Monkey Island 2: The Lost Cutscene?

Update in 2020: Some new information about the "lost cutscene" has appeared; see below.

 

Typically I go through phases where I'm really interested in this or that thing. Currently I'm very interested in the Monkey Island series of graphic adventure games, particularly the curiosities of the second game, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. I've been trying to come up with an explanation for the ending, and I've been scouring blogs, interviews and game transcripts looking for any scraps of information which will help me to piece together a more coherent explanation for the ending than that which has come before. I haven't quite managed that yet, because so far I feel like nothing seems to really cover every bit of the plot, but in my exploration I have come upon something else. For my own amusement I was using a program to look through the recorded dialogue for the Special Edition of Monkey Island 2 and came across some curious dialogue I hadn't heard before. At first I thought it was maybe something they'd recorded for the Special Edition which was never implemented, but then I checked a transcript of the game's dialogue which was made before the Special Edition was released.

As a result, I believe, at the risk of tooting my own horn somewhat, that I've discovered a lost cutscene in the game which has hitherto been unrecognised by Monkey Island enthusiasts over the past twenty-five years. Now I could be wrong. Maybe other people are aware of this, but so far my online searches have revealed nothing. Basically, what I've discovered is an additional cutaway to LeChuck's fortress which seems to have been set between the first cutaway, which featured Largo, the Voodoo Priest and the newly-resurrected LeChuck, and the second cutaway, which is Largo and LeChuck discussing Guybrush having acquired the first map piece to Big Whoop. I'll let the dialogue speak for itself. If you want to find a pre-Special Edition version of this dialogue, check here.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, back at the fortress...

LECHUCK: Aye...
LECHUCK: Largo...
LECHUCK: I hear that Guybrush is looking for the lost treasure of Big Whoop.
LECHUCK: This be true?

LARGO: Well... yes sir, but...
LARGO: What good can a chest full of money do him?

LECHUCK: It is not the treasure that is important.
LECHUCK: It is what is buried beneath the treasure that concerns me.
LECHUCK: He must not find the treasure of Big Whoop.
LECHUCK: See to it.

LARGO: Yes sir.

I wonder if this was written but never implemented because the designers felt that it gave away too much about the end of the game. In any event, as far as I can tell there's no time in the game in which this cutscene ever appears. That being said, it's clearly been lying around in the game script, because they got the voice actors to record it. Presumably they just printed out everything and got them to record all the dialogue they found just to be on the safe side.

This is just to illustrate the scene. Given they used everywhere else,
my guess is that the dungeon room would have been used for the lost cutscene (or not! See below).

On the one hand, this is an interesting cutscene because it establishes more clearly why LeChuck cares about Guybrush looking for Big Whoop. Something I always found confusing about the game over the years were the existing cutscenes, because I couldn't figure out what it mattered to LeChuck whether Guybrush found Big Whoop or not. In these cutscenes, Largo keeps showing up to tell LeChuck about Guybrush's progress, and LeChuck is increasingly frustrated. Why does he even care? It felt to me like the designers thought that LeChuck should just oppose Guybrush's goal simply because he's the villain. Recently I decided that it must have been that LeChuck, like the Voodoo Lady, knew that Big Whoop contained the "secret to another world" and wanted to stop Guybrush from finding it because if he escaped into another world he could never get his titular revenge.

Now I'm not so sure. This cutscene seems to reveal that LeChuck knows all along that there is something buried under Big Whoop. In my opinion this also means that, in Monkey Island 2, Big Whoop is definitely just the treasure, and "Big Whoop" isn't the name for what is buried underneath, ie the tunnels and whatever else is going on in the weird ending, although apparently it is the name of the mysterious Amusement Park at the end. That being said, I have a couple of theories about all this.

1. It's possible that the tunnels and so forth under Big Whoop compose at least part of the "plenty of booby traps" which Marley and his crew apparently buried with the treasure. How the four of them built this massive system of tunnels is beyond me, but then again implausible stuff happens in those old Monkey Island games all the time. These would have been designed to keep safe the "secret to another world" contained in Big Whoop, which appears to be the E-Ticket. That doesn't explain, however, why there is so much stuff specifically from Guybrush's past down there, unless part of the "booby trap" is that the tunnels take shape as a sort of "dream" of whoever is inside. Seems like a bit of a stretch. LeChuck would want to stop Guybrush finding this because if Guybrush was trapped or killed by this, it would deny him his Revenge.
    
2. The tunnels are some kind of means of accessing different times and places. Someone once suggested a similar idea to Ron Gilbert and he said it was wrong, so I'm kind of doubtful about this one too. My only theory based on this would be that the tunnels link Dinky Island to an amusement park where Guybrush became separated from his parents as a child, as well as to the back streets of Mêlée Island at a time when the street was literally "closed for construction": ie part of the town was being built. LeChuck would obviously want to stop Guybrush finding these because it might allow him to escape into another place and time. I don't think this one is right either, although Mr. Gilbert has implied that time travel is involved in Monkey Island at some point and this seems to be the most likely place.
    
3. Okay this one is going to get really weird. A lot of people argue that the ending of Monkey Island 2 reveals that the whole thing was just a daydream on the part of a young boy and the Monkey Island world isn't real. It's a fair argument, but it doesn't explain all the facts, like Elaine waiting by the hole, Chuckie's eyes, or the simple fact that Ron Gilbert has said this one is wrong too. I'm going to rework this one a bit: the Monkey Island world is "real" within its own narrative, but there is another world where the Monkey Island world is fictional. This world is sort of like the actual real world but rather than Monkey Island being a series of computer games, Monkey Island is a set of attractions at an amusement park. It's possible that Guybrush is from this world but ended up in the "real Monkey Island" world as a child. This explains the E-Ticket: it's a piece of evidence proving the existence of another world. Marley and his crew would have sealed it up due to the appalling existential dread they experienced at the discovery that their world was partly-real, shared its existence with another world, or seemed to be the figment of other people's imaginations. This of course doesn't explain how LeChuck could possibly know any of this such that he would have a motive to stop Guybrush from finding it, apart from the fact that it would allow Guybrush to escape him, although in Revenge LeChuck generally does seem to know more than he's letting on about quite a few things.

I can't explain it, but I do feel as if this cutscene adds some more fuel to the fire. Maybe one day the circumstances will arise which will allow Ron Gilbert to make his "true" Monkey Island 3, or maybe one day he'll just give up and spill the beans. He has said that his Monkey Island 3 would take place "two minutes" after the end of Monkey Island 2, "in a carnival" which seems to suggest that at least what's happening at the end isn't some kind of fleeting illusion. Who knows, though. At the end of the day, though, this is the sign of a good composition, a good work of art, even: a comedy adventure game which keeps people like me wondering about its ending twenty-five years later. Somehow I feel like if I cudgel my brains sufficiently the answer will reveal itself, but it hasn't so far. Then again, I've never really been that good at solving adventure game puzzles.

Update in 2020: This article from Video Game History Foundation sheds a little more light on the "lost cutscene": it was present in unused artwork. The cutscenes with LeChuck and Largo would have originally taken place as close-ups, in this case with Largo facing LeChuck at his "desk" (which is visible on the left hand side in the key room of the fortress in the final game). This still doesn't explain the significance of the text in this scene, or why the dialogue was cut from the final game (obviously the graphics were cut to save on disc space), although, as I've established, it's still present in the game's script. It does, however, demonstrate that it must have been part of the game's development for a while. I'm still of a mind that it was cut because it gives away too much about the ending.

SOURCE: The Video Game History Foundation (link)

Monkey 2 Lite Differences and Adventure Game thoughts

Lately I've been getting back into some Monkey Island, the classic adventure game series by Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman et al, formerly of Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts. One thing I'd never experienced before, however, is the "Lite" mode of the second game, notionally for game reviewers and inexperienced players. I'd heard of it, and knew that it made the game supposedly woefully easy, but I wasn't sure of how. The version I grew up with didn't even have the "Lite" option. It was just the proper game and that was it. Sometimes people describe it as "easy mode" or even the normal version as "hard mode" which seems a bit odd to me. As far as I can tell there's simply the main game, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, and then this heavily stripped-down version which was seemingly added in so that reviewers could breeze through the game and experience all of the story. I had no desire to play the "Lite" mode because I didn't see the point. It wouldn't be the complete thing. It's a bit like not drinking full cream milk.

Nonetheless, the other night m'colleague and I sat down and played "Lite" mode purely out of curiosity. More specifically, as one did as a child in the Nineties with such games, he played and I sat next to him yelling out advice. It probably took us all of half an hour, but although we're both seasoned players of LeChuck's Revenge, it's hard to imagine how anyone would struggle. What I thought I would do, however, is go through the Lite mode and mention all the changes I observed, because I can't see that anyone's ever done that, and it's an interesting exercise.

Part I: The Largo Embargo

You still have to make the voodoo doll, but it's pretty simple. As with the main game you use the paper taken from Wally's house to wipe up Largo's spit and use the shovel from the sign in Woodtick to dig up the grave to get the bone, as well as nabbing the hairpiece from the room. What they completely eliminate is the "thread" puzzle, which in the main game involves the bucket, mud from the swamp, the door to Largo's room, the laundry shop, stealing Largo's claim ticket from the back of his door and receiving the comedy bra in exchange. All that happens is you simply find a white shirt of Largo's lying on his bed, so it's in exactly the same room as the wig for the "head" component of the doll. It's doubly odd because the shirt is a unique inventory item only found in the Lite version. There's no bra on the bed. I guess that means if you play "Lite" you're getting fewer jokes as well as fewer puzzles.

You still need money to hire Dredd's ship, but you don't need to get Bernard the chef fired by dumping the rat from the laundry in his cooking. In fact the rat is unable to be selected and the components of the trap are either missing or reduced to background elements. Bernard himself is missing. There's unique dialogue from the bartender that the chef has already been fired. What's interesting about this "Lite" mode is that not only does it eliminate puzzles, but it reduces interactive components of the game so as to not distract the players. Dredd already has a lucky sailing necklace and you don't need to steal Wally's monocle. It really reduces the content of Part 1, making it feel like less of a narrative and more of a series of arbitrary fetching chores. Probably the only real "puzzle" is cutting Pegbiter the alligator loose so that the innkeeper is distracted.

Part II: Four Map Pieces

Given that this is the longest and most expansive part of the game, and possibly any LucasArts adventure game, the way this gets trimmed down is really remarkable. Let's go by map piece.

Young Lindy's Map Piece (found in the Booty Boutique):

This one is no puzzle at all. Rather than the piece being valued at six million pieces of eight and having to be traded for with the Mad Monkey figurehead, the shopkeeper will simply sell it to you for one hundred pieces of eight, little under a quarter of the money you get from the bartender. As there's no need to get the Mad Monkey head, Kate Capsize is completely removed from the game, as is the Spitting Contest, because there's no need to win the Spitting trophy to sell at the shop to raise the money to hire Kate's help. Now that I think of it, it's kind of odd that Dredd can't navigate to the coordinates, because it's not like Kate does anything besides give you an anchor to ride up on. I guess the point is Dredd knows how to get between the three islands but otherwise isn't an especially competent sailor. Anyway, as the spitting contest is gone, the old fellow with the cannon is gone too.

Rapp Scallion's Map Piece (found in the Scabb Island Cemetery):

This one has slightly more of a puzzle element, but all you need is to open the crypt. Rapp's coffin is clearly labelled with his name and a unique description which doesn't appear in the main game, eliminating the quote puzzle, and inside the coffin his map piece is simply sitting on top of the ashes. You still need to trap Stan in the previously-owned coffin to steal the crypt key at his shop on Booty Island, but you can simply take the hammer and nails from the Woodsmith in Woodtick. He merely tells you to bring the hammer back when you're done and to take as many nails as you like. There's no need to distract him by sawing off the Man of Low Moral Fibre's peg leg at the laundry. Similarly there's no need to use Ash-2-Life from the Voodoo Lady to temporarily resurrect Rapp, nor do you need to obtain the Famous Pirate Quotations book from Governor Phatt's bedroom. As a result, you never even speak to Rapp, which scraps a funny moment from the game, and you never need to go to the Steamin' Weenie hut.
I've been digging through the script and files for the game and I've discovered that it is possible to resurrect Rapp. I guess they couldn't be bothered to program out the Ash-2-Life sequence. If you do so, however, all he says to you is "What are you bugging me for? This is Easy Mode!"

Mister Rogers' Map Piece (found in his house off Phatt Island):

This is the next most absurdly simple after Young Lindy's piece. On Phatt Island, the waterfall is already "turned off" to reveal the Newly Discovered Gaping Hole. You don't need to turn the pump at the top of the waterfall using Jojo the monkey, and as such you never put the banana on the metronome in the Bloody Lip bar to get Jojo to stop playing the piano. When you're arrested on Phatt Island, the Gorilla Envelope containing the banana is missing. You still need to do the bone puzzle with Walt the dog to escape the jail, however. After passing through the Gaping Hole and subsequent tunnels, you arrive at the house to discover that Rum Rogers is completely missing. There's no drinking contest. As Kate's been eliminated, it's impossible to obtain her Near-Grog by framing her for your crimes on Phatt Island anyway. The telescope and mirror puzzle is also gone. All that you need to do is "open" the trapdoor at the far end of the room of the house and Guybrush falls through to discover the skeleton holding the map piece.

ASIDE: I originally referred to this as "Rum Rogers' Map Piece", but did you know that in LeChuck's Revenge, the "Mister Rogers" who was first mate on the Big Whoop expedition is never referred to as "Rum Rogers", let alone "Rum Rogers, Sr."? The man at the house is referred to by Guybrush in exactly one piece of dialogue as "Rum Rogers", but it's never indicated that "Mister Rogers" was also called "Rum" or even that Rum, as in the man whom you actually meet in LeChuck's Revenge, is even the other man's son. I'm suddenly inclined to believe that Rum Rogers might actually be meant to be Mister Rogers' brother. Rum only says that he "inherited" the cottage "two months ago" (although he also says "I wish I'd never bought this house" - which is it?). The idea that the character Guybrush meets in LeChuck's Revenge is the son of "Mister Rogers" who found Big Whoop seems to be something that was invented in The Curse of Monkey Island and has been retroactively applied to the previous game in fan consciousness completely accidentally. The "brother" interpretation would fit with the fact that Rum Rogers calls himself "retired" in LeChuck's Revenge and is clearly an old man.

Captain Marley's Map Piece (found in the Governor's Mansion on Booty Island):

This, along with the Rapp Scallion map piece, is probably the more complicated of the four, but it's still pretty darn easy in this mode. To obtain the invitation to the party, you simply need to play the roulette game in the Phatt Island alleys once. There's no need to solve the "if this is X, what's this" puzzle because whichever number you pick in the game automatically wins. After going to the party things progress more or less normally: you swipe the map piece, are identified by Guybrush the dog, get stopped by Filbert the gardener and speak to Elaine. When she throws the map piece out of the window, however, it simply hovers on the front lawn without blowing away. You simply pick it up there and you're done. The clifftop and Big Tree rooms are completely removed. As such, there's no need to obtain the fishing rod: the fisherman on Phatt Island has been removed from the game. If you try to bang the garbage bins outside Elaine's kitchen to trick the chef into chasing you so you can steal a fish, nothing happens. The chef doesn't come out. You can't take Guybrush the dog as you never go up on top of the Big Tree to sort through the papers (or to obtain the telescope, as that puzzle has been removed from Rum Rogers' sequence). For this reason you never have the accident on the Big Tree and the dream sequence with the bone song never takes place, nor do you need to take Elaine's oar to the Woodsmith to be repaired. You can still take it, but there's no reason to.

This also cuts some other stuff from the game, effectively. There's no point in going to the Phatt City Library, for instance, although you can. There's no need to get the drinks from the Bloody Lip bartender. As a result of this again a lot of jokes and narrative content gets eliminated from the game, making Lite mode seem like a decidedly anaemic piece. The ending of the part is identical, however, with Wally being kidnapped while analysing the map and Guybrush travelling to LeChuck's fortress via shipping crate.

Part III: LeChuck's Fortress

In this part, because of the changes to the game, there are effectively no puzzles at all. There is no dream sequence in Part II so there's no solution to the "ugly bone thing" puzzle, which was probably scrapped for being too hard at any rate. You simply walk past the "ugly bone things", Guybrush commenting that they're too heavy to open. This leads you straight to the big door and the key. There's no spitting puzzle with LeChuck's death trap either. You don't have the drinks or the straw, as there was no need to obtain them. What is added, humorously, is Wally complaining that he needs to go to the bathroom, and then urinating on the candle to turn off the trap. It's actually quite funny, albeit literally taking the piss with what an absurd solution it is and how effortlessly it's achieved. You still light the match to blow up the fortress, but that's hardly a puzzle. What this does is turn an already weirdly short Part, which you would think would be important, into an even shorter and more seemingly-irrelevant one.

Part IV: Dinky Island

As far as we could tell, this part underwent the least alteration. The only major change is in the surface section of the island, in which there is no need to break open the hanging bag of cracker mix with the broken bottle or distil the sea water via the Martini glass. You simply find three crackers straight away in the barrel where you only find one in the normal game. You still have to follow the parrot's instructions, take the rope from the crate, use the crowbar to open the crate to obtain the dynamite, dig up the X, use the dynamite to blow open the concrete at the bottom of the hole, and use the rope with the crowbar to assemble a makeshift grappling hook.

The final confrontation with LeChuck is identical to the main game. I found this slightly surprising because it's not exactly an easy sequence of events. I particularly feel as if the puzzles for obtaining LeChuck's underpants and beard are challenging. It's not as if, for instance, you'd assume that helium would help your rise in the overburdened lift, or that you'd remember that you even had Stan's complimentary hankie from way back in Part II. I suppose, though, it'd be virtually impossible to streamline these puzzles to any greater an extent, and even the game reviewers deserved a challenge at the end.

The ending of the game is as weird and baffling as it ever was, but the elimination of the dream sequence from Part II means that it is less effectively foreshadowed and doesn't feel as thematically consistent with the rest of the game.

I've read that "Monkey 2 Lite" was effectively a joke on the part of the developers, intended to be absurdly easy to mock those who lacked the patience and determination to puzzle their way through challenging adventure games. I don't know if that's true, but the entire mode is an interesting lesson in adventure game design. For instance, because of the nature of Part II, it's virtually impossible to simplify any part of any particular sequence without setting off a chain reaction which simplifies the rest, to the point where puzzles are abandoned wholesale and you virtually only need to do the bleeding obvious to complete the game. I've recently read criticism which argues that adventure games are essentially nothing more than elaborately disguised "pick the right key to unlock the door" games, and this is to an extent justified, although I would argue that part of the trickery of adventure games is that sometimes the door you can unlock is different to what you might think.

Furthermore, part of the point of Monkey Island at least is that the puzzles are a means of enabling jokes. Using Jojo the monkey to turn the pump on Phatt Island, for instance, is basically just a key in a lock, but the point of it is that it causes the absurd and incongruous situation of a modern water pump "in a pirate game" and the sight of Guybrush putting a piano-playing monkey into his jacket, which he later uses like a wrench. As a result I would argue that traditional adventure games are one of the more effective ways of doing game comedy. For the same reason I would argue that the obvious and probably intentional deficiencies of Monkey 2 Lite indicate that adventure games can't simply be reductively described as locked door games where the puzzles divide up chunks of story, because eliminating puzzles eliminates a lot of the funny, strange and interesting parts of the game in the same way that watching someone on YouTube playing normal Monkey Island 2 is never going to be the same as playing it yourself. It's about your personal interaction with the game world. Sure, the adventure game may be a relatively simple genre, but it doesn't need to be more complex. Its core method is a very effective way of conveying storytelling and humour. In many respects, all games are "find the key" puzzles, even if the "key" is simply having the right reflexes or knowledge of game mechanics or whatever.

If I was to argue that anything would improve adventure games, it wouldn't be shoehorned roleplaying or action elements beyond the existing extent to which such elements are already incorporated in parts of adventure games. My one suggestion is that more adventure games ought to have multiple solutions for puzzles. This would obviously take more programming, but it would also give adventure games more complexity as well as potentially reducing their inscrutability. Weirdly enough, I think this is something Lucasfilm Games actually did originally with Maniac Mansion, in which any combination of three of seven characters could be used to complete the game, but didn't really do afterwards. They did, of course, go down the route with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis where there are three completely different middle acts of the game, but that's another story. Multiple puzzle solutions would also eliminate the "I've come up with a perfectly sensible solution but it doesn't work" dilemma. It just involves a lot of forethought on the part of developers. I think a reasonable amount of playtesting can accommodate for that.

My point at the end of all this is: don't play Monkey 2 Lite, or rather, only play it after you've played the real game for a laugh. The normal game isn't "hard mode" or whatever, it's just Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge as it was meant to be played: with tonnes of interconnected and baffling puzzles that barely make sense. Don't write off the classic adventure genre, because its limitations are also its strengths. Those "find the key" tasks can be a force for good, and scrapping them leaves you with nothing but a thin gruel smirkingly served up by developers to mock reviewers writing for early Nineties computer magazines.

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.

Thoughts about a Fifth Indiana Jones film and Geek Hypocrisy

So ever since Disney acquired Lucasfilm there's been a bit of a feeling that they might ultimately do something with Indiana Jones, which is unsurprising given that it's essentially Lucasfilm's secondary franchise. And by secondary I mean way secondary, which is natural considering that it's about a single character, but nonetheless it has a presence. If people think "Lucasfilm" they probably think "Star Wars and Indiana Jones." Y'know, in the event that they're the kind of people who even know what Lucasfilm is, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised these days if people thought Star Wars just manifested out of thin air one day in "the past." Because, as I'm so fond of suggesting, the overwhelming majority of "geek" pop-culture consumers are fatuous morons.

In any event the issue of another Indiana Jones film has raised its head. But of course people are saying they shouldn't do this that and the other with a fifth Indiana Jones. And as usual with people on the internet, most of what they're saying is stupid. Let's take a look:

"Harrison Ford's Too Old to play Indy now."

It's possible that he is. But if he is, why the hell are you all so excited about coming back to play Han Solo in the new Star Wars film? They're both action heroes who say wisecracks and fight people. Is Indy a more 'physical' performance than Han because Han's a pilot? Han's running around shooting people and stuff all the time in Star Wars. Sure, he doesn't have some of the massive punch-ups that Indy has, but a plot which wanted to deal with Indy now would surely, naturally, work around that. It's only a problem if you want the same old Indiana Jones template. I've got a crazy idea for you then - go watch one of the old Indy films on DVD! Holy shit! He's punching people and swinging on his whip and shit! Oh my god!

"Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sucked so a fifth Indy would as well."

For my own part I actually like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (although admittedly it could have been better) but I can't deny that a lot of people don't. Weirdly enough, a reasonable majority of critics thought it was a decent film, which shows that there's no accounting for taste. It also puts paid to the stupid myth that "Everyone hated Crystal Skull." Anyway, y'know what else everyone hated? The Star Wars prequel trilogy! And yet you're all getting pretty damn excited by Episode 7, aren't you? "Oh, but George Lucas isn't directing." Yeah, but, and I hate to break it to you, but he was still involved in development even if he's apparently not closely involved with production. "But the best Star Wars films are the ones he didn't direct, so some involvement is okay." Oh really? You are aware that Steven Spielberg has directed every single Indy film, not Lucas? "Err... errrm... aliens." Uh huh.

"They should reboot the franchise with that guy from Guardians of the Galaxy as Indy."

Jesus. Or maybe if they don't make another one with Harrison Ford they should just let the franchise die? The whole point of Indiana Jones (or at least a very large part of its point) was to pay tribute to 30s pulp adventure serials (or 50s B-Movies in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but most consumers are too ignorant for this idea to mean anything to them) and imagine what they would have been like if instead of providing escapism from the issues of the day (the rise of Fascism, the Cold War) or representing them obliquely through symbolism and analogy, they'd directly confronted those issues. The films use this method to subvert traditional hero narratives: note that as a general rule in the film Indy acts to save those close to him (Marion, his father, etc) not to "stop the Nazis" or what have you. None of that stuff means anything to anybody anymore. In the Twenty-First Century, Indy (as portrayed by another actor) would just be some cheesy action hero who beats up Nazis and swings on a whip. It'd be as irrelevant as it could possibly be.

Would I see a fifth Indiana Jones film? Absolutely, if Harrison Ford was Indy. If it's a reboot or a remake, not so much. Do I need a fifth Indy film? Not really. While it's possible to imagine the series "ending on a high note" as it were I kind of think it already did - not that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is or is not a "high note" on its own  - but simply with that image of Indy walking off with Marion at the end of Crystal Skull while "The Raiders March" blared. I personally found it to be a nice ending. At the end of the day people need to face the facts: we're never going to get the Indy films that possibly should have been made in the Nineties and set during the Second World War. There's never a bad time to enjoy the films we've got rather than yearning for a franchise of inevitably questionable quality.

Just as a final aside: the fridge scene. Did everyone else fall asleep during this bit? Look at the image of him stumbling up the slope and being contrasted with the mushroom cloud. The point is, here's Indy, who could outfox Nazis, the worst history had to offer, all day long in his heyday, but now he's barely escaping being killed by a horrific weapon built by his own country. It's juxtaposing the hero, who could confront terrible evil, to a new world where's he's helplessly at the mercy of his own government. Did no one get this?

Hindsight: A 2014 Cinematic Retrospective

So I saw even fewer films in 2014 than I did in 2013. Yeah, take that, Hollywood! You're not getting my small contribution! Anyway, let's consider what I didn't watch.

9 Films You Might Have Expected Me to See but I Didn't

X-Men: Days of Future Past

The trailer for this did not inspire me. As much as I enjoyed "X-Men: First Class" and was intrigued by the idea of the new, younger actors being contrasted to the traditional cast of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and the like, the trailer made it look like way too much of a monotonous CGI assault on the senses, with loads of CGI Sentinels flying around a CGI wasteland and shit. I'll pass for the time being, but I may watch this eventually.

Update in 2017: I've seen this now and I actually quite liked it.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

The first one was balls, no way I was watching this one. It's amusing that this attempt by Sony to reboot the franchise is now already dead because Disney has renegotiated to bring Spidey into the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. Hopefully they'll make a new version of the character who, for the first time ever in cinema, is actually like the character in the comics.

Guardians of the Galaxy

I was unsure about this because generally I've watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe films but the trailer really put me off: loads of corny jokes seemed to be incoming, and I didn't think I could hack it. Once it was out people were acting like it was the greatest film they'd ever seen. Seriously? A Hollywood action movie is the greatest film you've ever seen? I think you may need to watch more films.

Update in 2017: I've seen this now and I actually thought it was pretty decent. The final battle was a bit unoriginal before the dance-off but everything else was fine.

Interstellar

I am actually curious to see this because as a general rule I like Christopher Nolan's stuff but it didn't interest me sufficiently to cause me to go out of my way to see it. Kinda looks awfully similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey I must say.

Transformers 4

Piss off.

Ninja Turtles

Piss off again.

To go into slightly more detail, a new Ninja Turtles film should eschew the cheesy franchise baggage the concept has accumulated since the 80s cartoon and deliberately set about satirising modern comic-book films. Set it in the 80s and use it to contrast modern superhero cinema's pretense at realism with how absurd it really is. This film did not look like it was going to achieve anything so intelligent. And before you argue, TMNT was originally a satirical concept with a bit of thought behind it, not just a dumb franchise about goofy turtle characters eating pizza and fighting a guy with steak knives strapped to his wrists.

The LEGO Movie

Supposedly this is good. I just haven't seen it.

Update in 2018: I've seen this now. It was a lot funnier and more charming than I expected. Chris Pratt is spot on as the voice of Emmett, the tributes to Lego eras old and new is pleasing, and Mark Mothersbaugh's music fits right in. A pleasant surprise, to be honest.

Robocop

No way in hell was I gonna see this: not because I'm some mortally offended hardcore Robocop fan but because I found the idea phenomenally crass. The original Robocop (the only one I've seen) is probably one of the best action films of the eighties: an extremely violent science-fiction-crime-dystopian mash-up satire which ruthlessly attacked the worst excesses of 80s culture. Not only is Robocop therefore totally irrelevant outside of that context, the only way to reshape that would be for a new film to do the same thing to 2010s culture, ripping the shit out of its plutocratic-authoritarian political structure, monstrous consumerism and cultural deadness. When it turned out this was just going to be sanitised PG-13 bullshit I completely lost interest.

Birdman

I want to see it but I haven't yet. Give me time.

Update: I've seen this now. As everyone else at the time said, it's very good. By a weird coincidence I ended up reading Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" short story collection before seeing this, which was convenient.

5 Films I Actually Saw in 2014

The Inbetweeners 2

I really like the tv show this is based on, but this film went further than the first in losing sight of its main comedic purpose, I think. I would argue that a large part of the point of the TV show is to specifically highlight the sense of horrendous alienation many people feel as adolescents. Thus they're 'inbetweeners': they simply don't fit in with anyone in their community. This film seemed to just rely on cheap gross-out humour mostly: Will getting shit on his face and spewing everywhere, or Neil pissing on Simon. In the TV series, comedy of this sort derived not from the grossness of, say, Simon spewing on Carli's little brother or Neil pissing the bed at Tara's sister's house, but because of how utterly untenable the situations are socially: it's impossible to fathom how those situations could be resolved. The film also basically rehashes Simon's plot from the first film in bits with Jay and Will. Like the first film, this one also featured far less comic dialogue than the TV series. I was a bit disappointed with this.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I have rewatched this film and I'm afraid to say that I just don't think it's that good. My opinion hasn't really changed since my review. The film's plot tries to do too much - it really undersells the idea of Steve discovering that his best friend is still alive, but brainwashed - the action scenes are repetitious and there are way too many main characters, as if they didn't feel that Chris Evans could carry the film on his own (even though he'd to a significant extent managed as a main protagonist in the first one). They needed to focus on SHIELD and the other Marvel characters like Nick Fury a lot less, drop HYDRA completely and focus on the personal story of Cap in my opinion. I would have even probably shunted Bucky into a later film, because his resurrection so soon lacks impact. The satirical content of this film is also rather thin, in my opinion: yes, surveillance is bad, but it's much more confronting to be spied upon by your own government than by a conspiracy of evil people who've infiltrated your government, because it reduces the complexity of the issue. Even if we argue that our politics have been infiltrated by authoritarian nut-jobs, we need to understand why, not just characterise it as an "evil conspiracy." This film could have been much better in my opinion.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

More like "Paranormal Activity: The Farked Ones" amirite? Let's just say I... uh... didn't see this one at the cinema. As a general rule it was pretty crap, but the twist ending where they go back in time to the first film was actually quite cool. Not much to say about this one: very far from being essential viewing unless you're a fan of the series.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

You can read my review of this here. It's probably in some respects the best of the three films in my opinion, at least for its first half. The second half is crap. I'm glad it's all over. It'd be nice if they'd stop dicking around with Tolkien's work now. Y'know, I occasionally read defensive film fanboys going "Tolkien would have liked them." Sorry, but regardless of quality, he would have bloody hated them. I don't think he liked cinema in general, and if you read his letters you can see how strenuously he tended to object to even fairly minor deviations from his source material. One thing I'd argue he probably did want was for his work to be taken somewhat seriously as literature, and I don't think the Hollywood adaptation treatment achieves that by a long chalk. Now I'd appreciate if shallow corporate interests would leave his writing alone.

Foxcatcher

Although I didn't see this in 2014, it's a 2014 film. Read my comments on it here. It was a pretty dark and confronting film, taking an extremely bleak view of the America equivalent of the "idle rich" and those who fall through the cracks in American society. Observed curiously through the lens of Olympic wrestling, the film represents a fundamental awkwardness and sense of discomfort in the American dream and ideal and how badly that dream can fail or disguise far deeper problems. It's not a film I'll be rushing to see again, but at least it had something to say, unlike most of this trash.

Thus, my top film of 2014 must be:
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Another 2014 film I didn't see in 2014. It's good. Read my thoughts here. It's an amusing and well-performed film which questions our romanticised perceptions of Interbellum culture and different decades and time periods in general. I'd heartily recommend it. It makes most of this other stuff (apart from Foxcatcher really) look like the brainless nonsense it is. I still haven't quite escaped Hollywood, but I've at least well and truly escaped bad action films as being the extent of what I see. If you're going to watch any one of the films I've mentioned here, watch this one.

"Avengers: Age of Ultron"

Joss Whedon's accommodation, provided by Disney.

I once attempted to give the first "Avengers" film the OCBW treatment but I gave up because I got bored writing it. Put simply, I think "The Avengers" is... eh... an okay ish film, with lots of emphasis on the "ish," which I described in my 'Why You Shouldn't Be Excited About the Casting of Doctor Strange' article as

a bland and badly-paced film where Iron Man and Captain America spend about ten hours sitting around frowning at each other in a flying conference room and then they have a giant Transformers battle at the end which is resolved in the same manner as the invasion of Naboo in Star Wars Episode I.

"Age of Ultron" is arguably better paced and has a severely reduced amount of conference room frowning, and in some respects it's superior to "The Avengers." In other respects it is not superior to "The Avengers." I'll sum up my grievances here, spoilers beware:

1. Ultron is introduced too quickly and his characterisation is rushed.
2. Black Widow in general is used badly.
3. Elements of the plot are too similar to "Iron Man 3".
4. Other elements of the plot rely too heavily on the plot of "The Avengers."
5. It feels like a middling instalment killing time before the third Avengers film.
6. Quicksilver's death is meaningless because he's only just been introduced.
7. The film is visually uninteresting because of the overdesigned costumes.

"Iss my ahksent conveenssing enough, do you zink, Ultron?"

So the team has reassembled offscreen, and they're in some fictional Eastern European country which definitely isn't Latveria hunting down a HYDRA base belonging to Baron Strucker, who was also seen in the post-credits sequence of the second Captain America film. They're trying to recover Loki's sceptre which apparently slipped through their fingers after the last film. How did that happen? Anyway, Strucker's used it to create Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who can't be mutants in this film because Marvel Studios don't have the rights to the characters as mutants, just to the characters in general. So in this they're "enhanced," given powers by Strucker because they want revenge on Tony Stark because his weapons killed their parents. Just for your information, in the comics their parents are actually none other than Magneto himself and his wife Magda, but obviously they can't reference that either. In any event I believe their parentage was a retcon made in the Eighties so it doesn't really matter: while they were originally created as mutant allies of Magneto in X-Men in their original comic appearances, they later joined the Avengers before it was ever established that Magneto was their father. In any event they serve to muck up the Avengers' plan: Hawkeye gets injured and Iron Man has a traumatic vision of failing to save the world.

It's the mayor I feel sorry for.

I thought this sequence was okay, although I took some objection to the sequence where Black Widow calms down the Hulk and gets him to transform, because I thought it was pretty crap that they took the route of making Black Widow, who so far has been a mostly practical-minded character, take on what felt like a weirdly maternal role: "she's a woman so she can calm down the big raging man." Seemed kind of cliché to me and a bit sexist: why does the only female member get put into that spot? I also didn't really like the fact that they were hunting down the sceptre and HYDRA were using it, because I feel like that plot line has been done to death - it wasn't even that good in "Captain America: The First Avenger" in my opinion, using alien artefacts to fuel "super science." In any event back at Avengers Tower everyone gears up for a massive party and Tony Stark and Bruce Banner discover that the core of the sceptre contains an extremely advanced, alien artificial intelligence. Then Iron Man springs on us that this could be used to run "Ultron."

"...did you just fart?"

Well that was quick. The film goes down the route of having Iron Man conceptualise Ultron already. He doesn't come up with the idea now, he already had it. He wants "a suit of armour around the world" or equivalent in case aliens and their ilk return. I found this quite similar to "Iron Man 3": wasn't the whole point of that meant to be Tony Stark learning that he couldn't do everything through technology? Obviously in this film it's motivated by the vision Wanda put in his head, but it still seemed repetitious to me, especially because after making a big show of destroying all his suits in "Iron Man 3" he now has a small army of suits working for him. In any event they put JARVIS to work on the AI and go off to have a party.

"Uh... it was you."

The party is essentially the "let's remind everyone of who's in our Marvel Cinematic Universe" scene. In addition to Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye we see appearances from Maria Hill, War Machine and Falcon. The last of these gives us also a small reminder of the ongoing search for the Winter Soldier, which I fear will dominate the rest of Cap's narrative. There's also a Doctor Cho introduced in a confusingly prominent role early in the film. Then there's all this flirting between Bruce Banner and Black Widow which is our weird romantic subplot. Hulk and Black Widow? No thanks. The other thing which bothers me about it is that the first Avengers film didn't have this element, and no other character in this film really has one. "Black Widow's a woman, better pair her up with one of the male cast members." Or maybe don't? I didn't like this element. Besides, what happened to Bruce Banner's love interest from the Hulk film which no one really counts as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Another issue with this of which I was just reminded was that in this bit Cap saunters over to make some ambiguous remarks towards Banner about Black Widow. I also didn't like this element because it made Cap seem like a dick, and the whole point of Cap is that he's not a dick.

"It wasn't me."

Once things are winding down we get our humorous moment as everyone tries to lift Thor's hammer. I liked that it moved a little bit when Cap grabbed it, because in the comics as we know Captain America can lift Mjölnir and has done so on at least one occasion. Meanwhile something's gone screwy in the lab because a deformed Iron Man robot arrives speaking with James Spader's voice. A bunch of psychotic robots fight them and fly off with Loki's sceptre. So this plot is still going. Ultron "escapes through the internet," whatever that means, and builds himself a fancy giant body back at Baron Strucker's castle. He then recruits Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver - although I wasn't sure how he did this - because he knows they want revenge on Iron Man. Iron Man really drives the plots of these films, doesn't he? I'd even go so far as to say that they're over reliant on him. One thing I will give this film credit for is that they established firmly that the real "boss," aka the proper leader of the Avengers, was Captain America, because he's actually a tactician.

"Well you can't have heard me all the way over here in this field."

The Avengers go through a bunch of old files they have lying around and somehow figure out that Ultron is after vibranium, the miraculous metal from which Cap's shield is made. As such they both head off to track down Claw, in this "Ulysses Klaue," played by Andy Serkis as a typical "never met a nice" South African who's stolen tonnes of it from Wakanda. So they're foreshadowing the introduction of Black Panther here. Klaue even gets his arm cut off in a nod towards his claw arm in the comics. So then they have a big fight with Ultron in a ship for the vibranium, but the Avengers get taken out when Wanda gives them all visions. I thought this part was okay, although I most liked Cap's vision, probably just because Cap's my favourite. Hayley Atwell has a brief cameo as Peggy Carter, and Idris Elba gets one as Heimdall in Thor's vision, which also looks towards the Infinity Stones and later Marvel films. We also get a nod towards Black Widow's origin, which has otherwise gone largely unrecorded in the films save for her informing Loki "I'm Russian" in an American accent in the previous Avengers outing. Then in a largely offscreen moment Wanda also traumatises Hulk, who goes berserk.

Avengers Diving Board: $99.99 from Hasbro.

What follows was probably one of my least favourite moments of the film: a now-stock CGI urban brawl where Iron Man in the Hulkbuster Armour, which he deploys from orbit, fights against Hulk. They leap all over the place wrecking everyone's property and knocking buildings down. Man of Steel already took this kind of urban mayhem as far as it could possibly go, and there's nothing to see here which we haven't already seen. I always just end up feeling sorry for the people who would have to organise all the cleaning up and repair work, and the probably scarred-for-life civilians. Ultimately Iron Man pummels the Hulk into submission and they all piss off to lick their wounds. It kind of feels like a waste of time, especially with the back-to-back "vs Ultron" and "vs Hulk" action sequences, both of which are frantic CGI extravaganzas.

The bank's about to break.

Needing somewhere to "lie low" as they say, Hawkeye leads them off to a farmhouse in the country which turns out to be where his wife and kids live. So Hawkeye has a family. It's a vaguely clever twist but in all honesty despite spending a bit more time with him I didn't really find Hawkeye any more interesting in this film than the one before. Thor immediately leaves again so that Stellan Skarsgård can get his cameo, somehow being able to immediately lead Thor to some underground pond where he takes a dunk to recover his dream. Captain America and Iron Man argue with each other like the last film while chopping wood, and then Nick Fury comes back. Ugh. He gives them a pointless pep talk, Black Widow and Bruce Banner continue to experience awkward sexual tension, and they head off to track down Ultron. Obviously this is meant to show them being proactive, as opposed to what Ultron accuses them of being: reactive and static. Then again, Captain America argues that people start wars by trying to prevent them. So what is it, let the bad guy go first, but then hammer him as much as possible? I guess so.

Release the Kraken.

In any event Ultron and his "enhanced" chums have tracked down Doctor Cho and mind control her with Loki's sceptre: more reptition of the previous film. They get her to use her super duper advanced cellular technology with vibranium to create some kind of 'ultimate body' for Ultron. I wasn't really sure why this happened, but in any event they do it, using the stone from inside the sceptre. What does he want this body for? I wasn't really sure, but in any event he does. Nonetheless the organic brain of the new body is getting Ultron's mind transferred into it, and thus Wanda is able to read the mind, discovering that Ultron intends to destroy all life on earth. She's naturally concerned, so Ultron and a couple of his Iron Man cronies chuck the new body in a lorry and they head off, but not before Cap shows up and has a fight with Ultron where he's repeatedly zapped off the roof of the truck and onto the windshields of the cars behind, apparently consistently forgetting that his main gimmick is that he has a shield he can raise to defend himself.

"My wig doesn't match my eyebrows."

Nonetheless Black Widow recovers the body but is captured by Ultron: damsel in distress much? Logically in my opinion it should have been (somehow) Tony Stark who gets captured. Back at the tower Iron Man and Bruce Banner decide to put JARVIS' AI into the body instead, and while Cap turns up with Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, now enemies of Ultron, to stop Iron Man from constantly building killer robots that go mental and try to destroy the world, Thor arrives and uses his hammer to put in enough juice to complete the process, thus forming classic Avengers character, the android known as the Vision, here played by Paul Bettany. He was a welcome character to have introduced and I would have actually liked him earlier. Thor also reveals that the stone from the sceptre, now in Vision's head, is the Mind Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones. Well there you go then. Vision says he wishes to protect life and encourages them to go fight Ultron, so off they go, after a mild gag where he is shown to easily lift Thor's hammer.

"They didn't get theirs finished in time."

Now we're back in Eastern Europe again as Ultron enacts his diabolical plan to lift a huge chunk of the countryside off the face of the earth. He wants to slam it back down like a meteor, believing it will encourage "evolution" on the planet, which has become stagnant because of humanity. Later he says that afterwards only metal will survive. So what does he want, evolved humans or a world of robots? I have no idea. In any event he has some bollocks device to achieve all of this, so when the Avengers show up they have to get to that, which is very, very similar to how they had to get to that thing which Loki was using to open the wormhole in the first film. What's more, the landscape Ultron's rendered airborne is partially city, so they have to evacuate as many people as they can and protect civilians from an army of Ultron's killer robots, which is also extraordinarily similar to what happened with the alien Chitauri in the first film. In fact this whole plan reminded me a great deal of an issue of Fantastic Four from the Eighties which I read recently which featured Galactus' rogue herald Terrax lifting the whole of Manhattan from the surface of the earth, and I almost wonder if, had they not used Manhattan for the climax in the previous film, they would have used it here.

1080 Waterboarding.

So Bruce Banner rescues Black Widow, she rather oddly forces or tricks him into becoming the Hulk, they have a big fight with lots of Ultron robots, the flying conference room from the first film shows up with Nick Fury, Robin Scherbatsky and War Machine on board to rescue the civilians, and Iron Man comes up with some bullshit method I didn't catch to negate the whole "Ultron dropping a huge piece of rock back onto the earth" issue. In horrific Joss Whedon post-modern fashion we have it extremely heavily, unsubtly foreshadowed that Hawkeye is going to die now that we've met his long-suffering family, so of course he doesn't - instead Quicksilver does to save his life and that of a small boy. It's basically the postmodernity singularity: it's a Joss Whedon "thing" that a main character dies in his films, but he plays upon that so that we expect it's someone else. The problem is, we've only just met Quicksilver, and because of this film's enormous ensemble cast, we haven't had that much time with him, so his death has very little impact. They wreck Ultron and his robots, Iron Man does... something which causes the "meteor" to explode into apparently harmless fragments, and they all go home for tea.

"So at 'Opinions Can Be Wrong' they say that 'Captain America:
The First Avenger' was the best Marvel film. What have you got to say to that?"

Our final sequence is basically just a set up for what's going to happen next: Captain America and Black Widow are going to run a new "Avengers facility" to seemingly train and coordinate their new set of Avengers: War Machine, Falcon, Scarlet Witch and Vision. Iron Man pisses off to probably go build even more killer robots or something and Thor heads off to the nether regions or what have you in order to figure out what's going on with all the "Infinity Stones" that keep showing up: one in Vision's head (formerly Loki's sceptre), one inside the Tesseract, one in that corruptive black and red stuff Christopher Eccleston was using in "Thor: The Dark World" and one I haven't seen that's apparently in "Guardians of the Galaxy." Meanwhile Hulk has deliberately sent himself off to the Pacific, Banner believing that he and Black Widow shouldn't be together or whatever. Yawn. So ends "Avengers: Two Hours and Twenty Minutes of Ultron."

In my article on the "Age of Ultron" teaser last year, I mused that

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.

Studio execs confuse the villain and the female lead.

I'm afraid to say that "Age of Ultron" didn't surprise me, at least any further than superficial elements like Hawkeye's family and Quicksilver getting killed. I argued that "Age of Ultron" needed "to not live up to the teaser where it seems to be a generic angsty action film" but I think it lived up to the teaser very well. We've got the Avengers doubting their purpose and fighting amongst themselves, plus some navel-gazing introspection on behalf of Hulk and Black Widow. Even Ultron didn't serve too great a purpose as a reflection of the heroes, really just being a nutcase who wants to destroy the world. The problem with adapting Ultron to a film is that Ultron, as the character was originally invented, is part of a very personal story: the story of his creator in the comics, Doctor Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, who isn't even going to be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe until the film after this one, and even then not in the role of Ant-Man. Otherwise this just seems to be fairly run-of-the-mill. Despite the fact that there are several geniuses on the team, no one ever intellectualises what's wrong with Ultron's argument, either philosophically or scientifically: that "evolution" has no mutual relationship with peace - if anything it has an antagonistic one - and that "evolution" is not about a species becoming better per se, simply more competently equipped to survive in its environment. This is of course confused by the fact that it's not actually very clear what Ultron does want, and I think in its efforts to make Ultron amusing and foibled, the film makes him seem ineffectual and non-threatening. Ultron ultimately seems too facetious and confused to pose a serious challenge, and as a result I didn't find him very interesting.

"How dare you claim 'Thor: The Dark World' was
'even more forgettable than 'Iron Man 2'!'"

In general I felt like the plot was rushed and didn't make itself abundantly clear a lot of the time. I didn't like the way Black Widow, as the only female Avenger, was given a very trite "emotional" and "romantic" role. I thought the battle between Hulk and Iron Man was a waste of time. I felt that the plot, rather than being a logical continuation of what's come before, seemed simply like a re-hash of it. The death of Quicksilver had no impact. Hawkeye's character is developed awkwardly. Like the first film, Thor's role felt very perfunctory. There was also some dreadful technobabble, with absurd concepts mentioned like some place in Oslo which is supposedly "the hub of the internet" or something equally ridiculous.

¡Arriba!

That being said, I liked the Vision and I thought the film kept up a reasonable pace. I didn't think they did too badly of including Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver up until the end. There were some decent lines and action sequences and stuff to appeal to a Marvel comics enthusiast. One thing I will take issue with, as I did in my list at the beginning, is the design. I think it was this film which really forced me to acknowledge something I find very objectionable about modern superhero films in general: I don't like the way they look. Captain America's costume in particularly is horrible, with an ugly Avengers logo on the shoulder and in a weird shade of deep blue which looks almost purple. Incidentally, whose sneakers did Quicksilver nick from Avengers tower before the final battle? The stupid glowing lights on Black Widow's suit were fairly risible as well, almost evoking the DC Comics New 52 style "let's stick big contrasting lines all over everyone's costumes" aesthetic.

The last thing seen by whoever mandated all this egregious
exploitation shots of Black Widow in this film.

Y'know what one of Marvel Comics' main strengths was back in the Sixties when the majority of these characters were either invented or, in Cap's case, revived? They had artists, particularly Jack Kirby, working on them, who had a talent for distinctive appearances. Give me Cap in swashbuckler boots with little wings on his head, Black Widow with a bright yellow belt, Quicksilver with light blue spandex and pointy hair, whatever. Superheroes don't need to look "realistic" because they're not. As I get older and more cynical, I come to believe more and more than superhero comics always work better when they're "fun" and embrace the absurdity of the premise: not because I'm happy for them to be meaningless, but because I think it makes them more meaningful, a more effective contrast to reality which helps to highlight the issues they raise and the eras they represent. Drab HYDRA goons, gunmetal-grey Ultron robots, the Vision covered in blocky lines, hairy, sallow-green Hulk: they're boring to look at, and make their narratives correspondingly boring. Sadly I think Superman Returns was the last we'll ever see of that kind of film for a long time (and even that one was a little overdesigned, what was with that weird dimple pattern on his costume).

"I really don't want to go back to the gym."

"Age of Ultron" is just a workmanlike piece of product, as I so often describe these things, "well-presented mediocrity" as I called them in the Doctor Strange article. Other than that it's just part of the Disney/Marvel money printing machine, treading water before Phase 3 and "Infinity War" where maybe something interesting will happen. It's not a film I can see myself rushing to see again, not particularly memorable nor especially effective. I wonder if Joss Whedon is sick of this rigmarole, because he's said he's not coming back, and to me at least I felt like in this film he must have already been mentally exhausted. If you want Avengers, read the original comic books - it was pretty groundbreaking, at the time, to run a comic featuring multiple heroes with their own books in a team setting. If you want to watch Avengers, I heartily recommend The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the 2010 cartoon series, and particularly its first season. For what is notionally a children's cartoon it's got a pretty complex ongoing narrative and rich characterisation, along with more characters (especially Ant-Man and Wasp, who I feel are badly missed in these films) and its own take on Ultron. Maybe it's because I'm such a devotee of that cartoon that I felt like "Age of Ultron" was showing me something I'd seen before and therefore it didn't especially grasp me, but it's worrying to think that that show achieved in two twenty-minute episodes of a cartoon what this big budget Hollywood film struggles to do in nearly two and a half hours. In less time than this film takes the cartoon series even established Ultron over several episodes as an initially benevolent force, which this film doesn't have time to do. This leads me to wonder how constrained Joss Whedon's vision was, if you'll pardon the pun, a fear I raised in my article on the teaser. No strings? Only the purse-strings, Ultron.

"I phase through your bedroom walls at night."