Fallout 4 First Impressions

No one's thought to clear up this broken glass in 200 years?
That's a health hazard waiting to happen.

The thing that irked me the most about Fallout 4 in the leadup to its release was that Bethesda didn't even have to try. You already had people losing their minds over it for months before it came out, an issue I examined in my exasperated article on the subject. Now, of course, it seems like people are more than prepared to question the game, and that's something, but I still want to give my thoughts. I had no real intention of playing Fallout 4; in my opinion Bethesda's version of Fallout isn't really Fallout at all because they didn't invent it and don't really seem to understand the point of it, and I was prepared for it to pass me by, but I was given Fallout 4 as a Christmas gift and so I felt I might as well give it a go. Thus I too entered the amazing world of mediocrity which is the Commonwealth Wasteland. What follows are my thoughts on the game so far, after playing for about ten and a half hours, apparently.

Well there's your problem.

GOOD THING 1: FROZEN PROTAGONISTS

In my opinion, the idea that your character was alive before the "Great War" which caused the nuclear annihilation of civilisation is an interesting one which has merit as a storytelling device; there's always mileage in the idea of a person "out of time" to explore the ways in which our historical moments shape us. This, however, comes with a number of issues as it manifests in Fallout 4 and which I will now relate.

BAD THING 1: CHARACTER MOTIVATION

The premise of Fallout 4's setup is that your Vault, Vault 111, which you were led to believe was designed to allow you to survive the nuclear war, was in fact a cryogenic experimentation facility. At some point, you conveniently wake up to see your spouse in the opposite booth being killed and your infant child kidnapped. There are two key issues with this:

The rare "Fallout cosplayer" gear.

1. It makes the gameplay seem ridiculous. As a big open-world RPG, Fallout 4 derives a lot of its notional entertainment value from being a "sandbox" in which you're free to muck around and have fun: you can explore, fight enemies, do side quests for various parties and generally squeeze the setting of all of its narratives and experiences. Yet you're playing as a character whose baby has been kidnapped. It just doesn't work as a motivation in this kind of game. A parent would surely be off following the clues without immediate time to spare for the issues of others, the recovery of their abducted child being their main goal. In Fallout and Fallout 2 the stuffing around factor could be justified in terms of gathering the resources you need to achieve your main goal - finding the Water Chip, stopping the Master, finding the GECK and beating the Enclave. In Fallout 4 it's much more difficult to swallow.

"Who's a getting-in-my-way-when-I'm-trying-to-sneak boy, then?"

2. It's trite. "Rescue your kidnapped child" is a pretty overused premise in fiction. Arguably all the Fallout games have been guilty of this, but that doesn't excuse it here. New Vegas is probably the most original of all of them, and that at least starts off as a pretty basic revenge plot. There's a third element which emerges from this as well:

Bonus Third Issue: It's basically just a reversal of the character motivation of Fallout 3. Fallout 3 was "find your father"; Fallout 4 is "find your son." That was the best they could come up with? I believe there are twists and turns later but they really could have done something better. Moving on...

GOOD THING 2: IT LOOKS NICE

I believe there may have been criticism of Fallout 4's graphics prior to release but I couldn't really be bothered researching it. It any event, I think the game looks okay. It looks a hell of a lot better than Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, that's for sure. Those character models in the Gamebryo Engine were horrible. I've been running the game on Low because my computer is comparatively old now - I got it in late 2012 - and even on low I think it looks fine. There are some texture pop ins and things naturally but I can live with it.

Cryogenic freezing may give you a shiny face.

BAD THING 2: IT LOOKS WRONG

Others have focused on this as well but I just can't get past the idea of Boston being the way it is two hundred and ten years after a global thermonuclear war. It's not just that it would have been bombed flat; you can make the excuse that, being on the East Coast, most of the Chinese aircraft and warheads would have been shot down before they reached it, a bit like in a game of DEFCON. That's a good idea actually - a crashed Chinese bomber. Where are things like that? But it doesn't change the fact that over two hundred years the city would have collapsed without maintenance.

I'll find my baby just after I've shot another few bugs.

Boston in Fallout 4 looks like the bombs dropped a few years ago at most, and yet two centuries are meant to have passed. People like to say "well the games are unrealistic so of course this is excusable" but the thing is, in Fallout and Fallout 2, this didn't happen: places like the Necropolis and the Boneyard were so named because they were built in the skeletal structure left behind by the wasted skyscrapers and edifices of the old world. Everything else had been blasted away or had succumbed to the ravages of time. In Fallout there is also the excuse that it only took place a mere eighty years after the Great War, and took place in a rather dry environment. Locations like Shady Sands were entirely new constructions.

Fallout 4, like Fallout 3 before it, still has scavenger-like societies of people living in towns made of junk and scrap, not rebuilding and starting again but clinging to the remnants of an old world that they never lived in. Even New Vegas continued the idea established in Fallout 2 that a new society was emerging, by representing the New California Republic of Fallout 2 as a comparatively "civilised" state which, while probably not at pre-war levels of development, was still an industrialised society of its own construction. For whatever reason, despite having the excuse of perhaps not being hit as hard, Bethesda's East Coast has not recovered to nearly the same extent. It's really a question of the timing. There's no real reason that Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 need to be set after Fallout 2 given how removed they are from its location, but I believe Bethesda wanted it to be plausible that the Brotherhood of Steel would have made it East. This leads into:

Zap.

BAD THING 3: THE HOLLOWNESS OF BETHESDA'S USE OF THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The whole composition of the game world (and this is true of Fallout 3 as well) is one which Bethesda has built out of a handful of now-meaningless signifiers of "Fallout" with a threefold purpose: firstly, to appeal to fans of the original Fallout games; secondly, to make their post-apocalyptic games seem quirky and unique (albeit using other people's ideas); and thirdly, now, to reference themselves and the concepts of Fallout which exist in the internet's popular consciousness dating back to the success of Fallout 3. In this they are mostly referencing ideas which they themselves never even invented, simply bought.

Thus there are things like: bottle cap currency, which Fallout 2 showed being abandoned once more established societies were developed; Super Mutants and various other mutated and gigantic irradiated creatures, even though they were specifically a creation of the Master in Fallout using the Forced Evolutionary Virus that was specifically found in the West-Tek Research Facility and Mariposa Military Base in California; and the abandoned ruins of the old world, even though the bombs fell two hundred years earlier.

My local supermarket looked like this on Christmas Eve.

In Fallout, all these things made sense: bottle caps were used as currency because they were convenient and sufficiently rare, the Super Mutant threat was part of the main plot involving the Master and his efforts to bring "Unity" to the Wasteland, and the old world was being replaced, like in A Canticle for Liebowitz, by a new one. Bethesda, however, sees Fallout as simply a game with ruins, a 1950s aesthetic, power armour, Super Mutants, ghouls, giant insects and pests, and bottle cap currency without any particular rhyme or reason to it. It just "is" because to them Fallout is just "stuff" that exists in some kind of vacuum, to be thrown together at will. Fallout doesn't really work outside of its original West Coast USA setting and it really shows in these games. I've seen it argued that really Bethesda just wants to make kooky 1950s style science fiction sandbox games and this is the most marketable way of doing it, and Fallout 4 brings that into relief. It's a bit dispiriting to see what was originally a rather striking concept, even if taking elements from the original Wasteland game, repurposed to have its most recognisable elements exploited in such a cynical way.

BAD THING 4: TOO MANY GHOULS

Seriously, why are there so many Feral Ghouls as enemies? Couldn't they think of anything else to use as an enemy? It feels like they just went around the map clicking intermittently going "Ghouls here... ghouls here... fill this space with ghouls... here's another empty patch, better fill it with ghouls..."

Trying to contact the parallel universe where Van Buren was released.

BAD THING 5: "POWERED" ARMO(U)R

Why on earth did they make it so that Power Armour needs fuel, something that has never come up in any other Fallout game? I could understand if they wanted to introduce it early and thus you got a shonky suit in the initial Power Armour sequence that used batteries regularly, but why make it a universal element applicable to all suits of Power Armour in the game?

This particularly irks me for a rather personal reason. I like to play Bethesda RPGs without fast travel, because I think it makes the game more immersive. Yet if you just walk at a normal pace in Power Armour in Fallout 4, your batteries drain. Yet apparently if you do use Fast Travel, they don't. If you take the battery out, you clunk around at a slow speed like you're encumbered, which is pointless. What on earth motivated this immersion-destroying decision? Furthermore, aren't they powered by fusion cores? It's in the name. Fusion. Wouldn't you expect their power supply to last for a practically indefinite amount of time? They also can't be recharged, which is absurd. If the fusion core simply functioned as a kind of key it would make sense, but making all suits fuelled takes it too far.

Bethesda banners: still hanging after 200 years exposed to the elements.

GOOD/BAD THING: A VOICED PROTAGONIST

In my Skyrim review, I argued that I would prefer the game to have a voiced protagonist, because in my opinion an RPG should have both NPCs and the player character voiced, or neither voiced. For this reason, I'm largely on board with the voiced player character. That being said, there are obviously points in the game in which the voice actor (I'm playing as the female player character) clearly has not received enough direction when recording responses, such that words are not always stressed in realistic ways in a number of lines. More work needs to be done on this in future.
 

BAD THING 6: NOT ENOUGH ROLE-PLAYING

As has been pointed out elsewhere, Fallout 4 is very much not like the RPGs of old in which you could choose to talk, sneak or fight your way through the story, or do a mixture of the two. Violence is very much on the menu here and the speech system is lacking in complexity, with the occasional Speech check being largely the extent of it. This may be a result of the misguided adoption of a Mass Effect-style dialogue wheel mechanic for choosing the gist of your character's responses, but I couldn't say for sure because I modded this out immediately with the "Full Dialogue Interface" mod before beginning the game. This may result in an "inauthentic" Fallout 4  experience but because Bethesda's Fallout is by its nature inauthentic I couldn't care less.

Must have been one hell of a law degree.

My other issue on this front is that the game shoehorns you so hard into being a certain person with a certain background: you're either a male veteran or a female lawyer with a spouse and a baby. For me, this takes things too far. In almost any other RPG you can be whomever you wish. Giving too much background limits your ability to role-play. The stupid thing is, they then never make anything of it. As I said, I'm playing as the female version of the protagonist with the legal background. At one point while I was doing an early mission for the Brotherhood of Steel, Paladin Danse (I think) quoted their Latin motto, and the Brotherhood member who doesn't like me scoffed that I wouldn't know what it meant. This is a logical scenario in which my player character's background should have come to the fore, because while it's not certain, as a former lawyer there'd be a good chance that she would understand that much Latin. These are just minor examples of Bethesda failing to make the most of what they've got.

All these issues with character and setting coalesce into a single fundamental problem: there simply isn't enough of a disconnection between the world the player character leaves in the opening and the one they enter after waking up in the Vault; the world outside is the world they lived in, just blown up. It isn't an unrecognisable space, completely rebuilt and reorganised with geography as the only identifiably consistent feature. Furthermore, the character's own reaction to their situation simply isn't strong enough. The whole game would make more sense if it was set about twenty years after the war rather than two hundred. In terms of both setting and character Bethesda fumbles the opportunity they've given themselves to craft something unique which carries on in the tradition of the original Fallout games. I can appreciate them doing what they did in Fallout 3 (even if it was unimaginative) because they were trying to revive the franchise, but Fallout 4 is just more of the same apart from superficial additions like the settlement-building gimmick and it simply doesn't work.

Boston: hit by one of those "soft" nukes.

Like Skyrim, Fallout 4 seems to be a diverting game but in many respects an unsatisfying one, one that like Skyrim is begging for modders to deal with its many shortcomings and for other developers to learn from its mistakes. Fortunately the indie and crowd-funded scene has seen the return to some degree of the classic computer RPG, with recent examples such as Pillars of Eternity, The Age of Decadence and Underrail showing that what companies like Bethesda can try to shove aside others can revive. Unfortunately, companies like Bethesda just don't need to go that extra mile anymore; there are simple things which could make the game feel more real like, for example, at night Travis Miles the Diamond City Radio DJ could go to bed and continuous music could play all night or a night DJ could take over. But Bethesda doesn't need to do that anymore because internet hype culture takes care of anything for them. Fallout 4 could have been literally anything and people would have bought it, and thus in many respects the fault is with the consumers as well as the composers. That's not to say that Bethesda couldn't work to make a greater value product simply out of professionalism and principle, but it doesn't change the fact that they'd as good as made back their money the instant the first trailer hit Youtube. Irresponsible consumers feed indolent companies, and it's a chicken-and-egg dilemma which only can be resolved if both parties make an effort - and how likely is that?

"Star Wars: The Force Awakens": Initial (Bad) Impressions

So I just saw The Force Awakens, the new Star Wars film. It was, in my opinion, not very good. That being said, there was a massive cock up at the cinema where I saw it, causing me to miss the first couple of minutes, and the immense frustration at that may have coloured my experience, but at this stage I can firmly say that I did not find much to enjoy in this film. Here's why:

1. It's a massive rehash of previous Star Wars films

Ever seen Star Wars, now known as A New Hope? Then you've seen The Force Awakens. Good guys have secret information inside droid, bad guys want droid, bad guys have huge superweapon that they use to blow up a/some planet(s) no one cares about, good guys blow up huge superweapon, old guy dies. Also Kylo Ren is just Darth Vader as a son rather than a father, so you can throw some rehashing of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in there as well.

And yeah, they did the whole "blowing up the superweapon" thing in both Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, and it was pretty unoriginal then; it doesn't somehow make it less unoriginal here.

2. The CGI is crap

There are some practical effects in the film, which is nice. As such, what's with the CGI? There are two characters in particular, some little orange lady with big glasses who reminds me of Edna Mode from The Incredibles called "Maz Kanata", and the Palpatine substitute, Supreme Leader Snoke (who I'm fairly sure is referred to interchangeably as "Snoke" and "Stoke" in the film), who are completely obviously computer generated in contrast to the aliens done with practical effects. The "Maz Kanata" character is bad enough because she comes out of nowhere yet apparently knows everything about everything (if so, why have we never seen her before?) but having an important antagonist like Snoke merely as some crappy and incredibly fake-looking CGI creation is beyond the pale.

3. It doesn't look like a Star Wars film
It looks like a J.J. Abrams film. Yeah, I get that in some respects that's a really stupid thing to say because he directed it, but it does. The "visual grammar" of Abrams' style, as seen in his rebooted Star Trek films, is very evident: shots of space ships flying through tunnels are extremely reminiscent in terms of composition, as well as the delayed reaction humour and some of the framing of the actors. I'm not a film expert so it's a little difficult to describe, but to me, even though they weren't all directed by the same people, there's something relatively consistent about the original Star Wars films which isn't present here, and yet was present to a greater extent in the prequels (even though I don't think the prequels are very good).

This is what comes to mind at this stage. Number One is the most glaring because the film's plot is so devastatingly unoriginal in many respects. I'm going to reiterate that my poor experience at the cinema almost certainly coloured my viewing situation, and I'm prepared to rewatch and reassess the film, but at the same time in this age of appalling mass consumerism and hype trains people need to stand up and say "No, I disagree."

Why You Shouldn't Be Excited About Fallout 4

One thing that pisses me off to no end (among many) is how easily seemingly sensible people are willing to enthusiastically climb aboard consumerist hype trains. Today's instalment appears to be a tease for a new game in the Fallout "franchise," inauthentically brought to you by Bethesda Softworks. Why shouldn't you care about this? Let's begin:

It's Inauthentic

As you may know if you ever read these humble jottings, I'm a bit of a stickler for authenticity. I like characters, plots, settings and general ideas to be worked on by the people who invented them, not simply by the highest bidder. Y'know who invented all that stuff you liked in Fallout 3, like bottle-cap currency, multi-headed cows, the big war between China and the USA, T-51b power "armor", super mutants, the Brotherhood of Steel, Vault Boy, the SPECIAL system and all that other shit? A team from Interplay in 1997. Y'know who didn't come up with any of those fundamental ideas? Bethesda in 2004 when they started developing Fallout 3. Now I know that the Interplay team that made Fallout 1 wasn't identical to the team which made Fallout 2, and the team which made New Vegas bore virtually no resemblance, but the whiff of authenticity is completely absent in the Bethesda-created instalment. They didn't come up with any of the crap that actually makes Fallout into Fallout. All they came up with is a reworking of the concept into less of a 'rebuilding of society, war never changes' type game and more of a generic post-apocalyptic "look, it's Washington but blown up" type simulator.

I guess if you never played the first Fallout you wouldn't give a shit, and good for you. But you ought to perceive that Bethesda Fallout is basically just licensed fan fiction with no actual creative link between itself and the intellectual property it bought from Black Isle Studios in 2003. You may say "well, Bethesda bought the rights, they can do whatever they like with it, and take as much credit as they wish." Yeah, sure, according to dumb, blunt corporate logic that might make sense, but artistically speaking it's nonsense. It'd be like if someone had paid John Wyndham a tonne of money to buy the rights to The Chrysalids and then wrote a sequel to it exploring the post-apocalyptic world portrayed in the book. Would you get all excited about that? Probably not, because you probably have no idea what The Chrysalids is, but my point is it'd be artistically meaningless. What could possibly be conveyed authentically by a bunch of completely different people playing around with toys they'd purchased from another company?

Bethesda doesn't understand Fallout

This is probably one of the stronger arguments against another Bethesda Fallout game, I would argue: Bethesda simply doesn't understand Fallout. The Fallout games are about a) how even under the most extreme circumstances, human nature carries on in both its better and worse capacities, and b) how as a result human morality is complex and difficult to define. Weirdly enough, the team at Obsidian understood this when they developed Fallout: New Vegas, but Bethesda didn't. As a result, Fallout 3 is a simplistic morality tale: the good Brotherhood of Steel versus the evil Enclave. You can be as good or bad as you like but ultimately you're shepherded towards the same conclusion: you have to help the Brotherhood beat the Enclave, even though you can go on to help the Enclave by poisoning the water supply so it'll kill mutants. It's the kind of simplistic black and white morality Bethesda have developed through their long history with their main franchise, the Elder Scrolls, a vaguely enjoyable series of Fantasy RPGs which nonetheless indulge exactly the same simplistic good versus evil bullshit you can find in any generic Fantasy paperback in an airport bookstore.

There's also the fact that Bethesda seem to see Fallout as being about simulating the ruins of the old world rather than exploring a strange new one. The whole point of Fallout (the first game) is that the area of the United States in which you find yourself has become virtually unrecognisable as a result of the horrendous nuclear war. Fallout 3 by contrast presents you with Washington DC as it would probably appear if it was abandoned for a decade, when of course in a nuclear war between the superpowers it'd be one of the first places which would be turned into glass. It would have been bombed flat. It's the romanticised "cosy catastrophe" nature of the disaster in Fallout 3 (to reference Wyndham again) which makes the situation a bit ridiculous, but obviously Bethesda figured that pictures of a vaguely sooty-looking Capitol building would sell better than pictures of a bloke wandering around a desert between mud huts built by survivors.

Maybe these aren't terribly strong reasons for not buying into the Fallout 4 hype, but in my opinion not buying into hype should be self-evident. You have literally no idea if the game is going to be good or not, unless you're so blindly, ideologically enslaved to the franchise that you know you'll enjoy it no matter what. I'll give Bethesda some credit: Fallout 3 is an expansive and atmospheric game (albeit one which misunderstands its source material and has an extremely weak story) and I feel that the Creation Engine, as used with Skyrim and hopefully with this, ought to be a major improvement over the clunky and ugly Gamebryo engine, which was understandable for Oblivion and more or less for Fallout 3, but despite the fact that it was obviously not going to be replaced to develop a mere spinoff, looked extremely dated by the time of New Vegas. I may well give Bethesda's new Fallout a chance myself, although I worry that it will be another simplistic morality tale. As I always say, however, question the authenticity of these things, ask yourself if you're getting something as artistically and intellectually rigorous as what has actually come before, have a little self-respect and don't get on board hype trains. It's undignified, if nothing else, and while it's perfectly fine to be interested in and enjoy these things, companies that mass-produce exploitative products to take your money, with as little effort as possible on their own part, don't deserve excitement or enthusiasm and certainly don't deserve gratitude.

EDIT AFTER THE TRAILER RELEASE
Looks like BioShock Infinite crossed with The Last of Us. Basic signifiers like Ink Spots track, TV screen, Vault door, Vault suit, power armor etc to make fanboys automatically think it's awesome. Don't buy into the hype!

EDIT AFTER SOME OTHER THING AND A PRE-ORDER ANNOUNCEMENT
Yeah! Let's all pre-order Fallout 4! Let's all be good little consumers and blindly line the pockets of a big corporation that simply buys other people's more intelligent ideas and then repackages them into easily digestible blockbuster mush!  Let's all get our special Pip-Boy Editions so that we can get more cluttered shit in our bedrooms so people will know how geeky we are!

Have some god damned self respect you utter sheep. These people do not deserve your enthusiasm, they do not deserve excitement and they certainly do not deserve your money.

Why You Shouldn't Be Excited About Star Wars Episode VII

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a huge Star Wars fan. Don't get me wrong, I've seen all six films multiple times, albeit not in a few years. That being said, I don't care about it a great deal. I think Return of the Jedi is the best one, whatever that means, purely for the scenes between Luke and Darth Vader. I respect the 'Original Trilogy.' Technically, they're very impressive in terms of effects, they're well-designed, Darth Vader is a well-realised character and the twist at the end of The Empire Strikes Back is a classic film moment. I don't hate the Prequels. I was a little kid in 1999 when The Phantom Menace came out so I still have some affection for it. I thought Darth Maul was cool and never found Jar Jar sufficiently annoying to be worth worrying about. That being said, I do think the Prequels are nothing more than mediocre action films. I definitely don't like Revenge of the Sith, which I found narratively disappointing. The only decent bit is when Yoda fights the Emperor. [Update: What was I thinking when I wrote that? Yoda vs the Emperor is one of the stupidest bits in Episode III] Grievous was stupid. Anyway, my point is I'm neither here nor there when it comes to Star Wars. I get that people like them but at the same time I think they're limited.

Now that Disney owns Lucasfilm and has J.J. Abrams making a new Star Wars film a lot of people have been, I think, optimistic, because they're bringing back the original cast and because Abrams' Star Trek films show that he has a greater aptitude for space-opera action than he does for insightful sci-fi. But now the teaser is out and everyone's carrying on like it's the Second Coming. Beyond the fact that all we saw was some desert, some stormtroopers, some X-Wings and a new silly lightsaber design, all fairly calculated signifiers of what "Star Wars" is in the popular unconscious, it's ridiculous the amount of anticipation this has generated. I wish to interrogate this in the style of a hypothetical conversation with someone who is getting really hyped about this project.

WOW OMG STAR WARS THE FORCE AWAKENS LIGHTSABER HNNNGH

Frankly, I thought it just looked like a collection of random postmodern signifiers of what people think Star Wars is: a silly hovering vehicle, the desert, a funny droid, stormtroopers, X-Wings and the Millennium Falcon. All that tells me is that the people making this are trying to cash in on people's nostalgia and expectations rather than trying to make a good film.

BUT MILLENNIUM FALCON ORIGINAL TRILOGY

So because you see a bunch of digital recreations of stuff from thirty years ago, that makes you excited? Why?

YOU'RE JUST A HATER YOU WANT JAR JAR TO BE THE LAST THING EVER

True, I'm no great Star Wars fan. But I'd be curious to know how big a Star Wars fan you are as well. And if you are such a big fan, why do you care about new films made by someone else? Sure, some of the actors are the same, and George Lucas had a little involvement, but do you get this excited about fan fiction? These are sequels, they're not the same thing. They could be crap for all you know - unless of course you convince yourself that they're not crap before you even see it, which is no different to, say, writing it off as garbage before you even see it (as I'm doing). The original films were successful for their engagement with theory (especially Campbell's Monomyth) and their technical achievements. By the Prequels, that wasn't possible anymore. Bringing back Hamill, Ford and Fisher isn't going to change that.

IT'LL BE ENTERTAINING YOU HATE ENTERTAINMENT HIPSTER

As I've discussed elsewhere surely 'entertainment' means different things to different people. Besides, as I said in my article on the Avengers 2 teaser, there's nothing noble or admirable about wanting 'just entertainment,' about not wanting to think. These corporations want you to not think so that you'll give them more money. Hollywood is about profit, and profit is about the bottom line: what's the least we can do to make the most? And if that means tricking people into seeing a 'continuation of the beloved original films' by using a bunch of meaningless signifiers (like the original cast) then that's what they'll do. You're not a hero for wanting to shut off your brain. That's a fatuous declaration that you want greedy businesses, who, and I must emphasise this, do not know or care about you at all, to manipulate you, exploit you and treat you with utter contempt in return for a few charlatan tricks to make you think you're consuming something you aren't.

Hollywood is the McDonald's of culture. Sure, the film might be good. I doubt it very, very much, but it might be. But as I said with Avengers, these films are pieces of product, and they don't deserve your enthusiasm. Or maybe I'm just a curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder. But I still think you ought to calm down, show a little self-respect and not give these people exactly what they want.

The 'Age of Ultron' Teaser

Thrills, spills and adventure.

As we all know, in the age of modern cinema, the main job of the Hollywood film is to live up to the trailer with which it was sold to audiences. With that in mind, let's not bother waiting until next year to see 'The Avengers: Age of Ultron' and just review the teaser that Marvel released today after it was leaked. There are three dominant features to this teaser: Ultron doing what bad guys do, delivering monologues; people running around screaming and carrying on, including the majority of the Avengers; and Iron Man in the Hulkbuster Armour fighting Hulk.

Beep boop.

Obviously the most intriguing element is going to be Ultron himself: his truncated line "not to protect the world, but you don't want it to change," cuts rather deeply to the heart of the entire superhero premise. Superheroes are a purely reactive force. They wait for things to go wrong, and then try to put them back to how they were before. If they capitalise upon this it could potentially be interesting. We also hear him quoting Disney's 'Pinocchio,' presumably in reference to him seeing himself as freed from the shackles not literally of his control by the Avengers but from society, convention, tradition, morality, cultural conditioning and so forth. It's an interesting idea and I hope that it goes to interesting places.

Upon discovering the fine print in his supposed six-film contract.
Back to the gym for another ten years.

Now let's talk about people running around screaming and carrying on. There's some kind of intense masochism in Hollywood action cinema these days, that morbid fascination where you don't want to watch but can't look away. Specifically, it's a masochism about 9-11 and terrorism in general, with action films becoming obsessed since the rise of CGI with huge swathes of destruction being cut through densely-constructed cities, buildings falling over, and helpless people fleeing for their lives. This already reached its logical conclusion in 2013's 'Man of Steel' where a city was reduced to a wasteland revealing the existential brittleness of modernity, so I fail to see what more mayhem of that nature will achieve here. This  teaser also includes footage of the Avengers looking dour, of course, because that's how we get our drama. This I feel like we see all the time in trailers now: lots of notionally 'intriguing' shots of the heroes looking all distressed.

Coming soon to a toy store near you.

Finally our last major element is Iron Man in the Hulkbuster Armour fighting Hulk. We see a weirdly large amount of this. Didn't we already see Thor fight Hulk in the last film? I suppose Captain America will fight him in Avengers 3 and then we can call it quits. This is the same stuff as the last item though really, devastation in an urban environment and heroes showing a reckless disregard for collateral damage. We get some other random stuff as well of course, like the token shots of Hawkeye and Black Widow, Andy Serkis for some reason and some dancers. "Nothing lasts forever" is Black Widow's pointless cliché. Nick Fury appears too, unfortunately. I'm sick of him. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver appear too but not in such a way as you'd notice. Pietro needs his pointy hair and bright blue jumpsuit.

"If you don't stop I'll take my shirt off again!"

The thing is, apart from Ultron I can't help but feel like this is just the same old song and dance. Our heroes are shown in a comfortable place, something goes wrong, they have a big punch up with the bad guy and it ends. So the real challenge, then, is for 'Age of Ultron' to not live up to its teaser, to do something different, to surprise me. Maybe the full trailer will be different. Do I trust Joss Whedon? Not even slightly. I'm not a great enthusiast of his work. He's competent, yes, but he's also going to be constrained by the edicts of his employers.

My face when trying to find information on when and
why they were retconned into being Magneto's children.

The biggest issue with these Marvel films, however, is the ridiculous hype and over-excitement that this stuff seems to generate. If you like these Marvel films that's fine. I like some of them, but I'm going to be an outlier when I say that I think 'Captain America: The First Avenger' was the best one and that 'The Winter Soldier' in my opinion just isn't what people say it is. All genres run stale, and I feel like superhero cinema, or at least the superhero cinema that began with 'Batman Begins' and 'Iron Man,' is exhausted. Obviously other people don't agree, but I don't understand why. I think a lot of you need to start thinking a little more critically about what you watch and realise that just because there's loads of 'cool' CGI action, stuff blowing up and actors making sarcastic, postmodern, self-aware and self-referential quips doesn't mean that what you're watching is good. You also need to realise that there's nothing commendable or noble about wanting 'just action' and nothing deeper. That's the attitude of a fatuous dullard who's intimidated by other media because they're too lazy or insecure to try them.

"Would you like a cup of tea, sir?"

I'm not trying to write off 'Age of Ultron' from the start and I think elements of it look vaguely interesting, but I think 'geek culture' or genre culture or whatever it is is really suffering from a condition where every new thing is the 'best thing ever' and it's a race to see who can express how much they love these films or TV shows or games or whatever with the most hyperbole. The thing is, these films are adequate, but they're not masterpieces, or inspired, or works of genius. They're workmanlike pieces of 'product' that follow corporate templates to maximise profit, and they're not deserving of great praise or enthusiasm. The advent of CGI certainly means that there's no craft to them anymore, because unlike the period from the late Seventies, through the Eighties to say the mid Nineties effects are not an accomplishment. They're an expectation. There's nothing we can be shown visually now that we couldn't imagine. You need to look for more in what you consume than the 'cool factor' of Hulkbuster Armour or Cap's shield getting broken, and figure out if there's something more beneath the surface, and if there is, then whether it's the same trite, simplistic message that mainstream cinema spews forth constantly (usually about humdrum themes such as trust and friendship) or if it's something radical and new (insofar as anything can be new). That's the job of 'Age of Ultron,' then: to not live up to the teaser where it seems to be a generic angsty action film, and to use whatever's going on with Ultron himself to show us something we wouldn't see otherwise.