No, Peter Jackson, I Don't Think You Learned That Lesson: On 45-Minute Battle Sequences
This article is called “Peter Jackson Walks Us Through His Battle Plans For The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies,” though it should be called “Peter Jackson Threatens World With Overly Tedious 45-Minute Battle Sequence.”
And in it, he says:
“After making the Lord of the Rings trilogy and two previous Hobbit films, Jackson has learned that epic warfare can be surprisingly boring….”
No, Entertainment Weekly.
No, he hasn’t.
Because if he had learned the lesson, he would have realized that the end of the last Hobbit movie was ZOMG BIG BATTLE sequence that nobody cared about half as much as, say, that first fight to save the Hobbits from the Ringwraiths in Fellowship of the Ring. And instead of saying, “Wait, small character moments really matter,” instead he has doubled down on his solution to go BIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGG and devised a solid forty-five-minute action sequence which will undoubtedly be as filled with as much CGI artificial excitement as, say, a greenscreened-in Legolas shooting made-up orcs while standing on an imaginary barrel, or dwarves fighting a huge dragon for-fucking-ever in a forever sequence that could have been replaced by a large placard that says, “THE DRAGON FLIES AWAY.”
The Hobbit makes money, because it’s pretty, and because people are sort of like, “Well, we got into this, we might as well see how it turns out.” But I’m pretty sure that final sequence will feature a bunch of people I don’t care much about dodging things in what is a quicktime-videogame sequence except sapped of all the excitement of pressing “X” at the right time, and in the end we’ll go home having seen something that fits every possible definition of “exciting” and yet somehow just made us feel weary and ready for this to be over.
Not that I’m snarky.
On Happiness and Productivity
“If I could just manage to feel happy again, I’d be productive. I just know it.”
That’s what my friend said to me, and he was entirely serious about this. He’d been experiencing depressive fits for months, his life decaying at an increasing rate, and he blamed all of his flagging grades and lost friendships and money troubles on a lack of happiness.
See, when he was happy, he could do anything. He would wake up empowered and DO ALL THE THINGS. And he’d be productive for a day, maybe a week, before something bummed him out again and he just couldn’t rouse himself to do all these depressing things.
The trick, my friend thought, was to somehow arrange his life for MAXIMUM HAPPINESS, so eventually he’d just be happy all the time and thus productive.
Whereas I told him the trick was to learn to keep working when you were miserable.
“Look,” said I. “Right now, you have a beautiful sailboat. And it is a glorious thing, with full sails powered by your happiness, and when the winds are blowing strong you can go anywhere.
“Unfortunately, happiness is like the wind in that it comes and goes. It’s good enough to get you around, but some days dreams will die and plans will die and people will die… and then your sails go slack. And the happiness will probably come back – it usually does – but by the time it returns, you may have starved to death on a becalmed sea, hoping like hell for the wind to come back when what you really needed was an oar.”
It’s a misnomer to say that anyone can work when they’re happy. A lot of people don’t want to do the unfun work when they’re depressed because they’re too despairing to go look for work, and when they’re happy they don’t want to bum themselves out by going back out and seeing how terrible the job market. So as it turns out, they’re actually unproductive no matter what their mood; they just have an excuse that works under any circumstances.
But even if you get ALL THE THINGS done when you’re happy, you gotta learn to work when your lover dumped you, when your dog just died, when that rejection you were dreading just came in over the transom. Because life has a nasty habit of not giving a shit about how good you feel. Life usually asks, “Well, did you pay the bills? Get a job? Go to work?” And if the answer is “No,” then life tends to say, “Well, okay, I’m just gonna make your life harder for you then.”
You can wait for happiness to fill your sails, man. But you might be waiting for a long time.
Get the oar.
Conversations With My Wife
SCENE: The wife and I have snuggled for an hour after a hard week, recharging her wifely batteries.
GINI (not leaving my embrace): I feel so much better.
ME: Aww, yeah. That’s your daily dosage of Vitamin F talkin’.
GINI: Okay.
ME: Which isn’t actually a real vitamin.
GINI: Okay.
ME: Because I’m vaguely worried if you thought it was, you’d divorce me and go get a supplement.
GINI (snuggles closer): Oh, you know I prefer getting my vitamins naturally anyway.
Why I Hate Stealth Games, Or: How I Discovered Roger Ebert Was Right
So as a reward for, you know, selling a novel, I finally got a PS4 after months of hand-wringing. (Yes, I abandoned my good ol’ XBox 360 after years of racking up achievements, and it feels a little sad to have all my Rock Band ‘cheevos gathering dust at the ass-end of a hard drive now. But looks like the XBone’s a loser in this generation’s console wars.)
Anyway, so flush with triumph, I got two games – Shadows of Mordor, because I was excited about the orc vengeance system, and The Last Of Us, which I was excited about because it was a zombie game.
Both turned out to be stealth games.
Oh Christ, I fucking hate stealth games.
This is not to say that your great love of stealth games is the work of Satan’s anal warts, but I fucking hate every aspect of stealth games. Because it’s like programming. Because it’s like writing.
Look, in my day and my night job, I spend many hours painstakingly mapping approaches to complex problems. I have to do a lot of tedious research to scout out the landscape, looking carefully ahead for hidden problems, analyzing the pros and cons of whether this methodology would be more effective, everything proceeding at a snail’s creep. And when I’ve set up the plan and want to explode out of the gate, I still proceed at a dim crawl, because every line is critical and I need to get each of them right.
It’s nice when I finally triumph. It is.
But when I settle down to game, I want to blow shit up.
Plus, most stealth games are actually incredibly tedious puzzle games. “But you can approach the guards in any order!” you cry. Well, kinda. You can have your take of one of two approaches, through this corridor or that tunnel, maybe branching to three if you throw a brick to distract them. In actuality, what you have is an incredibly constricted experience, where there are basically a handful of strategies that work and infinite strategies that won’t.
Plus, I never feel like the guards are humans, because they’re incredibly fucking stupid – oh, hey, I’ll just walk in the same circles all the time, what’s that, I guess everything’s normal, UURRK MY THROAT.
I don’t feel like I’m outwitting a bunch of clever opponents. I am patently fighting a modified computer AI, where if I step one foot here then I am VISIBLE and all the guards will converge on me at once, and if I am here then I am the THIEF OF THE NIGHT.
So when I do win, I get little sense of triumph. I don’t feel like I’m Batman – I feel like Ferrett, sitting on a couch, having vanquished a bunch of arbitrary and maddening rules to achieve a marginal result.
That is my day job.
I hate being weak enough that any time I annoy two guards, I’m all but dead. I hate having to manage ammunition. I hate having to crouch everywhere when what I want to do is LEEEEROY JENKINS my way to success. There’s nothing wrong with stealth in general, but my preferred game mode is charging in with some limited strategy, maybe a minute’s worth of scouting the field before going, “Okay, reflexes, you can take it from here.”
I almost returned The Last Of Us to GameStop, even though I was really enjoying the story, because the bullshit one-hit-kill Clickers were really pissing me off. Then Gini said, “You paid for it, you should enjoy it,” and after wrestling me to the ground in a no-holds-barred match, ultimately convinced me to –
– and I am loath to admit this before a group of gamers –
– lower the difficulty.
I had never lowered the difficulty this early in a game before. (I did once before, on Dragon Age, on the final level, just because yes I could win the final battle against the fire-resistant dragon with my fireball-slinging mage, but it was taking forever and I was getting very very bored.) But I did with The Last of Us because I really did like the story, and so I basically treated The Last Of Us like a very slow and clumsy movie, where I ran past a lot of zombies (who, on the lowest difficulty level, were no challenge at all) to be treated to snippets of cinema.
It was good cinema. But the gameplay was highly unsatisfying. Now we had something where stealth was clearly the way you were supposed to go, but if you want to screw up then fine, kill seven soldiers with a brick while standing in the middle of a field, whatever, do what you like. It felt, honestly, pretty condescending as a gameplay experience.
And I realized that part of the reason games work is that you do feel the tension along with the characters. When it was hard slipping past the fucking clickers, I felt a horrible fear for everyone involved in the game, and when I got to the next segment of the story I felt both triumph at having propelled myself to the next objective, and fear because I knew just how hard it was for them. For the first time, I understood Roger Ebert’s criticism that videogames were just bad movies, because once I actively disdained the gameplay, well, The Last of Us was about as good as it gets in a videogame storywise, and the fairly lengthy cut-scenes were padded by these even longer annoying segments of what I can only describe as violent paperwork.
And I realized: I need to go out there and get back into a style of videogame that rewards what I like to do. That is not a stealth game. A stealth game is just a continuation of the most frustrating things in my life, and so this weekend I’ll probably seek out Infamous: Second Son or play the new Civilization (which punishes imperfect strategy, but one can play quite profitably against computer AI up to Prince level without thinking too hard) or anything that involves blatant power plays and not sneaking.
I do not like to sneak. Plotting and planning is my life, and I wish to escape my life.
Hand me the gun. Leave that barrier behind. I’ma charge into battle, because today I want to be a superhero.
Is It Any Wonder I Fell In Love With The Flash So Quickly?
I hadn’t been planning on watching The Flash, because, well, I’m a little tired of superhero TV shows. Agents of SHIELD just hasn’t floated my boat this season, and Gotham has been getting such mixed reviews we haven’t even started it, so even though The Flash is one of my great childhood heroes, I didn’t start it.
No. That’s wrong.
Because The Flash is one of my great childhood heroes, I didn’t start it. I’m attached to The Flash. If they got him wrong, it’d just make me sad that this grim-and-gritty misfire was the face of one of my favorite superheroes. So I tuned out.
Until my friend Guthrie emailed me to say, “Please tell me you’re enjoying The Flash as much as I am.” I trust Guthrie. He’s a Green Lantern guy, I’m a Flash fan, so we obviously have our differences, but the Flash and Green Lantern can still team up to be buddies.
And I was all like, Well, if Guthrie loves it, I’ll give it a shot.
So we sat down last night and I fell in love.
It’s rare that any show nails what I consider to be the heart of a comic book character, because any long-running comic book character has many hearts. Like when I saw The Dark Knight with my friend Dana. I thought it was a brilliant interpretation, but Dana’s Batman-heart was “The World’s Greatest Detective,” a dude who relied more on intellect than raw might, and yeah, that Batman wasn’t there. Likewise, for many Batman is an avenging devil, as portrayed by Frank Miller, this gritty guy who’s just a hair better than his enemies – a valid interpretation, but not how I view it. Or Batman’s the goofy 1960s Adam West version, all clean-cut and surrounded by art deco.
They’re all valid. Some interpretations are more popular than others, but each of those Batmen are a Batman that someone grew up and idolized.
There’s no right and wrong here, but there is disappointment if someone emphasizes the wrong character traits.
But no! This Flash is heroic. He is a literal do-gooder – a little naive, but who would risk his life for others like this if he weren’t? He is incredibly smart, but he needs his friends in a way that other superheroes don’t. He is likeable, wisecracking, the kind of superhero you’d want to have a beer with.
My favorite scene in the entire DCU hands-down is where Wally West has the opportunity to beat up a supervillain at the bar, and instead he quietly asks if that villain has been taking his medications, and the villain admits shamefully that he hasn’t, and Wally gets him into treatment. That’s this Flash. He cares. He fights because there aren’t better options, but he’ll cheerfully try to talk if he can.
Now, this Flash is a little heavy on Daddy issues, but I suppose they gotta give him something to work past. We’re only three episodes in. I’ll live with that.
But the action sequences are spiffy and the dialogue is relatively good and I love the simple, bold way they humanize people. There’s not a lot of subtlety in this, but I don’t want deep characterization in my Flash media. I want big damn heroes, and I am hooked.