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Warobouros

THOUGHTS ON CALL OF DUTY: INFINITE WARFARE

Whoever decided to make Call of Duty into an annual franchise is a madman.

The most interesting thing is how Activision-- in conjunction with three different studios-- has persistantly forced themselves into making the simple art of murder into a new and fresh experience year after year. Considering the rivals they seem to have left in their wake (and the rivals that seem to struggle to compete year after year), it's amazing that we're still here, in the year of our Lord 2016 still talking about these dumb games. Plus, Osama bin Laden has been dead for years, so trying to tap into whatever anxiety college-age males have about society is also an interesting endeavor in amatuer psychiatry.

With that said, I am a madman, as well. I've played through every single one of these games since Modern Warfare in 2007 (in fact, it's the primary reason that I bought an X-Box 360). As often as I say "I think I'm done with these games," November rolls around every year and I find myself with a six pack of Kirin Ichibans staring at a Red Box.

So here we are again. I played through Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It's pretty good. Here are more thoughts about it-- Then again, maybe I'm not the guy to consult. After all, I'm the idiot that liked Ghosts.

In space there will be generic white dudes.

SO SAY WE ALL

I didn't think that Battlestar Galactica would be the direction Call of Duty would head in, but I'm glad they did. Because Battlestar Galactica is dope as hell.

Instead of ripping off Tom Clancy or the exploits of Richard Marchinko, this time around, they've decided that late 2000's sci-fi is the way to go. It's a good fit. Space is an appropriately dangerous and grim place. It's an environment where a pin-prick hole can kill you just as quick as automatic gunfire. But also there's both. There's no room to fuck around. . .  But also space is a really fun place to fuck around in. While BSG was never about the joy of duking it out in space, Infinite Warfare does convey the high-stakes thrills of pulling off something as impossible as not dying from literally everything at once. . . in space.

Unlike BSG, Infinite Warfare actually has a strong ending. A poignant one. Maybe too poignant. I haven't felt this way about the ending of an FPS since Medal of Honor-- Again, that is a distinction that nobody else has probably drawn about this game or any other. There is a grimness to Infinite Warfare that goes beyond the previous CoD games. Yeah, they've nuked you and shot you and shot you and blown you up and shot you again, but there is a diminishing returns to all of that. Infinite Warfare is different. Like BSG, the horror of war in space isn't set dressing, it is a thesis. It says, in a way that needs to be restated, emphatically, ever so often, that war, war is a real son of a bitch.

So say we all.

IS THAT APPLESEED?















Yeah, that's an Appleseed.

Good work, Infinity Ward.

Good work, Ethan.

Anyways, I mention this because the art design of these games has been all over the place. Specifically, Treyarch and their Black Ops series (especially II and III) seem to have all of the wit of a mid-90's CGI football commercial. Everything is all bulk and pads. The few robots that they had in BlOps II and III were ugly, boxy messes in the same vein (personally, I thought the robots in BlOps II looked like the juggernauts from the Warhammer universe, but without being some kind of hell-rhino, which, arguably, is the entire appeal of the Warhammer juggernauts).

Even the knives are needlessly complicated. Just look at how dumb these things look.

Who decided to complicate what knives look like?

I mean, besides the bad guy from Cobra.

Also, how come nobody had fucking sleeves in Black Ops II? Ugh . . .

Infinite Warfare* is a break away from that. They went whole hog into the future and they designed a world that both makes sense on an aesthetic level and makes sense on a mythological level. It's a consummate world that looks really neat. It's a world that fits in more alongside something like Deus Ex than it does Modern Warfare.

I'm also glad that I get to talk about Appleseed in public.

Next up: My opinions about Battle Angel Alita.

GHOSTS OF GHOSTS

As I said earlier: I was the guy that liked Ghosts. If anybody ever asks you "What kind of an asshole liked that game" you can tell them "It was James Kislingbury. It was him. Let's go stop him."

I liked it. But, again, see above: I'm a madman. But, before you burn me at the stake, hear me out (I mean, you've come this far)--

There are two main things that I liked about Ghosts. The first is that it took place in Southern California and the American West.

Maybe it's a masochistic kind of narcissism, but it's cool to fight a bunch of enemy militia members in a location that's less than a mile from my work. It's also nice to see Santa Monica get blown up, because fuck Santa Monica. Also, that game had a dog. You had to drag that dog to a medevac. I loved that little guy.

What's interesting is that it presaged the direction that first person shooters. Games have moved on from the "modern warfare" end of things.  The market has been saturated for a good ten years and groups like ISIS are too real to have fun with (and, again, we shot UBL years ago and it was awesome). Less successful imitators like Spec Ops: The Line and the Medal of Honor reboot have also probably pushed developers into safer markets.

So, they've gone in two directions: The Future (see Titanfall 1 and 2, Destiny, DOOM) or The Past (Battlefield One, Verdun, Wolfenstein: The New Order) or both at the same time (see: Black Ops II). This isn't a perfect analysis, but you see my point?

Then there was Ghosts. Ghosts came out on current gen and previous gen systems. It was split. So were its themes. It couldn't break away from the series' previous trappings, having neither been futuristic enough or stripped down enough to really matter. It was a game that

Infinite Warfare completes this loop. We're finally in the future. Black Ops II and III didn't quite do it and Ghosts was too trapped in the past. Now here we are: Space ships. Space marines. Orks. Mars. Lasers. You know, the future-ass future. And it's kind of neat.

THE TITLE

It's a really good title**.

Fight me.

SHOOTING PEOPLE IS FUN

Yeah, some ten years since the first Call of Duty, it's still fun to murder fools over the internet. It's also fun to murder robots. And robots pretending to be people. And people pretending to be robots. . . You get the picture. As a shooter, Infinite Warfare comes through and delivers the kind of top notch polish and shine that you expect out of a Call of Duty. While that sounds like damning with faint praise, consider how tight Modern Warfare felt when it first came out. It still feels good.

As much as I love Titanfall 2 (which is my go-to for multiplayer this season), that's a game that just doesn't quite have the fine sheen that this game does. Which doesn't so much ruin one game or make the other as it does make me appreciate just how much money Activision poured into this game. It's there. It looks like it. It feels like it.

If nothing else, the economics of Infinite Warfare should leave an impression.

SO, WHAT ELSE?

What I think is going to be fun is seeing what the hell they're going to do with the next installment (which falls on Treyarch this time around). It isn't like they can go even farther (further?) into the future and any half-steps at this point better be well thought out, because nobody is going to go back to the farm after they've done a double-jump into a wall run.

Personally, I'm hoping for some kind of historical remix weirdness. Sending soldiers through quantum tunnels to fight in alternate historical time lines with modern weapons. Like William Gibson's The Peripheral, but vastly dumber. Or go back to Nam. I'd be okay with that. Or cyberpunk. You know, like those other William Gibson novels. All of this works. I'll even take a game with a difference engine in it.

Gimme that dumb stuff, Treyarch. I know you can do it.

Give me Space Reznov. And, for that matter, Infinity Ward needs to bring back Captain Price. Space Price. Thawed out to beat up the future, because they don't build MEN like they used to. Or mustaches. The aliens took our mustaches and we need 'em back Price.

At least somebody give me that dog from Ghosts back. Can't be that hard. . .

James Kislingbury writes, draws, and makes podcasts. He also hates updating his log line. That's what this is, right? Aw, who cares?

*The more I think about it, the more I realize how cool of a game Advance Warfare was. That game did a lot of really neat things that I don't think people appreciated. At least not that I noticed. I tend to stay off of the internet, because it's a freaking full-time nightmare zone.

**I mean, yeah, it's kind of a "Fuck you" to Sledgehammer and Advance Warfare, but what are you going to do? Infinity Ward was there first and it's a really good title.

A Trailer, a Thought, and More Defensiveness About Movies I Love

This looks like it might be a winner, right?



After watching the trailer for Automata (which is way too close to the warmed up left overs that is the Penny Arcade crew's Automata), I wondered something: Are we quietly living in the best era of science fiction since the late 70's/early 80's?  While that decade had Silent Running, Alien, and Star Wars and in the early 80's you have Blade Runner, Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Terminator, and Outland.

Now, we have Looper, Moon, District 9, Inception, Primer, Her, Attack the Block, Snowpiercer, and the new Planet of the Apes series. . . I mean, these movies aren't perfect, but we're in pretty good shape here, right? They're either great pieces of cinema or they're interesting pieces of cinema.

And with that said, look at how good our big, dumb blockbusters are! Did anyone expect Guardians of the Galaxy to be that hardy of a picture? And while Edge of Tomorrow might be a lark, it's a smarter film than a lot of other sci-fi films that I do not care to name. Then there's Pacific Rim, which is a movie that I could go on about forever (and have).

And what did the 90's have? Total Recall (a great, great movie) followed by a bunch of Will Smith movies (you could argue for Terminator 2 (but that's more action than it is science fiction and that seems to be an outlier). Then you've got the 2000's which are stained with the legacy of the Prequels That Shall Not Be Named and, what? Avatar?

Oh yeah, Minority Report was awesome. Good call on that one, reader.

Maybe I just have a selective memory or a kind of blind confirmation bias. Who knows? Whatever the case is, we're lucky to be in an era where special effects have finally caught up with screen writing.

I don't know. Movie are cool. I guess that's what I'm getting at. We should be exicted about them. Which brings me to the next item on the agenda:

The script of Blade Runner 2 is complete.

There's been a lot of boring, Internet skepticism about this and as much as we all love a good skeptic now and again, it's important to remember you can shut the fuck up we have a goddamn Blade Runner sequel here. Thirty fucking years in the making do not take this away from me!

There's every reason in the world to trust Sir Ridley Scott on this one, too. I mean, he did make Blade Runner.

And Alien. And Gladiator. And Kingdom of Heaven. And Black Hawk Down. And Prometheus and fuck you, Prometheus is awesome. And sure, he's done quite a number of highly questionable films-- some of them as recent as the past year-- but, hey, when you're one of the greatest film makers of all time, you're entitled to a slump here and there. HE MADE BLADE RUNNER, YOU CURS.

In the meantime everybody go read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as a warm up for Automata. And toss Neuromancer and Akira in there while you're at it, because, you know, they're great.



James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and an enemy of mankind. You can follow him on twitter.

FOOTNOTES
*Notably I've left out Kathryn Bigelow, who would be perfect to take the mantle from Scott, except that she's already at work on Alien V, which is a fact that I am 100% is true.

Old City Talkin' Blues

 Alright, let's make this quick--

Giannis Milonogiannis is rapidly becoming one of my favorite artists. There’s something about the specificity of his lines mixed with the fact that it has the raw energy of a sketch. It’s an exciting book to look at and even in its most referential (the book basically wouldn’t exist without the Ghost in the Shell comics), it still stands out as a wonderful book to look at.

The fact that he's younger than I am is as amazing as it is depressing-- on the definite plus side, at least I have a greater chance of getting him to draw something for me. . . in time.

Anyways.

His line work reminds me of the work of Yoji Shinkawa (another of my favorite artists and apparently one of Milonogiannis’ if his blog is to be believed) mixed in with a dash of Paul Pope (there are way too many excited brush strokes to ignore).

Old City Blues is a skeleton of a story that exists to basically show off Giannis’mad megalopolis and his wonderful bits of technology yet to be. In a way that is enough. Almost. What little plot there is exists only as a sort of boiler plate cyberpunk story (if there is such a thing), which, in many ways is fine. It leads to future cars running through well composed future landscapes, as well as a robot fight or two and this world’s equivalent of mechs, “Mobile Guns.” Again: standard cyberpunk shit.

Well-- Very standard with streaks of underlying brilliance. It's all there, it just can't get through. Not yet, anyways. . .

The outstanding difference being it takes place in a sort of recovering post-apocalyptic Athens, which unfortunately could just as easily be Neo Tokyo or Neo New York or some other fake disaster ridden future city (in Milonogiannis’ defense, though, he seems to be aware of this and his “New Athens” is as much of a tribute to those fake fictional cities as it is living in their shadows). The place doesn't feel like a place, it feels like a generic world in which there are robots. That's awesome-- and really, no joke, it is awesome-- it's just that awesome isn't the sort of thing that makes a book last. Or worth lasting.

Taking all of its flaws and piling them up really makes me think that there is a much bigger and more intensive story than Old City Blues’ meager 120 pages. And if it is going to be a book that lasts it will be because Milonogiannis eventually came through on the promises of this book.

In its defense (not that it needs it), it does seem to have the kind of prescient hallmarks of a great artist that can only be found in their first major work. Old City Blues is not perfect, nor is it revolutionary, like the first works of other respected artists like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. Bottle Rockets and Reservoir Dogs aren’t perfect movies (especially when compared to some of their later works*), though, as fans and as an audience we can still see the little inklings of genius in between the scene that go nowhere and the ones that go on just a little too long. That’s this book in a nutshell. His work on Prophet only seems to confirm my belief that he’s going to get a whole hell of a lot better.

Despite its shortcomings Old City Blues is one of the coolest books you could hope to pick up—and I do mean that literally—the actual packaging of the book is really cool. It’s a wonderfully put together hardback and at 15 bucks—even with all of its flaws—it’s a steal. If you love Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, or even Johnny Mnemonic, then this comic is for you. It’s a wonderful mash-up of the best things you remember from the video games you played and the anime you watched as a kid in an actual piece of art. I’m glad Milonogiannis is getting work with Prophet and I am glad that I discovered this book (thanks, Warren Ellis!).

SIDE NOTE: Do you think that the Fallout: New Vegas DLC "Old World Blues" ripped-off this comic or do you think that they both ripped off the same source? Or maybe it was just some weird coincidence? (I'll start taking bets here.)

SIDE SIDE NOTE: iFanboy is always a good opinion to lean on despite their unfortunately aged name.

*Namely Pulp Fiction, Rushmore, Jackie Brown, and The Royal Tenebaums-- Those are all perfect films.The Darjeeling Limited and the Kill Bills. . . perhaps less so.

Mad Man Future

Sometimes the dumbest ideas are the coolest.

(This is about a person planning to build an underground park in New York City. Yup. Chew on that, John Carpenter.)

The Terrible Movie About the Matrix That Wasn't a Matrix Sequel

There's no doubt Johnny Mnemonic is a bad movie. History has proven this. There hasn't been any kind of redemption through a director's cut and there no cult following has ever materialized. The crowd of ironic cinema goers has moved on to much shoddier fare than this. The only people who ever wind up watching this. . . thing are people like me, movie nerds with too much time on their hands and who want to see sub-genre train wrecks complete with Dolph Lungren as a fanatic cyber-monk and a junky dolphin that Ice-T owns that can hack government super computers*.

I'd wager that it did more damage to science fiction and the cyberpunk sub-genre than we'll ever know. It's kind of amazing that it's this bad, considering that it's based off of a short story by one of the better science fiction writers of the past thirty years (William "I Created the Term Cyberspace" Gibson). Making a movie about this subject look this crappy and sound this goofy would presumably take far more effort than making a film that was actually good.

Johnny Mnemonic is one of those silly movies of the 1990's and reeks of being a work made on the fence between two eras. It came early enough to know about the internet and the revolution of technology that would ensue, but not late enough to know what the actual shape of things would be. On the one hand it knows that the internet would be a daily part of our lives-- something most movies about the future can barely even comprehend-- and on the other hand it didn't manage to predict cell phones or that a terabyte hard drive would be smaller than the book the original short story was included in. It's also one of these weird 1990's movies that thinks that people would actually want to go into the internet. While he isn't a speculative futurist, Dave Chappelle got one thing right: If you could actually travel to the internet, nobody would ever want to.

Chappelles Show
If the Internet Was a Real Place
www.comedycentral.com
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs Black Comedy True Hollywood Story

To quote Roger Ebert:

`Johnny Mnemonic" is one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn't deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it. Based on a story by William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk fiction, it has the nerve to pose as a futuristic fable when in fact all of its parts were bought off the shelf at the Used Movie Store.

That's probably sums up what this movie is more than anything else. With that said, even though it doesn't deserve it, I really do want to seriously analyze this movie. Why? Because I'm almost positive nobody else on earth has ever felt the slightest desire to. Being first as something is a rarity nowadays, even if it's under as ignominious circumstances as critically analyzing Johnny Mnemonic.

The movie is dumb as dirt, Ebert is right about that, like most things that are stupid, Johnny Mnemonic doesn't know that it's stupid. Despite being Blade Runner's thalidomide baby, it has serious pretensions about being a well-thought out movie. I guess, maybe if there was some thalidomide baby born into really supportive (and borderline delusional) parents, that didn't want to tell junior that it had anything wrong with it, that kid's future would look something like this piece of crap.

It reminds me of much better films, so with that said, it isn't entirely without merit. It's kind of worthwhile, if only due to reflected glory.

From the first few minutes on it's clear that this flick is referencing the cyberpunk Holy Grail, Blade Runner. The entire aesthetic of the film is ripped off wholesale from the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with a few added plot points about the internet. Besides the seedy, rain-slicked streets packed with Asians and neon, there's at least two shots that are direct send-ups of its better (those being when Johnny first arrives in China, he stands on top of his car a la Deckard in his foot chase with Zhora and the second shot is just a simple panorama of the city).

Despite having all of the budget and technology that Blade Runner didn't have, Johnny Mnemonic looks like a bad film school knock-off. It's profound, that kind of incompetency. How hard could ripping Ridley Scott's last sci-fi movie be when you've got all of the blue prints at your finger tips? Someone already did it! All you have to do is follow the instructions. It must have taken them far more effort to make a crappy, knock-off version of the movie considering the newer, quicker resources they had at their finger tips. I mean, even Keanu Reeves' hair looks bad and that's probably the easiest thing in the world to fix.

Shameful shit.

There must be an over/under for making movies looks good. You've either got to go way high on the budget-- like Avatar, Terminator 2, or Superman Returns or something-- where you end up with a true, larger than life spectacle, made by the best in the business with as much time as they need. Or you've got to shoot low like with Monsters or District 9, where the effects become more impressive because of how little they cost. Now, while Mnemonic didn't have the technological resources as any of the above movies, I think it might be a victim of being neither a flawed, low-budget art house picture and it isn't a big-budget summer blockbuster. It's this lukewarm sci-fi nothing that is only really notable for its intense goofiness.

Or in the director's words:
"[The movie] started out as an arty 1½-million-dollar movie, and it became a 30-million-dollar movie because we couldn't get a million and a half."

Alright, enough of that. We know it's bad. As I said before, even though it has no real worthwhile qualities of its own, it reminds me of much better pictures. For whatever reason, one of those is Persona.

That's right, this fuckin' film--


Ingmar Bergman is one of the great artists of the 20th century and for whatever reason one of the dumbest movies of the 1990's reminds me of what is perhaps his greatest work.

There's a reason for this. So, let me show you the method to the madness, While the subject matter of either film diverges greatly, there is an interesting overlap between the time and I think if even Johnny Mnemonic can understand one of the things that makes Persona great, then there's no reason you shouldn't understand that, as well(do I need to mention the thalidomide thing again?).

There is no doubt that there's a stack of thesis papers and critical studies as thick as my fist just on that opening alone (Hell, I'm sure I've written at least one of them) and they're all probably better thought out and better sourced than this little blogging here, so don't take my word for it. It's just funny, to me, and I thought I'd share it with you, that two years after I saw this movie and studied it that the one thing that would get me to think about it the most is bad sci-fi.

The opening and closing of Persona is famous for it's collection of unrelated and unexplained images that reads more like a cinematic free-association riff than it does an Eisensteinian montage. As an audience we have to assume that it is a metaphor for something rather than any kind of narrative. Bergman's body of work often concerns itself with psychoanalysis' conflict with art and the opening seems to encapsulate that idea because, if anything, it's Bergman at his most artsy and his craziest.

I suppose it is the idea of the montage (which, as you probably know, isn't always something people did in the 80's before a big competition, but, rather, the combination of two images that, as a result of their juxtaposition, create an idea larger than the sum of their parts) taken to its most abstract limits. It all of the trappings of a montage without anything to contextualize it.

What got this whole ball rolling is that the key to unlocking Johnny's woefully small brain hard-drive isn't a pin number or an decryption key, but three images randomly chosen from whatever happened to be on TV at the time. I like that. I like that a lot. It might just be the most clever thing in the movie. Now, while that makes it something of the tallest dwarf in the mine, it's still a good idea because in a way this is what Bergman was going for in the opening of Persona. In both cases it is images-- not words or technology, but art-- that are used to peer into the protagonist's mind. While the reasoning and execution is different, I'd like to think that this shows even the most imperfect pieces of art are not without fleeting moments of perfection-- even if they're accidental.

Now, watch this opening before you start calling me an idiot.



I can wait.

It's clear there's potential within this movie. It's based off of a William Gibson short story that has the same name. What drives me the craziest with works of art that don't work aren't necessarily their flaws, but they're wasted potential. Messy movies are fine, a film can survive being a mess. Some of the greatest films of all time are messes-- The Thin Red Line and Magnolia pop to mind. Movies are such an amazing art form and it hurts to see people with so many things to work with squander what they have.

SIDE NOTE: I like that Johnny carries a briefcase full of equipment. In my best-of-all-world's part of the brain, I want to believe that Christopher Nolan and his brothers saw this movie and at least thought that the brain-hacking briefcase was a good idea. Even if it didn't-- there it is-- It might be in one of the most infamously bad movies of the 1990's, but it shares a huge link with Christopher Nolan's most recent masterpiece, Inception.

Think about that for a moment.

SIDE SIDE NOTE: Watching bad movies is a lot easier for me to do than to watch a good movie. Artful films, important ones, take a patience and the right kind of mood. A lot of the time I don't have this. Either I'm busy or drunk, or I don't want to watch it on a shitty TV or whatever. It isn't a process that comes as simply as sitting down and watching something I know doesn't really deserve my time (see: Reign of Fire).

Over the past couple of weeks I rented a few movies that I would consider to be "great." There was Seven Days in May (which I've neglected to write about here, but I should get around to it) and Serpico. Each of these took me about a week to watch each, because I knew they were worth the time. This isn't something I'd do with an Earnest movie. The latest movie I've got from Netflix is Citizen Kane. I've only had it for two days, though, considering that it's supposed to be the best movie of all time, it could take me a month before I actually sit down for it.

SIDE SIDE SIDE NOTE: Also, you know what is a much better, much more fun, much more compitent (but no less silly) movie about cyberspace is?

Hackers.


I love Hackers.

LAST SIDE NOTE: Now that I'm going over this again, there's another couple of stories that are about enlightenment or salvation through information and through art. Recently the post-apocalyptic action movie The Book of Eli was about just that (in this case a book, not a bunch of screencaps from the TV) and, less recently, but more significantly, Fahrenheit 451. What is is about dystopias and their inability to properly store needed information? You think they'd at least have knocked that one out by then.

*Oh man, I would totally pay good money to see a super-intelligent dolphin go head-to-head against Ken Jenning on Jeopardy. Are you listening, Hollywood?