Broken Age

Broken Age (4/5)

Since its announcement, Broken Age has become a talking point in how games, films, music, and other projects are financed today through crowdfunding.  At first, Broken Age appeared to showcase the incredible potential of asking fans to pony up for a project that might not have the kind of audience necessary to garner the approval of the bean counters.  Initially, Tim Schafer and his Double Fine Studios asked for $400,000 on Kickstarter in order to make their new adventure game.  They ended up pulling in nearly three and a half million dollars.  This was a massive haul, and the initial success helped establish Kickstarter as a legitimate platform for crowdfunding.  Of course, not just any video game developer could pull in seven digits through crowdfunding.  Tim Schafer’s time in the nineties knocking out stone cold classic adventure games such as the first two Monkey Island games and Day of the Tentacle likely helped.

But the studio ran into trouble when it realized that as their funding increased, so did their ambition.  Realizing that they would run out of money before finishing the game, Schafer decided to release Broken Age in two acts.  The internet did what the internet does best and started grumbling.  Unfortunately, the second act was release over a year after the appearance of the first.  And to add insult to injury, Schafer made it clear that, unlike the Telltale adventure games, Broken Age was never developed to be played in two halves and that those who have already played act one should go right back to the beginning following the release of Act 2.  For some, these delays and miscalculations have impacted their experience playing the game, but if you can put the game’s funding strategy aside and just play the damn thing, I think you’ll find a visionary experience that could have only come from the mind of Tim Schafer.

As its name implies, Broken Age is split into two halves: in one we follow Vella Tartine who lives in a fantasy world where maidens are sacrificed to monsters and people live on clouds; in the other we follow Shay Volta who lives in a spaceship where his every waking moment is monitored and controlled by the ship.  The player can switch back and forth between characters, so when a puzzle trips you up while playing Vella, you can play Shay for a while in order to give yourself some intellectual distance.  The game starts you off playing Vella, and I pretty much ran right through her entire story for the first half before shifting to Shaw.  But the second act is more difficult, and I appreciated the ability to switch between the characters.  There are also a handful of moments in the second half where it’s necessary to switch between characters in order to gather the right information in order to solve certain puzzles.  (It doesn’t go as far as the indie adventure game Resonance where switching between characters was an integral means of solving puzzles).

Vella lives in the small town of Sugar Bunting, which used to be called Steel Bunting and was once a warrior town but now has become a town of bakers.  Vella has been chosen to take part in “The Maiden’s Feast” in which a handful of select young women are offered up to a giant monster known as the Mog Chothra.  While most of Vella’s family—with the exception of her grandfather—tacitly accept the necessity of The Maiden’s Feast as a means to stave off Mog Chothra, Vella herself comes to doubt whether this ritual is the only way to save her town.  

Vella begrudgingly accepts her own sacrifice until she’s finally faced with Mog Chothra himself and decides to escape near certain death.  This sends Vella on an extended quest to once and for all defeat Mog Chothra.  In order to kill Mog Chothra, Vella visits several other towns that have their own version of The Maiden’s Feast.  Perhaps the most imaginative locale in the game is Meriloft, a town nestled in the clouds and ruled by a buffoonish cult leader named Harm’ny Lightbeard.  The clouds are awash in the colors of a summer sunset while the rest of the town is composed of pastels.  

Shay’s side of the narrative has sci-fi trappings.  You begin his story by completing what at first appear to be dangerous missions on other planets, such as rescuing people from an avalanche, but you quickly discover that these are fully controlled playtime scenarios that occur on ship.  The avalanche, for instance, is made out of ice cream, and Shay must eat enough of it so that his robotic friends made out of yarn are freed.  Shay’s every waking moment is monitored by mom, an A.I. that encourages him to participate in his playtime activities, eat regular meals, and keep a regular bedtime.  However, a secret stowaway eventually punctures this numbing routine.

Both Shay and Vella’s stories share thematic connections.  They are both teenagers trapped in a world where their destiny appears to be out of their control, but they are determined to break away from cultural strictures.  It is important for the story that the two main characters are teenagers, a period in your life when you are capable or even encouraged to question and buck social bonds.  Eventually, as you might assume, the connection between Shay and Vella become less metaphorical and more real, but you could imagine a nice little game where the parallel adventures never intersect.

Perhaps Broken Age’s greatest strength is its unique aesthetics.  The world looks as if it is built from intricately cut construction paper.  The children’s book imagery gives the game a sense of instant nostalgia, and it’s hard to overstate how beautiful the game is.  And like a great children’s book, you could imagine pulling this game out now and again just to flip through some of the images.  There’s something tactile about the look of Broken Age, as if you could touch your computer screen and feel something other than a flat surface.  Broken Age is a kind of artisan video game, something only possible thanks to the internet’s ability to reach niche audiences.

Like Schafer’s earlier creations, the world of Broken Age is dotted with quirky tertiary characters, and the story is aided by a fine cast of voice actors, including household names like Elijah Wood, Wil Wheaton, and Jack Black.  Throughout the game you will encounter Harm’ny, a cult leader who lives on a cloud, Curtis, a hipster lumberjack, and a set of talking utensils (it kind of makes sense in the context of the game).  In fact, I enjoyed the characters so much that one criticism of the game is that I wish I could have spent more time with these people.

***Warning: Ahead there be spoilers.  I can’t really discuss the second half of the game without revealing some major twists in the story.  Since discovering each new wrinkle in the game’s world is one of the more enjoyable aspects of Broken Age, I would recommend that if you haven’t played the game, turn back now.***

When images of Broken Age were first released, they immediately brought to mind The Longest Journey, a seminal adventure game in which the protagonists flits between a fantasy world of magic and a Blade Runner inspired megalopolis.  These two halves of the game are parallel worlds whose destiny are intertwined, even if few are conscious of this connection.  But this is not the case in Broken Age.  In fact, not only do Shaw and Vella live in the same universe, they live on the same world.

It turns out that Shay is not floating through space.  In fact, his “spaceship” happens to be the same Mog Chothra going from town to town abducting maidens, and an elaborate system has been developed in order to keep up the illusion of space travel.  Shay and his family come from beyond the Plague Dam, a giant wall separating modern cities of Shay and his people from the agrarian world of Vella and her people.  In a twist that never quite makes sense, Shay’s mother is not actually an A.I., but a flesh and blood parent who was merely using the ship’s system to watch over her son while she maintains the ship.  He also has a father, but he doesn’t appear until Act 2.

Shay and his family were actually being manipulated by the Thrush, an advanced race of beings who have genetically modified themselves.  But, in a plot point that appears to be borrowed from Dark City, the Thrush need to diversify their gene pool so they abduct young women from what they call “the badlands,” and it turns out that young children have a certain amount of purity that allows them to make the right picks.  (This was Shay’s job, but don’t worry, the Maidens aren’t dead.  They’re just locked up on the ship/Mog Chothra).  

The twists on top of twists makes for a somewhat convoluted second half, but there’s something admirable about taking Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and doubling down on it.  In Act two, Shay and Vella switch places, so while Shay discovers Meriloft and its quirky denizens, Vella explores Shay’s damages ship.  Both Shay and Vella seem oddly at ease with this change of scenery.  Shay doesn’t seem perplexed by people living on clouds and advanced technology doesn’t seem to phase Vella.  Both are decidedly non-nonplussed.  Not addressing Shay and Vella’s unusual situation in Act 2 is something of a missed opportunity.

Broken Age’s second half doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its first, but it’s still a wonderful experience.  Because of the layers of twists, not everything gets explained.  The game repeatedly insinuates that there’s a special connection between Shay and Vella, but this is never fully spelled out.  The game also ends after the worlds of Shay and Vella are quite literally bridged, which makes me wonder how their societies will handle knowledge of each other.  The world of Broken Age is so rich with possibilities that I would love to see a sequel.  But even if we only get one Broken Age, it still stands out a unique visual and emotional experience.

Mikal Cronin - MC III

Mikal Cronin – MC III (4.5/5)

            Born out of the California garage rock scene—with its loose style and buzzing guitars—Mikal Cronin’s solo material has unexpectedly veered towards more orchestra laden power-pop.  His second album, simply titled MC II, opened not with muscular guitars, but with light ivories on the undeniably catchy “Weight.”  Cronin’s third album, naturally titled MC III, expands on these light flourishes of strings and piano, transforming his songwriting into something approaching Beach-Boysesque pocket symphonies.  And while most rock and roll musicians would be buried by all of these additional instruments, throughout the album, Mikal Cronin’s superb songwriting always shines through.

            There’s a certain airiness to Cronin’s songwriting, whether it comes from his heavy use of acoustic guitar or the gusts of violin that greets the listener.  It is this open sound that allows him to incorporate further instrumentation without overburdening his songs or burying his songwriting chops.  “I’ve Been Loved,” for instance, is a memorable acoustic ballad enhanced by a building wall of strings that leads into an echo-affected whistle reminiscent of vespers through a grove of birch trees. The album also happens to be well sequenced.  The lush “Turn Around” leads into the hooks-focused “Made up My Mind,” which in turn leads into the propulsive “Say.”  It’s clear that Cronin is thinking not just in units of songs but also whole albums.

But as an album, MC III is split in two.  The first half is a collection of pristine pop songs where the second half aims to comprise a single song cycle known collectively as “Circle.”  Much like the first half of the album, this six song opus reaches for a diverse array of impressionistic and emotional resonance.  I can think of no other album where a song’s tail end jam session includes the unlikely addition of a tzouras as happens in “Gold.”  From the way it is situated in the liner notes, “Circle” is supposed to function as a single unit, but while it is, again, well-sequenced, each track works as an individual song.  Tellingly, “Ready,” with its immediate chorus “I’m not ready for December,” stands out as one of the album’s most radio ready songs, and yet it is fitted within a larger song cycle.  Instead of viewing the first half of the album as a loose collection of songs and the second as a single entity, it is probably easier to view the album as either two E.P.s released together or an L.P. with a distinct A and B side like artists used to crank out in the 60s and 70s.

            Mikal Cronin’s roman numeral naming strategy might seem like a lazy way to avoid coming up with a title, but this choice actually demonstrates an awareness of ways in which each iteration expands on the last.  Some might miss the more guitar focused MC II, but I prefer to watch an artist continually build on what has come before.  MC III is one of the best albums of 2015 so far, but I’m also confident that it represents one stop in Cronin’s larger musical journey and not his final destination. 

The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton

The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton (2.5/5)

With the exception of the books from the X-Wing series, as a kid my favorite Star Wars novel happened to be The Courtship of Princess Leia.  I don’t think this particular book gets a lot of respect from Star Wars fans these days, so in my bid to further explore the Star Wars Expanded Universe, I decided to revisit the continuing story of Han and Leia’s romance to see if my twelve-year-old self was onto something or if the general consensus was correct.  It turns out that there are some potentially interesting ideas in The Courtship of Princess Leia, but they’re mostly marred by poor execution.

Like most early Star Wars novels, The Courtship of Princess Leia begins by dealing with the detritus of warlords that have risen out of the destruction of the Galactic Empire.  While the New Republic has started to reestablish itself, it’s still looking at a series of lengthy and costly battles against these remnants of the Empire.  A possible solution presents itself by the arrival of a delegation from the Hapes cluster, a wealthy and powerful collection of systems that offers to aid the New Republic in its fight, but on the condition that Princess Leia marries the Hapan Prince Isolder.  Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with Han Solo.

Many readers might rightfully scoff at the idea that Leia would drop her affections for Han Solo to marry a dreamy prince.  The author, Dave Wolverton, does suggest early on that Leia might marry the Prince out of a sense of duty to the New Republic and the lives that might be saved by a potential alliance with the Hapan cluster.  But this tact is quickly dropped, and it appears that Leia is genuinely falling in love with the Prince because he’s totally hot.  In one of the novel’s sillier conceits, because of planned breeding everyone from the Hapan cluster are super attractive. (There’s a weird undercurrent of evolutionary psychology in the novel.  Later, Prince Isolder suggests that monarchy is a suitable form of government because it pairs the best and the brightest and their brood as rulers, something that struck me as really silly even when I was twelve).  The Hapans are also a matriarchal society, so if Leia were to marry Prince Isolder, she would eventually become queen of the Hapans. 

Out of jealousy and desperation, Han enters a high stakes card game in the bowels of Coruscant and ends up winning an entire planet, Dathomir.  I do kind of love that Han could win an entire planet from a card game, just like he apparently won the Millennium Falcon.  But when even this doesn’t win over Leia, he eventually abducts her and takes Leia to his newly acquired planet.  The kidnapping plot might, rightfully, leave a poor taste in many readers’ mouths.  While there is common trope of women falling in love with their captors (which may very well go all the way back to Tristan and Iseult), I think this cliché has become more difficult to justify in the new millennium. 

It’s when Han and Leia get to Dathomir that things get really bizarre, mostly for the better.  Dathomir is under the control of the Warlord Zsinj, making it impossible for Han and Leia to flee the planet after making their way through an Imperial blockade.  They’re followed by Luke Skywalker and Prince Isolder who have teamed up to retrieve the Princess.  On the surface of Dathomir, Han, Leia, Luke and Isolder have to contend with matriarchal clans of Force sensitive women.  In fact, there is a particular clan of witches that have been threatening other inhabitants of Dathomir and are seeking an alliance with Zsinj in order to leave the planet and wreak havoc across the galaxy.  Oh, and these clans of women not only ride Rancors, but they also appear to keep men like property.  This is the kind of pseudo-feminism that could have only occurred in the nineties.  When one of the women decides to keep Prince Isolder as a mate, the book threatens to turn into the Futurama episode “Amazon Women in the Mood.”  In other words, Wolverton’s idea of feminism not so coincidentally doubles as a male fantasy.  Still, the concept of Rancor riding Force witches is pretty damn cool.  And while it might diminish Luke’s unique status in the universe, the invention of the Witches of Dathomir manages to expand the fantasy/mythology aspect of Star Wars when so many authors at the time approached the world strictly through a sci-fi lens. 

I probably genuinely enjoyed The Courtship of Princess Leia as much as I rolled my eyes.  But Wolverton’s novel has contributed to the larger mythology of Star Wars.  The Witches of Dathomir have become a permanent, canonical part of the Star Wars Universe thanks to their inclusion in The Clone Wars TV-show.  And the one thing I remember enjoying about the novel was the fact that C-3PO does whatever is in his power to help out Han Solo win over Princess Leia, including uncovering Han’s supposed aristocratic ancestry and writing and performing a song about the greatness of Han Solo.  So if you ever wanted to read about C-3PO playing wingman to Han Solo, then this is the book for you.  

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Seasons 1-6)

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Seasons 1-6) (5/5)

Technically, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is not a part of the Expanded Universe.  When Disney executed their own version of Order 66, unequivocally banning the EU from the canon, they exempted all six theatrical films and The Clone Wars animated series.  But because it serves as neither quite sequel nor prequel, the series still seems like more of an addendum to the prequel films, even if it exceeds them in quality.  So I’m calling Star Wars: The Clone Wars fair game for my series of Star Wars Expanded Universe reviews.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars got off to an ignominious start.  The theatrical film was dumped into theaters at a time when the general public had fatigued on the prequel films.  The film was panned and its box office was a mere pebble next to the boulder sized hauls of the proper films.  It didn’t help that The Clone Wars movie was uneven at best.  The film made a number of mistakes that didn’t bode well for the eventual series, for which it was, in part, serving as an advertisement.  The film had Anakin take on a Padawan of his own, Ahsoka Tano, a strong headed teenager.  The two are charged with recovering Jabba the Hutt’s infant son, Rotta, who is a poorly conceived bundle of “comic relief.”  Among other missteps, the film also includes the character of Ziro, a purple Hutt who not only speaks English (or Basic in the Star Wars Galaxy) but does so in an obvious imitation of Truman Capote for no reason at all.  Although the film boasts some great action (which was true of the prequels as well), it feels undercooked.

The Clone Wars film didn’t accurately represent the complex world that the series would eventually create.  If anything, Star Wars: The Clone Wars demonstrates how rich and rewarding the prequel universe can be.  First and foremost, The Clone Wars managed to both tweak traditional elements of Star Wars while also maintaining the general aesthetics of George Lucas’s creation.  Each episode opens with the usual Star Wars fanfare along with some added arpeggio as the series title withdraws from the screen.  This is followed with a rotating series of aphorisms in the color and typeface of “A long time ago…”.  Each episode begins in media res, and a stilted, slightly campy announcer speaking in the style of 1940s newsreels brings the audience up to speed.  Within the first minute or two, each episode demonstrates that it is exploring the moral power of myth, recreating the thrills of those 30s and 40s serials, and producing stories that are diverse but also clearly a part of Star Wars. 

Although the series would continue to improve over the years, the first season is still largely confident, and the multipart “Malevolence” episodes signal early on that The Clone Wars is interested in more than simply recreating a Saturday morning adventure of the week cartoon.  But if there is a single moment in the first season that showcases the series’s ambition it might be in “Innocents of Ryloth” when two Clone Troopers form a bond with a young refugee Twi’lek orphan.  The episode briefly explores the devastating effect of war and demonstrates what happens when people become trapped between the Republic and the Separatists.  The Ryloth three-parter does not shy away from violence, and it is shot in the cinema verite style of Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan.  (George Lucas also used simulated hand held photography to film some of the large battles in the prequels, a style that was modeled off of World War II footage.  Lucas also showed documentary footage of World War II dogfights to his special effects team when creating the first Death Star run.)  What’s special about this episode isn’t merely that the series isn’t afraid to show violence when necessary (plenty of episodes would probably be rated PG-13), but that it was also willing to grapple with morality and war. 

The Ryloth episodes also expand on perhaps my favorite new element from the prequels: the clones.  In the prequels, the clones were cannon fodder or they were a plot point, but they weren’t actual flesh and blood characters.  The Clone Wars actually imbues the clones with their own personalities, and although they have the same genetic makeup, each clone purposefully attempts to differentiate himself from the others by styling his hair or getting unique tattoos.  The image of nearly identical grunts striving for individuality is more telling, more heartbreaking than you might expect.  There are a number of reoccurring clone characters who have slightly different personalities: Rex, Echo, Fives and Cody all become important characters in the series. And because each clone is genetically identical to the one another, they are quite literally Shakespeare’s “band of brothers.”

The fifth episode of the first season, “Rookies,” focuses almost solely on a handful of Clone Troopers manning a distant outpost, and from here it becomes clear that the series, unlike the films, isn’t interested in just following members of the Jedi Council and the Republic Senate.

 In fact, several of my favorite story arcs focus mostly on the Clone Troopers, including a confrontation between the Clone Troopers and a bigoted Jedi, General Krell as well as a season six arc that takes some of its cues from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and grapples with the notorious Order 66.  Episodes focusing on the clones also try to tease out the paradoxical role of a military grunt.  To be a member of the armed forces, you have surrendered yourself to a purpose much greater than yourself, whether it is the Galactic Republic or the U.S. government, but you have little input into the goals and policies of these overriding institutions.

The series also allows for a further exploration of the Jedi and their place within the galactic conflict.  I’ve always maintained that the prequels included some tremendous ideas that were hindered by poor execution.  One of Lucas’s cleverer conceits was to stage a war where no matter who wins, the galaxy loses.  Palpatine has engineered it so that he is the hidden power behind both the Separatists and the Republic.  In most narratives, and especially in large blockbusters, wars are always divided between the good guys and the bad buys, but here Lucas presents us with what is close to a no win scenario.  It’s made clear in both the show and the films that the Jedi are not warriors.  They’re a monastic order who occasionally must rely on violence, but only if it will prevent some greater evil.  But the Clone Wars series suggests that they have compromised their values by taking on military positions within the Republic.

Expanding on the morally tangled choices made by Jedi only deepens our understanding of Anakin’s fall to the dark side.  In a third season arc, Anakin, Obi-Wan must sneak into a nearly impenetrable Separatist prison known as the Citadel in order to rescue captured Jedi Even Piell and Captain Tarkin.  Fans of the original trilogy know that Tarkin would go on to command the Death Star alongside Darth Vader in A New Hope, and in the Citadel arc there’s an interesting exchange between him and Anakin about the lengths the Jedi should go to in order to win the war.  Tarkin believes that Jedi shouldn’t serve as generals, because their code of ethics gets in the way of victory, a point of view that Anakin, who is seen throughout the show bending the rules, appears sympathetic to.  This scene suggests that Anakin’s turn to the dark side is born out of the corrupting nature of war as much as it is his own personal circumstances.

Perhaps The Clone Wars’ greatest contribution is that it finally got the character of Anakin right.  He’s no longer the petulant teenager that we saw in  Attack of the Clones or the naïve innocent from The Phantom Menace.  Here Anakin is more impulsive and known for working on gut instinct.  A common complaint about the prequels is that there are no rogue characters like Han Solo in this trilogy, but the writers on The Clone Wars realized that Anakin could fill this role.  Because Anakin is allowed to be charming, the audience actually feels a sense of loss and foreboding knowing about his ultimate fate, which is alluded to a few times throughout the series.

The Clone Wars expands on the mythology and world of Star Wars in a number of new and exciting ways—including the introduction of strange force-like beings that are more gods than men—but perhaps the greatest contribution to the Star Wars universe is the character of Ahsoka.  When she was first introduced, most people pegged Ahsoka as the annoying sidekick, but over the course of the series she demonstrates that she’s smart, talented and resourceful.  We are given only a few glimpses into Ahsoka’s past.  We do know that her force sensitivity was first recognized by the Jedi Plo Koon when Ahsoka was a child, but who she is mostly becomes apparently through her actions.  Over the course of the series, she demonstrates some of Anakin’s more impulsive tendencies, and the two are often competitive, sometimes acting more like friends than master and padawan.  Ahsoka also adds a necessary female character into the mostly male dominated world of Star Wars.  While the Star Wars movies aren’t completely devoid of empowered women—in A New Hope Leia ends up playing the role of her own rescuer in her escape from the Death Star—but it’s evident that most of the important characters in the Star Wars films are male.  With this in mind, Ahsoka serves as a sort of gender corrective.

The Clone Wars does so much right that it’s easy to forgive some of its flaws.  One problem the series never quite figured out was what to do with Padme.  Obi-Wan and Anakin get to fight massive space battles, but she’s stuck playing the role of the diplomat, which by comparison isn’t nearly exciting.  There are a handful of strong Padme episodes.  In “Heroes on Both Sides,” Padme and Ahsoka attempt to broker a secret peace and stop the war.  The episode showcases Lucas’s ability to use myth and fantasy to interrogate contemporary topics, and in “Heroes on Both Sides” he takes a look at the financial crisis as well as the war on terror.  It’s a smart episode that illustrates that the only way out of impossible situation engineered by Palpatine is to find a non-violent, peaceful reconciliation between the Republic and the Separatists.

But I believe the biggest misstep is the resurrection of a character who should have stayed dead. [Spoilers ahead].  In season three, we are introduced to the character of Savage Opress, a vicious force powered brute given abilities by the Nightsisters, a coven of force sensitive witches.  We later learn that Savage has a brother, Darth Maul who had been chopped in half at the end of The Phantom Menace.  It’s not clear why Maul is still alive, or why the writers thought it was a good idea to bring him back.  Darth Maul was an admittedly cool villain, thanks in large part to Ray Park’s physical performance.  But he was interesting precisely because we knew so little about him.  But we finally get to hear Darth Maul speak at length, and it turns out that he’s kind of whiny.  It doesn’t help that Savage and Maul are responsible for killing a character with deep emotional ties to Obi-Wan, but in a matter that is cheap, unnecessary, and wholly unsatisfying.  There are times when I’m not sure whether I hate the Darth Maul or the Jar Jar Binks episodes more. 

Still, The Clone Wars series is an important part of Star Wars lore that expands the story of the prequels in exciting and complicated ways.  Even when his filmmaking skills weren’t up to snuff, Lucas’s ability to conjure up worlds from his imagination always remained strong.  The prequels might falter more often than they should, but the universe Lucas created with those films is still vibrant, and this is clearly evident in The Clone Wars.  In the series, Lucas managed to take the Manichean divide between light and dark and weave a more complex tale of good people going towards damnation even as they have the best intentions.  And he accomplishes this in a universe interspersed with 1930s serials, space samurai, and World War II tough guys.  

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (4/5)

At this point everyone hates Frank Miller.  You hate Frank Miller.  I hate Frank Miller.  All your friends hate Frank Miller.  Your grandmother, if she knows who he is, probably hates Frank Miller too.  After many years of contributing to the development of American comic books, Miller’s talent and credibility hit a serious wall sometime in the 21^st century.  His output has been so bad that people have started to wonder whether or not he was ever talented.  To top it all off, in addition to putting out lazily written drivel, he also released a bizarre anti-Occupy Wall Street rant that fully revealed his inner neocon.  Miller’s politics were never exactly subtle—in fact, if one of his characters came upon nuance, he would have likely socked it in the jaw—but there was a certain complexity to his political positions, which often camped out somewhere in the borderlands where liberals and libertarians have achieved an uneasy truce.  So judging merely by Miller’s involvement, there was little reason to be optimistic about a long delayed sequel to the original Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller collaboration, Sin City.

But, surprisingly, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For has turned out to be a worthy sequel to the stylish and brutal original.  Despite the diminishing quality of both Miller and Rodriguez’s work in recent years, there must be something about working together that brings out the best in both artists.  Like the first movie, A Dame to Kill For is split into several distinct but vaguely interrelated tales.  Two of the film’s stories, the eponymous “A Dame to Kill For” and “Just Another Saturday Night,” are taken straight from Miller’s funny books where the other two, “The Long Bad Night” and “Nancy’s Last Dance,” were written by Miller exclusively for the film. The events of Dame occur before and after the events of the first film, making it a sort of pre-sequel and allowing Miller and Rodriguez to resurrect fan favorite characters like Marv.

“Just Another Saturday Night” is little more than a cynical smirk of a story that serves to set the stage for the rest.  The film’s meatiest tale is the titular “Dame to Kill For.”  Taking over for Clive Owen, Josh Brolin plays Dwight who gets pulled back into a world of seduction and double crosses by his old flame, Ava.  Played by Eva Green in various stages of undress (she’s French), Ava is the femme fatale turned up to eleven.  Able to transform herself into varying female archetypes so she fits the desires of any single man, Ava is a consummate manipulator. 

 

The femme fatale standard is highly problematic, but in certain films she has been made to symbolize female agency within a patriarchal world.  It would be difficult to redeem Ava, and there’s no confusing the writing of Frank Miller for a feminist treatise, but I’m not quite willing to call Miller an outright misogynist.  (Perhaps Ava’s ability to transform herself is a critique of the kinds of boxes men wish to box women into?)  And to complicate matters somewhat, A Dame to Kill For brings back the women of Old Town, an area of Sin City controlled and policed by its resident prostitutes.  If anything, A Dame to Kill For arguably tests the limits of third-wave feminism.

The two stories written specifically for Dame feel a little trim compared to those first written for the page.  In the first Sin City, there was a sense that each individual yarn could have been expanded into its own film, which is not the case in the sequel.  “The Long Bad Night” follows the preternaturally lucky Johnny (Joseph Gordon Levitt) as he weasels his way into a high stakes card game and makes enemies of the unrelenting big bad, Senator Roarke (played with gusto once again by Powers Boothe).  I naturally love the noir inspired irony that for someone with unerring luck, Johnny still has a horrendous time in Sin City.  (I also thoroughly enjoyed the scene stealing cameo from Christopher Lloyd.)  By contrast, “Nancy’s Last Dance,” a more direct sequel to the first film, suffers somewhat.  The story of Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) and her attempt to avenge the death of police officer and her savior, John Hartigan, played once again by Bruce Willis, only this time, well, dead, seems too undercooked to have much of an impact. 

If A Dame to Kill For lacks some of the more memorable elements of the original—a dead Benecio Del Toro speaking from the grave while part of a gun sticks out from his head or Elijah Wood’s trophy room—each story seems to slide into the next more easily for a more cohesive whole.  Plenty of critics have claimed the film has come too late and audiences are used to its box of tricks by now.  I impolitely disagree.  Dame may not be as good as the first film, but I think it injects something much needed into today’s genre of comic book movies: a sense of visual experimentation. 

Here Rodriguez expands on what he accomplished in the original film, mixing in metaphorical images of a tiny Johnny sliced apart by Rourke or staging a car chase around Marv’s head as he remembers what happened earlier in the night.  If anything, today’s comic book films are far more conservative visually then they were a decade ago or more ago.  Marvel, the most financially successful maker of comic book films, appears to be uninterested in fusing the distinct visuals of film and comic books lest it muss up their plans for franchise domination.  (I wouldn’t be surprised if this was part of the reason for the departure of Edgar Wright, a unique visual stylist, from Ant Man).  Compare the relatively safe imagery of the Marvel films to the hyperkinetic camera movement of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, or the disorienting use or split screen in Ang Lee’s Hulk, or, to stretch back farther, the infusion of German Expressionism into Tim Burton’s Batman films.  Hell, even the now forgotten 90s superhero film The Shadow has some wonderfully bizarre imagery that would be deemed too out there in 2014.  I’m a fan of Marvel’s movies, but I’m also somewhat nostalgic for that period of time in the aughts when comic books were providing a new template for what was possible in Hollywood films.  In 2005, the original Sin City seemed like the culmination of a series of experiments, but in 2014, A Dame to Kill For seems wholly singular.  

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (4.5/5)

In the summer of 2003, Star Wars fans were attempting to recover from the one, two groin kicks that were Episode 1 (1999) and Episode II (2003).  While I’m sometimes inclined to defend segments from those movies, I also remember being exhausted by the cycle of anticipation and disappointment that accompanied the first two prequel films.  The Star Wars galaxy was starting to feel stale at that point, and after two disappointing films many fans of George Lucas’s adventures far, far away were becoming a little despondent.  It’s around this time that Knights of the Old Republic, the first Star Wars role playing game, came out and reminded a generation of players why they fell in love with Star Wars to begin with.

Unlike most Star Wars games, which often take place concurrent with the most recent film, Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) escapes the tricky issue of continuity by taking place 4,000 years prior to the events of the original trilogy.  Originally, the game was supposed to tie into the world of the second trilogy, specifically Episode II which was in production at the same time.  However, Lucasarts gave the developers, Bioware, the option to set their game in the distant past, which they smartly chose to do.  This shift in time allows the creators of KothOR to craft a Star Wars game without worrying about questions of continuity or relevance to George Lucas’s more recent cinematic creations.  In other words, KotOR rebuffed corporate synergy in order to achieve a sense of artistic integrity.  But despite the drastic temporal shift, KotOR wound up capturing the essence of Star Wars better than the prequels, much less most Star Wars videogames. 

The freedom inherent in setting KotOR thousands of years prior to the original trilogy allowed Bioware to superimpose the motifs and archetypes of Star Wars onto a new and exciting world.  Like most RPGs, in KotOR you are able to pick and choose elements of your main character, including gender and general appearance.  The class system also generally conforms to the archetypes used by Lucas in the Star Wars films, an element of the game that extends to the varying characters that join your party throughout the game.  In addition to your self-made main character, you also get to control a soldier (Carth), a Wookie (Zaalbar), a resourceful street urchin (Mission), a Mandalorian warrior (Canderous), a handful of Jedis (Bastila, Juhani, Jolee), and a couple of droids (T3-M4 and HK-47). 

Not every character is great (Carth can be awfully whiny for a soldier), but every player will have his or her favorites (I was always partial to the cantankerous Canderous and the gruff Jedi loner, Jolee).  But more importantly, these characters fit nicely within the world of Star Wars, judging by much of the extended universe, a more difficult task than you might imagine.  You could easily split the characters into those who serve to maintain order in the galaxy and those who live in the shadows of the two warring factions of the Republic and the Sith.  In other words, they’re either rogues or acolytes, the same tension that exists between Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in the Episode IV. 

 

KotOR also captures the visual essence of Star Wars.  In particular, they replicate the scope and sense of the infinite in the world of Star Wars.  While you can only explore a relatively small fenced in portion of each planet, the use of a horizon, whether it’s the dunes of Tatooine or the unending plains of Dantooine, gives you a sense of the infinite.  This extreme scope has always been an integral aspect of Star Wars, from the initial invocation of a galaxy “far, far away” to the seemingly unending pit Palpating is drop into at the end of Return of the Jedi.  And yet, so few video games have managed to really capture this visual and thematic element of the Star Wars films.

But BioWare wasn’t just content with capturing the essence of Star Wars; they also wanted to revamp the role playing genre.  For many years RPGs had been associated with turn based fighting and somewhat tedious class, weapons and magic management.  And while KotOR has maintained those core elements, they have also made the genre far more cinematic.  KotOR was released shortly before World of Warcraft, and like those similarly detailed MMORPGs it helped usher in the immersive qualities to the genre.  There’s no switching perspective as you move from the world map to the dungeons to the battles.  Instead, everything maintains a fluid third person view.  And unlike the MMORPGs and RPGs of the same era, there’s less emphasis on tedious fights and minigames.  There’s a limit to how far your characters can level up, and you can only get into so many battles on each planet.  In other words, you won’t find yourself wandering around for hours on end trying to find more random monsters to fight.  In order to emphasize story, the game makes it easier to level up by completing tasks for non playable characters rather than randomized battles. Many of the side quests are related to characters in your party, making them more central to narrative elements like plot and characterization.  All of these aspects help reinforce the game’s cinematic qualities, which seems especially fitting for a Star Wars game.

There are numerous aspects of the game that add to its replayability (that is, if you have the patients to replay a game that can take upwards of fifty hours to complete).  In order to mirror the choices made by Anakin and Luke Skywaler, the main character must choose to serve either the dark or light side of the force, a decision made through a number of choices throughout the game.  BioWare made the dark side of the force suitably enticing, since it often leads to more fights and easier solutions.  There’s a really fun assassination subplot that you must take on a few dark side points if you want to complete it.  You’re also given some freedom as to which planets you want to visit in what order, but of course there’s still a correct way of completing the game if you want to gather every character and finish as many side quests as possible (Tatooine, Kashyyyk, Manaan, and Korriban). 

The enticing possibility that you could play as a hero in the Star Wars universe has lead plenty of fans to buy subpar Star Wars games, so there’s something especially powerful when a Star Wars video game chooses not only to capture the sense of fun and adventure of the best films but also in general expands on what the medium can accomplish.  In some ways, KotOR reinforces the power of myth and archetype inherent in Lucas’s Star Wars by transporting the actions to a different time while maintaining the core aspects of that galaxy far, far away. 

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Quick spoiler warning: From here on out, I’m going to discuss a major plot twist in the game and its general importance to the genre and the themes of Star Wars.

As I mentioned earlier, at the start of the game you go through the process of creating your main character, choosing the gender, class and abilities of your blank slate.  Well, the main character has more of a history than you might imagine.  As the story goes in KotOR, the Republic is in a life or death struggle against the forces of the Sith, currently lead by a former Jedi Darth Malak.  Malak’s mentor used to be Darth Revan, also a fallen Jedi.  But Revan was defeated prior to the game by the Jedi Bastila.  We’re lead to believe that Bastila has killed Revan, but in a twist reminiscent of the “I am your father” scene from The Empire Strikes Back, it turns out that Revan wasn’t killed; rather, he was captured by Bastila and turned over to the Jedi council who decided to wipe his memory in order to bring him back to the light side.  In fact, the character you created at the beginning of the game is Revan, so you have been playing as the dark lord this entire time without realizing it.

There are a few implications to this reveal.  The tabula rasa origins of your character has long been a staple of the RPG genre.  But the Revan twist adds a meta aspect to the creation of the main character.  Just as you have conjured the elements of the main character out of thin air, so too has the Jedi council.  In other words, at the beginning, rather than just going through the normal motions of character creation, you are, unwittingly, in the role of the Jedi council remaking Revan from the ground up. 

The Revan reveal also adds a layer of truth to your dialogue choices.  While playing your character it is possible to veer from being kind hearted to callous in the blink of an eye.  Character inconsistency was always nagged me in games where you are given branching dialogue options.  Where most critics focus on ways in which dialogue options do or do not appropriately transform a game’s narrative, few focus on how these dialogue options allow you to craft your own unique character.  Of course, this makes little sense if you can be altruistic one minute and vicious the next.  But knowledge that you used to be Darth Revan actually explains your character’s extreme bi-polar disorder: any acts of evil can be chalked up to your history as Revan bubbling to the surface, even if you are trying to follow the light side.

Finally, the story of Revan and Malak ties nicely into one of the stronger aspects of the prequel trilogy.  Prior to the battle between the Republic and the Sith, the Jedi were involved in a war against the Mandalorians.  As Jedis, Revan and Malak managed to defeat the Mandalorians, but in doing so they adopted a tough uncaring attitude towards casualties.  It is suggested, then, that the necessity of victory may have forced Revan and Malak to turn towards the dark side.  Although KotOR was released prior to the completion of the prequel trilogy, Malak and Revan’s turn to the dark side seems to echo some of the themes from Episodes II and III.  Throughout the prequels, it is suggested that the Jedi have lost their way, in part because they have abandoned their role as peacekeepers in favor of becoming warriors, a choice that makes sense in their given situation, but is ultimately their downfall.  And, of course, the real threat behind the Clone Wars, Palpatine, has engineered it so that no matter which side becomes the victor, he will be the ultimate winner.  Both the prequel trilogy and KotOR illustrate the corrupting nature of warfare.  

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (4/5)

It sometimes seems as if Dave Eggers has made a career our of running away from his first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Where Heartbreaking was a meta-memoir centered on a self-aware and self-conscious Gen-Xer, his subsequent books have mostly looked outward.  Eggers has made a concerted effort for his work to engage with the world around him and to avoid any of the navel gazing that pervaded his memoir.  While I thoroughly enjoyed Heartbreaking, I’m glad that Eggers’s concerns have turned towards the world at large.  One element that seems to appear again and again in Eggers’s writing is the impact and role of globalization on people’s lives.  This was certainly true in Zeitoun and What is the What whose protagonists found their to America from far off countries, Syria and Sudan respectively.  But in A Hologram for the King Eggers follows a middle aged American business man as he ventures to Saudi Arabia.  What results is an intriguing commentary on the economic and psychological effects of globalization on the American middle class.

The main character of Hologram, Alan Clay, is abusiness consultant who formerly worked for Schwinn bicycles before he was let go and they moved business overseas.  Through happenstance he now finds himself working for an I.T. company that plans on presenting a new hologram system to the King of Saudi Arabia.  We spend the entire novel with Clay who can be something of a sad sack.  Ever since leaving Schwinn, he has been a man adrift, attempting to start the manufacturing of a bicycle he has designed but unable to acquire the requisite funds.  He’s low on cash and struggles to pay for his daughter’s tuition, meaning she may be forced to take a semester or two off from college.  Clay wouldn’t necessarily be a fun guy to hang around, a detriment that Eggers attempts to sidestep by approaching the character with both empathy and a dark sense of humor. 

Clay is both a victim and perpetrator of his own miserable situation.  His company began looking for ways to cut costs, which at first meant moving manufacturing to less union friendly states within the U.S., but later it meant outsourcing jobs to China.  This didn’t affect Clay at first, since he’s a part of management, not labor.  But, as has been the case with globalization over the last couple of decades, outsourcing crept upwards, eating away not only those who toil in factories but also those who toil while wearing business suits.  While Schwinn was looking towards China for cheap labor, it turned out that the Chinese also had just as capable salesmen and managers, thank you very much.  In a somewhat roundabout way, Clay had become responsible for outsourcing his own job. 

All of this results in Clay making the trek to Saudi Arabia in order to present a new telecommunications hologram system to King Abdullah and hoping to wrangle his meeting with the King into something more long term.  Except Clay himself is mostly useless.  He doesn’t have expertise in computers, and it is suggested that his value lies only in his connection to a relative of the King’s he knew in college.  Clay and his team of young computer techs spend much of their time sitting in an un-air-conditioned tent without the requisite wi-fi needed to set up their presentation, problems that Clay is too ineffectual to resolve.  Even here he seems to have carried with him his own obsolescence.

The obvious literary influence here is “Waiting for Godot,” and like the characters from Beckett’s play, Clay is continually looking towoards a future event that may never come.  The presentation with the King is continually postponed, and the presentation does not guarantee that the King will grant them the contract or lead to any further business in the country.  And yet Clay continues to chase this meeting all the way to the end of the novel.  Eggers seems to be trying to answer the question, if the world of globalized capitalism has so decimated the middle class in America, then why do the victims continue to prop up this system?  The answer seems to be that a businessman’s present is always mortgaged on a possible future where he has made that one great pitch and secured that one sacred deal. 

In addition to other such literary influences—Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Franz Kafka’s The Castle—Eggers also borrows from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Much like the titular Gatsby, Clay finds himself searching for the American dream.  Where Gatsby had to find the American dream through illegal means, Clay searches for the American dream outside of America.  One particular scene in Hologram owes a heavy debt to the description of Gatsby’s opulent parties.  Clay is invited to a gathering of foreign expats working in Saudi Arabia and when he arrives discovers a horde of middle age men and women imbibing more than they can handle and generally acting like teenagers.  At one point during the bootleg bacchanalia, a man decides to done an astronaut costume as a joke.  As he floats around the gather, he comes to represent an emptied out past, a mockery of what America was once capable of accomplishing.  One worker admits that he hasn’t built any major projects in the United States in some time.  As their own nations collapse under the pressure of global forces, this gathering of Westerners seems only capable of regressing towards childhood. 

Of course, even these displaced workers have it easy compared to the labor necessary to build the massive complexes that they are designing and pitching.  At one point Clay stumbles across a roomful of indigent laborers in a half-built condominium.  The men are living in squalor and are less than pleased about Clay’s intrusion.  (I couldn’t help but think of the moment in The Trial where K. discovers the two agents who served him being whipped by a superior in one of the rooms where he works.)  And Clay’s father was once a union-protected manufacturer.  Naturally, Clay would be responsible for outsourcing these kinds of jobs before losing his own. 

Hologram at times trades in a kind of pessimism that’s absent from most of Eggers’s output, but Eggers doesn’t view globalization as a monolithic wrong.  As you might guess from someone who has written about the possibility of helping others, he sees real possibilities in our ever shrinking world.  Clay strikes up an unusual friendship with his driver, a Saudi Arabian that spent some time in the States while attending university.  He also has a growth removed by an international collection of doctors, one of which is a female Saudi doctor.  There’s definite nuance in Eggers’s depiction of the lived experience of those experiencing global economic upheavals, for those willing to look, anyway. 

While not everything works in the novel—Clay seems too pathetic to strike up a relationship with two separate women—it still manages to evoke a sense of immediacy as it engages with our ever-changing world.  Hologram isn’t Eggers’s best book, but it points to how literature—a term that conjures up dust-gathering tomes on a shelf—can get in the ring and duke it out with other genres desperately trying to explain our world.  The novel is capable of representing economics with far greater detail than a sloppily written New York Times op-ed or better expresses the lived experience of those affected by godlike forces of the market than an academic paper.  If nothing else, Eggers’s work, as a whole, tells us that the written page and lived reality are constantly entwined.  

Star Wars: Dark Empire I

Star Wars: Dark Empire I (2/5)

If Heir to the Empire reintroduced Star Wars to the novel format, then Dark Empire reintroduced Star Wars to comic books.  Dark Empire was a major event that ushered in the era of Dark Horse’s reign as the next guardian of Star Wars in comics.  Of course, it’s not like Star Wars hadn’t found their way into the comic book format previously.  From 1977 to 1986, Marvel comics published a Star Wars series, but the results weren’t ideal.  The Marvel iteration of Star Wars has largely been ridiculed for introducing a new main character that pretty much looked like Bugs Bunny in space.  Perhaps as a corrective for Marvel’s perceived unseriousness, Dark Horse doubled down on the dark and gritty aspects of Star Wars.  Unfortunately, the results are just as laughable as Marvel’s giant trash talking bunny.

Dark Empire I takes place after the events of Heir to the Empire. The Empire has fallen into its own civil war among different warlord factions, and in order to sew confusion, the Republic has used commandeered Star Destroyers to swoop in and further decimate Imperial forces.  As the story opens, Han and Leia are rushing in to rescue Luke who is leading troops on the ground.  But after they finally fight their way to Luke, an anomalous “Force storm” sweeps through and picks up Luke and Artoo like Dorothy and Toto in the tornado.  The Force storm is both figuratively and literally nebulous.  It’s not clear what its purpose is other than to separate Luke from his friends and to whisk him towards the series’s big bad, which also happens to be the big bad from the films: the Emperor. 

Early on in the 90s extended universe, artists weren’t shy about bringing back fan favorites.  Not only does Dark Empire I resurrect the Emperor but it also showcases the return of Boba Fett.  For me the question of what to do with the Empire in the extended universe was somewhat tricky.  It would be nice if these stories fully illustrated how vast this galaxy is instead of rehashing major conflicts from the first trilogy.  There were times when the main villain was so strong that it hardly matter—Thrawn in Heir to the Empire, for instance—but resurrecting the Emperor results in a serious case of diminished returns.  The Emperor’s rebirth is attributed to, what else, clones.  But it’s a little more complicated.  Through the magic of retconning, The Emperor has always been a quasi-ghostly being who is so infused with the power of the dark side that he burns out his physical body and must replace it with a new clone body from time to time.

The Emperor has whisked Luke away in order to offer him, once again, the chance to rule the galaxy by his side.  (Presumably, the Emperor created the Force storm, but like a lot of the comic’s story, this isn’t exactly clear).  Improbably, Luke decides to agree to join the Emperor in order to defeat him from inside his organization.  This doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Luke’s plans look something like this: first, ally with the Emperor; second, become consumed by the dark side; and, finally, the Emperor is destroyed!  I think there are a couple of steps missing from this process, and I have a problem with the idea of joining the dark side being treated in the same manner as going undercover in the mob.

While Luke is playacting his own version of Donnie Brasco, the Republic is fighting off World Devastators, the next iteration in a long line of super weapons that plagued both the New Republic and unimaginative Star Wars EU fiction.  Naturally, the World Devastators, which feed on a planet’s raw material in order to produce more weapons for the Empire, are an even greater threat than the Death Star.  Declaring whatever new technology the Empire has conjured as even more dangerous than the Death Star became routine in 90s Star Wars stories, presumably an avowal made by an Imperial commander while giving his audience metal horns and being backed by a gnarly Dave Mustaine solo. 

Sensing that Luke is in trouble, Leia convinces Han to mount a rescue, but instead of heading straight to Luke, the two make an inexplicable detour to Nar Shaddaa, a moon that is completely inhabited by lowlifes, bounty hunters, and other assorted criminals.  It’s not clear what Leia and Han wish to accomplish by visiting this place, but it was probably just an excuse for the writer to reintroduce Boba Fett who shows up to chase Solo and his wife.  If Boba from the films was a man of few words, coolly carrying out his mission, then the Boba of Dark Empire is his inbred cousin.  While chasing Han, Boba Fett is continually bumbling as he tries to kill his mark.  If you hated how Boba Fett died in Return of the Jedi, then you will absolutely loath what they have done to the character in this comic.  I will concede that the artwork of CamKennedy, best known for his work on Judge Dredd and 2000 A.D., really clicks during the Nar Shaddaa section of the work.  There’s something about his rough, cynical artwork that melds well with Star Wars’s underworld, even if it seems unsuited to the wide angle battles in other parts of the story. Kennedy would go on to serve as an artist on a Boba Fett series later on, and, likewise, his artwork captured the grittier aspects of Star Wars surprisingly well. 

The entire narrative is pocked by those unnecessary explanatory captions where the author over explains everything that’s happening.  So the reader is presented with an image of the Republic and the Empire battling and the caption then explains that the Republic and the Empire are battling.  You would think that with the judicious use of these captions that the reasoning of Han, Luke, Leia and the rest would make sense, but you would be wrong.  The dialogue is alternatively bad and hilariously bad.  Perhaps my favorite moment in the whole series is when Leia mans the guns of the Millenium Falcon and says to herself, “Luke is right…I can feel the Force moving through me…guiding my hands in the terrible task of war!”  In fact, most of the critiques of the prequel trilogy, that the characters were thinly drawn or that the dialogue was stilted, could just as easily be leveled at Dark Empire I.

And yet, over the years Dark Empire has received a mostly positive reputation, and it’s often found on lists of best stories from the Star Wars EU.  Part of its reputation might come from the fact that, as the title suggests, it’s a rather dark story.  But it’s the kind of dark that confuses humorless cynicism with adult storytelling, the kind of “mature” narrative that most early teens are susceptible to.  Over the years a lot of those teenagers who first read Dark Empire have grown up, and if they ever revisit this series, I can’t imagine they would be anything other than disappointed.