Open it up. The tightly scripted nature of it is a huge turnoff, man. I mean, gamers hate on-rails shooters. Yet it feels like we're basically playing one in CoD campaigns.

I was alright with it with CoD 1 and 2. Back then, they were still doing the whole MoH:AA thing with delivering a sort of cinematic Saving Private Ryan/Band of Brothers inspired schtick and I understand that and why gamers liked it. I was okay with it too. But it got old after a while, man. I got to CoD 4 MW and it was the same damn thing again and I just got tired of it. Crysis came out right around that time and really showed how much fun you could have without scripted sequences everywhere. Where you had real openness and options for what to do and solving combat puzzles.

The CoD games have a lot to like, don't get me wrong. I like how tight and responsive the gunplay feels. I like the fact that it is 60 fps and silky smooth. And I like how they have all the weapons kitted out with attachments and special ops gear and it all looks great and polished and you don't see hands clipping through vertical handgrips and other stuff. They really did deliver that high production value and polish that a lot of other shooters were lacking at the time.

But I hate how limited the campaigns are. I don't care for being told to mindlessly follow someone. I don't like endless respawning waves of enemies (the TV station in MW). I don't like just being along for a roller coaster ride and being hurled from one setpiece to another, all scripted to hell. Dynamic gameplay is where it's at for me. For example:

Look at that oil rig mission from MW2. You launch out of the submarine on that cool Navy SEAL submersible and you see marine life swimming all around you and it's cool and feels like you're playing a scene right out of The Rock. Yet for as good as it all looks... there're no options for approaching the oil rig. It's all tightly scripted to hell. How about letting the player maneuver around the ocean to pick a specific location on the oil rig to disembark? Giving us tactical options for where to breach and clear, instead of just forcing us through one preset point? It's just frustrating how the devs take all the choice out of the player's hands, like we're unworthy of being entrusted with that.

It's why while Ghost Recon Wildlands is a hugely unpolished game with lots of bugs and jank and oddities, I'm still spending hours and hours every day playing it and haven't touched my copy of CoD Black Ops III outside of an hour or so. That power of freedom and making my own tactical approach and gameplay in the world is something that I value and enjoy 100,000 times more then what CoD campaigns can deliver.

I haven't been loving it. The control feels jerky and stilted. When I was running to Cora's position at the beginning of the first combat encounter, I ran into some rocks on the ground that stopped my movement entirely. These weren't huge boulders, they were just large pebbles sticking out of the ground. Yet I couldn't move at all against them. Weird.

The game's also buggy as hell. After you and your dad accomplish the thing at the end of the level, there's a ton of cutscenes that you can't fast forward through at all. Then there's a cutscene that plays with the Kett main villain guy. However, on PC, my computer locked up twice while playing this one buggy cutscene. So I had to reboot my PC. Then, when I resumed the game, it placed me back at the start of all those cutscenes, the ones that you absolutely cannot skip through. This took ages to get through. Unbelievable that 1) That Kett cutscene actually locks up my computer, and 2) that the cutscenes beforehand can't be sped through.

There's ridiculous holo boundaries that box you in for no reason in the opening level. You'll go into a cave and come across a large tropical tree and a scorpion trapped in a dome. But then you head out the back entrance to the cave and there's just this shimmering blue field that comes across the screen and makes you head back to the designated mission area, Battlefield-style. It's very bizarre and takes me out of the game. They could've just blocked off the back of the cave. I don't understand why you'd allow the player to head out and see a new area of the planet, just to put up an arbitrary mission boundary like that.

The game has infinitely respawning Kett right when you and your dad make the first big push up into the remnant compound. I noticed this because I stayed back and kept shooting them until I ran out of ammo for both my AR and my pistol. Really dumb decision.

You can't unequip and sell your default stuff on the Nexus for some reason. I got a Black Widow out of a loot crate and wanted to equip it and get rid of my pistol at the arms vendor, but the game wouldn't allow this. I also couldn't unequip consumable ammo to sell. This makes no sense.

Everybody's already covered the horrible facial animation.

I will say this one positive for the combat, you will hit whatever you aim at with your crosshair, which is more than can be said for the other game I've been playing atm, GR Wildlands. In Wildlands, you can place your crosshair on an enemy rounding a corner and fire at him, but the bullet just hits the wall corner that's blocking the path between your gun barrel and the enemy. In Andromeda, I feel fully confident that anything in my crosshair will be an unblocked shot. That's very commendable and I applaud them for that decision.

What's not so great is how the enemies don't seem to react or stagger when hit by my weapons. I'm playing on Hardcore, so I expect the enemies to be somewhat bullet sponges, and they are. But it'd be nice to see some effect of my rounds impacting them. Especially when you're going up against the shielded machine gun-wielding Kett soldiers, those things can take ages to kill with an M8 avenger, but there's never any reaction when I shoot them.

Enemies also seem to take cover for way too long without peeking out or moving. This is really annoying and feels like wasting time. I'm in cover waiting for them to peek out so I can shoot them, but they must be scared or something, because they just stay in cover and do nothing. This is not great AI or gameplay flow.

So far, I think the reviews have been pretty accurate. I kinda wish I was back playing GR Wildlands.

I think it does an okay job of maintaining that Tom Clancy tone and feel, which is never going to resonate with a lot of people. That sort of techno-thriller late 80s atmosphere with quiet competent professionals is... always a taste thing. So people who complain that it doesn't go all out wild like Saints Row or whatnot with the wackiness is... I mean, it is what it is.

You can tell they definitely watched a hell of a lot of Narcos though. The whole story campaign is basically Narcos, even with the catalyst of that one DEA agent being killed. The real life guy who got killed in Mexico was "Kiki" Camarena. They call him "Chichi" or something in the game.

There's a lot of bugs and unpolished stuff in the game. But I admit, it's still fun to go out and collect guns and attachments. Unlike something like Assassin's Creed or DAI, where you're collecting feathers or shards or some bullshit, collecting new guns and attachments is really satisfying and addicting. Sneaking into a Unidad base and getting a Mk17 FN SCAR-H and seeing the huge increase in damage and accuracy compared to your assault rifle is a great feeling. So it's got that going for it.

One prominent bug has a line of dialogue about a "Quinoa factory" playing over and over again. It's horribly annoying, and now I seem to be getting another one about "high profile" coming on strong. Another serious one has your drone and binoculars unavailable for use for some reason. And there's the standard open work jank where you'll fall into a terrain pit and be completely stuck and unable to get out without fast traveling, which is unpleasant since fast travel respawns every enemy in the region. There's a disappointing lack of persistence to the world, which is only somewhat better than Far Cry 2. The radio is horribly annoying (think Sofia Vergara) and never seems to quit anywhere on the map. And the cover penetration is completely inconsistent and bewildering. Chainlink fences and brick walls can be penetrated just fine, but ramshackle wooden fences and errant tree leaves and bushes are completely impenetrable.

The soft cover system is pretty much... not good. There are plenty of obvious cover elements that won't let you stick and peek out of. Instead, you'll just ADS and look into the top rim of the cover. And when you do get under cover, there's actually an issue where if there's a boundary on the sides of the cover, like a stack of tires or something, touching or brushing against it will bump you out of cover and you'll lose the ability to peek out. This makes no sense. There's also the issue that the game seemingly switches your shoulder perspective every single time you brush against any cover element in a room, to where your camera is constantly, schizophrenically switching from left to right, right to left, dozens of times through clearing a building. For those of us who play cover shooters and are used to looking over the right shoulder, with some situational switching to the left shoulder when appropriate, this is maddening.

The third person perspective shooting has problems, where you'll place your crosshair right on a bad guy as he rounds a corner, but the corner is actually still blocking your shots, which is frustrating and immediately alerts them. What you see in third person is not what you'll see in first person ADS. Now, the game does put a small red X over the crosshair when the target is blocked in this way, but it means you have to consciously be looking for the red X and seeing where the magical invisible boundary is between the blocked corner and the unblocked shot. This feels annoying and clunky in the heat of the action, when you should be focused on the enemy and his movements.

Of course, people will say the solution is just to toss out the third person camera shooting completely, and just do ADS. And yes, that's what I've been doing. However, even in first person ADS, the game still does not always shoot where your crosshair is. If you go prone and crawl up on an elevated ledge or some tower somewhere, to where the enemy's head is just peeking up over the ledge/floor, and place your crosshair on that head, you will not hit that head in your crosshair. Your shot will instead hit the ledge/floor right in front of you. This is incredibly annoying. There are plenty of shooters that have fixed this issue. Halo is the most famous. Halo will always have your shot hit where the crosshair is. I dunno what Ubisoft was thinking, but they went for a different route.

Customization of your character is good, though could be better with more camo options. Crye outfits are in the game, but without the major camo patterns like AOR1. There's no BDUs available. For now, most of the outfits tend toward a more casual appearance, like T-shirts and jeans. The major sticking point with most people right now is how you can't even customize your AI squad's outfits. So sure, you can meticulously gear your own character up to look like a Delta operator right out of "Black Hawk Down", or whatnot, but it'll be very irksome seeing him standing next to the other AI teammembers dressed in their casual covert ops gear.

Customization of guns is much better, with tons of camo paint schemes and attachments. The neat thing is, you can set an overall paint scheme for the gun, and then individually tweak each attachment with their own colors. Really like that detail.

I think the side missions are definitely repetitive, with basically four types of rebel missions repeating over and over again. However, the main story missions have been crafted pretty damn well and I'm satisfied with them. You've got some missions that take you out to deep swamps to take out drug submarines in their docks. Some of em are out on snowy mountaintops. One of em has you going to hit a drug lord compound. Along the outer perimeter are roving patrols that you need to isolate and kill. Then there's a few guards on the rooftop to snipe. Then a few guards on the interior that can be sniped through large windows. And finally, there was a large congregation of 4 Unidad soldiers and 3 cartel henchmen engaged in conversation right outside the entrance. I told my AI squad to sync kill three of the Unidad soldiers, while I lined my sights up to take out the last Unidad soldier and one cartel guard in a single penetrating sniper shot. Immediately afterwards, I pulled off two quick shots to eliminate the last two cartel guards. All without triggering any alerts. This whole compound "combat puzzle" to be solved, over a span of fifteen minutes, was immensely satisfying and really showcased Wildlands at its finest, for me. When you pull those missions off, it's somehow okay that at its heart, it's a very unpolished version of MGS V.

I remember the original Rainbow Six came out right as I was getting done with middle school and moving onto high school. This was back when the only other realistic games about special forces were "US Navy SEALs" and "Spec Ops". So it was a tiny genre, but it absolutely captured my imagination. In fact, that was actually the origin of my username. I was signing up for Red Storm Entertainment's forums back in the day, and just had to come up with a username, so being the unimaginative guy that I was, I thought Delta Assault sounded pretty good and Rainbow-y. And I've kept it ever since.

And man, that multiplayer. So fast and fluid and completely different from the Quake and Unreal style arcade shooters of the era. Everything just felt so much more lethal and simmy, it was crazy. Of course, everybody learned pretty quickly that there was that design flaw that unintentionally made the 3 round burst more powerful and gave more DPS then full auto. Because the 3 rnd burst in the game fired all three rounds simultaneously (instead of one by one in real life), and you could fire the bursts just about as fast as you could click the mouse button, it delivered rounds way faster than the traditional full auto mode.

So everybody just played multiplayer with CAR-15s with 3 rnd burst on. That was the metagame. Sidestrafing and nailing dudes with 3 rnd bursts. It was glorious.

I think the most popular maps were Mint, Amazon, Hacienda, Oil Rig, and uh... Biolab? Mint was definitely the most popular, by a long way. Everybody would ask for more Mint. All of these maps were not exactly mirrors, since they'd just been repurposed from the singleplayer campaign, but there was an interesting dynamic where the two spawn ends were roughly balanced and nobody really had a big advantage from either starting side.

But funnily enough, I also really enjoyed the extreme long range camping maps of "Road" and "Airport", where it was basically all sniping from across two huge swathes of empty space. I think Airport had some blocks off to one side where you could take cover and possibly make your way to the other team's spawn if you were wiley enough, but Road was completely barren and just had two teams peeking around a corner sniping with M-16s. And that was fun too, especially since you could goof off and impose rules like pistols or shotties only.

The multiplayer of Rainbow Six was a huge hit, and the magazine PC Gamer's staff were such big fans of it that they even got their own map, which was some sort of city block layout with billboards. I don't remember it that clearly... but the point was, Rainbow Six had arrived, and it was here to stay as an influential multiplayer shooter.

But I think the sequel Rogue Spear was really when I got full hardcore into multiplayer. Rogue Spear after school everyday was my obsession for a couple of years, where I ended up writing down pages and pages of IP addresses (Back in those days, there were two online services: MPlayer and the Microsoft Zone, and direct IP address connection). Direct IP was the best, since you didn't have to deal with the lag and hardware resources of running a third party service in addition to the game itself.

Because they'd changed the 3 rnd burst to function properly in Rogue Spear, the best option now was full auto, and the best weapon was one that had the tightest reticle while sidestrafing. That was quickly found to be the MP5 PDW, which was the smallest and most compact MP5 in the game, but which also had the highest rate of fire of any gun. This combination of fastest full auto and the best handling made it the ultimate gun for short and medium range fights, where people would strafe, or "dance" around each other. The PDW's 9mm round itself was weak, but the sheer volume of fire was enough to offset that. Plus, the large amount of rounds helped to compensate for the lag inherent in games back then, where you'd often find enemies warping around the map in weird ways. People also had the option of tactically peeking around cover with their assault rifles, but they'd usually never beat a competent sidestrafer with the PDW. The fire rate was so ridiculously high that sometimes I actually switched over to the MP5A4, just for the A4's slightly lower rate of fire.

The maps were of course all new, and I think the technical standout of the bunch had to be "Kosovo", which was a sprawling, rainy, wartorn urban environment with a signature clock tower that nobody much used in multiplayer simply because it was the most obvious sniping spot ever. The "747" level was one that was highly featured in advertising for the game, since this was one of the first times a video game had recreated a big 747 in a level. But really, nobody much played it after the first week since the 747 itself was a really cramped and boring space to fight in, and the outside tarmac was just a big ol sniping wasteland, in a game where everybody wanted to use PDWs.

Ya know, just on a sidenote, one of the RSE forum members was this guy named Serellan, who released a mod for Rogue Spear called Snowbird's Nest, or Crow's Nest, or something along those lines, which turned the 747 level into a snow-covered mission. And this mod was so impressive to Red Storm Entertainment that they actually hired him and brought him onboard. This guy later went on to be a Lead Director on games like Bungie's Halo Reach. Just goes to show, you never know where things can lead...

My personal favorite map of the bunch was definitely "Siberian Base 1" or Sib 1 for short. This to me was like CS's Rust, it was the perfect sized map with multiple routes for combat, from a raised walkway, to flanking around the side of a hill, to hiding behind a snowbank. It wasn't overly large and confusing, but wasn't so simple that the chokepoints were always predictable. Didn't much care for "Siberian Base 2" though, that one was a lot larger and you spent a hell of a lot of time just trying to find the other team.

Another great map was "Chateau", which was supposed to be a retreat for a Russian oligarch or something. There was a two story guardhouse at one end of the map that actually made itself into a fun mode for us, because we came up with our own game of "Crackhouse Raid", where one team would hole up in the guardhouse as drug addicts with uzis and shotguns, while the other team would roleplay as the SWAT team sent to assault the crackhouse and take everyone out. Of course, I would just hole up in the closet as a crack addict with C4 planted at the door. Fun times.

There were quite a few large sprawling maps that I never cared for, like "Opera." Never ever completely figured out the layout for that. Most of the popular maps, like Nuke Silo, Train Depot, or Desal, were rather simple and had about three or four main routes that a team of 4 or 5 could cover. The worst map in the game was the last campaign mission "Nuke Power Plant" which, from best I could figure, was just them faithfully recreating the entire inside of a huge sprawling nuclear power plant. That was just no fun. Of course, being too simple and straightforward was also a bad trait, which made 747 and Oil Tanker unpopular maps.

The big update patch for the game came out with the "Bunkers" multiplayer map. This was a big deal at the time because it was the first map specifically designed for multiplayer, which meant it was a symmetrical layout and no team had any geographical advantage. The bunkers themselves were quite vulnerable and very predictable locations, so everyone actually avoided going inside them, rather going around the flanks to cross the map, or strafing around the sides of the bunkers.

Then the first expansion Urban Ops came out. This was five new multiplayer maps, as well as five old school R6 maps like Mint, Estate, and Hacienda. It felt like a breath of fresh air to get so many new maps, though I'll be honest and say that most people preferred to play the old school maps and relive the glory days of R6. I personally got really confused and never quite learned the layouts of the large new maps like "Bazaar" or "Hong Kong". Especially Bazaar. My god, that was a confusing map, full of orange and brown textures.

Then the first Ghost Recon came out, but the slower paced gameplay and lack of sidestrafing in multiplayer turned me off and I never quite got into it. Then GR2 came out only on the consoles, and that seemed real shitty.

For the longest time, I've avoided grenade launchers in video games. The arcing shot always bothers me, because it's so hard to judge. With other guns in shooters, it's easy to know when you'll hit. The shots are usually hitscan, or close to it. Rocket launchers also travel in a straight line.

But grenade launchers always have that plunging trajectory, which is why they always come with that HUD reticle that shows the dropping arc. And that never sat right with me. I had no idea where on that arc the grenade would hit. It was just a rough guesstimate, right? You had to fire multiple shots to zero in on the right mark, while in the meantime the enemy was probably shooting my ass up. So I basically just stayed away from ever using them in games.

But now I'm playing MGS V, and come upon the later "Heavy Infantry" missions. And the 08 one is just tough, because they seem to have upgraded their armor suits so Dragunov shots won't stop them at all. And that's the most powerful long range gun I've got in my armory. I check online for guides, and it seems like grenade launchers will stop them. So great, now I've got to turn to the video game gun I hate using.

I buy the Hail MGR-4, with the large magazine so I can afford to fuck up a few shots. But when I actually aim with it in the mission, I notice something I've never seen in other video games. The sight actually has a pip that dynamically calculates the impact point of the grenade! So now I actually know where the shot will land. This was something that other games had never had before.

So with that cleared up, I just effortlessly blew up the 4 Heavy Infantry guys on my first try. Wow. What a difference a little pip makes. Thanks MGS V for getting me over my fear of grenade launchers. This is what's great about MGS V, the gameplay feels like it was crafted by people who play games.

Well, I finally started to play MGS V after putting it off for a long time. I think the opening intro, where you're stuck in a hospital bed for 15 minutes, was what really dissuaded me from playing. Not a lot of gameplay there.

So yeah, that part wasn't so great. But then you get out of the hospital bed and... it's a lot more cutscenes. Jesus Christ. You know it's a Kojima game. Lots of cinematics going on, with very little actual game. I also gotta say, these black ops soldiers searching every room and executing every patient... they'd do a much better job if they just leaned down and peered under the curtains, like when you check for occupied bathroom stalls. They never do that. Instead, they just walk around and totally miss Boss crawling around on the ground. Such a silly thing.

It's pretty funny how crazy the game is, with a giant fire guy strolling around and blowing everything up. Taking out helicopters left and right. But a little sprinkler is enough to extinguish him. What was that all about?

Then you get to the actual gameplay and it's surprisingly fun. The gunplay feels fun, as long you're actually using Aim Down Sights. The headshots are easy to pull off and feel satisfying. This was a pleasant surprise.

Revolver Ocelot rescues you and uhhh... oh boy, the overwrought and cheesy dialogue is just overwhelming. A lot of talk about "returning as a legend" and "we must have the conviction to return to glory" and "Boss, time to show who you truly are" and uhhh... just terrible bizarre writing. What we've come to expect from Kojima, I guess. It's so awful and awkward and funny at the same time. I will say, I've only played MGS 1 and about half of MGS 4, so the talk about Cipher went completely over my head, I had no idea what the hell Cipher was or why they needed to fight it or anything. I guess maybe that's supposed to be meaningful to hardcore MGS fans?

So now the game drops me off in Afghanistan and it's a huge big open sandbox to play around in. Again, it's surprising how much fun this gameplay is, after that incredibly tedious and off-putting opening intro sequence. The attention to detail with every aspect of the game is immediately noticeable. This can be both good and bad in a few ways though. For example, the fact that your gun will actually lower if you stand too close to cover is realistic, but awfully annoying in a gameplay sense, and something you'd never expect in a shooter like Halo or Battlefield. Yet it happens a lot in MGS unless you account for it. It felt frustrating the first few times I tried to shoot someone, only to find my gun lowered because I was too close to a surface.

But in other aspects, the realistic detail feels very cool and refreshing, like trying to Fulton a guy who's inside a hut, and having the balloon hit the ceiling and pop and fail. Or Fultoning a guy in a sandstorm and having that fail. These are things that you'd never see in other mainstream games, because the developers just wouldn't think to actually acknowledge the details in such a realistic manner. Same thing with having a suppressor wear out and eventually become ineffective. The little intricacies of the game stand out and feel meaningful.

Of course, in some ways, the game's extreme details are a little confusing. I went and started tranqing every soldier to Fulton them back to Mother Base, but the Staff Management menus are completely confusing to me. I get the feeling that you're supposed to match different staff to their individual strengths, but I have no idea how to do that, or how to even read their personal attributes. I've also filled out the two departments with 30/30 staff, and now have 28 guys waiting in the Waiting Room, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with them. Guess maybe now I can stop fultoning people and just kill them?

I do like the weapon upgrade system, and can tell that they actually feel substantive. For example, upgrading the Wu tranq pistol to Grade 2 actually does improve the accuracy to the point where the ADS scatter is a lot lower and headshots that used to take 2-3 shots can now be nailed in 1. That was such an important part of the game for me and grabbing the upgrade now makes me anxious to get up to Grade 3. Though since I have 28 guys in the Waiting Room, I suppose I can switch to buying and upgrading the 1911 for lethal kills?

Well, I'll give you my impressions of DS9. Back when it premiered, I was in full Trek mode, since DS9 actually began while TNG was still running and going strong. So everybody was onboard with TNG, and saw DS9 as a way to get more of that goodness. And I watched the season premiere, "Emissary" and uh... yea, it left me cold. I did not like it. The characters were all kinda unlikeable, the new station looked ugly and decrepit, and the Cardassians were the main antagonists, even though we didn't know a whole lot about them. All we knew was that they'd once enslaved and occupied Bajor. And that whole theme seemed to be what the show was ultimately going to be about... the Bajorans and their planet Bajor. Which wasn't all that interesting to me, at all. Cause they're just... aliens with ridges on their nose and weird earrings. I mean, they weren't terrible, but this was gonna be the focus of the show for entire seasons. Unlike TNG, where you'd hop from planet to planet with each new episode. There was exploration and seeking out new worlds and bolding going and all that jazz. With DS9, the station just stayed stuck near Bajor and that's what you got. Bajor and their weird religion and religious leaders and their politics and that wormhole off in the distance... which had some decent CGI effects for a TV show back in the day but still... those effects got old after a couple episodes. Kinda like TNG's tedious saucer separation maneuver. Thank god they stopped that after "Best of Both Worlds."

So yea... DS9 in the early seasons was just really dull and boring and terrible. I didn't care about Bajor and its religion about weird lightbulb things. Those Prophets, ya know? I definitely didn't care that Sisko was kinda their messenger and had visions. Frankly, I find Avery Brooks a pretty bad actor. He really seemed to be sleepwalking at times. I didn't care for Quark, the comic Ferengi relief, or Odo, the gruff security guard. Odo just seemed to be a copy of Data but without the innocence and charm of Data. I didn't care for Bashir, the high strung British doctor. And I certainly didn't care for Kira, played by Nana Visitor.

Now, this is kinda a weird complaint to make, but part of the reason I didn't like Kira was because Nana Visitor looked, to me, almost identical to Frenchy from "Grease." And you remember Frenchy, right? She was the really fucking annoying girl who always said or did something obnoxious. And Nana Visitor just seemed to be some sort of visual doppelganger of her. Hell, for a long time I thought Nana Visitor did play the role of Frenchy in Grease. It turned out she hadn't, but the similarity was unnerving. Chief O'Brien I did like, but that was only because he was from TNG and a nice character.

Avery Brooks' acting was pretty weird. He either seemed like he was sleepwalking through scenes, or he'd be shouting in a bizarre halting manner.

But more then that, the character itself does really odd and nonsensical things. Like that episode where they go to recapture DS9 from the Dominion. The Dominion finally succeeds in destroying the Federation's self-replicating minefield, and what does Sisko do? He foolishly takes the Defiant into the wormhole to singlehandedly hold off the incoming Dominion reinforcements.

Like yeah, if you read the script and know ahead of time that the Prophets are going to wipe that fleet out of existence, then it totally makes sense. But he didn't know that was going to happen. He just somehow decided to take his one ship into the wormhole to battle the entire Dominion fleet? Why? What does that accomplish? Who the fuck thinks that's a good idea? It just made him seem suicidal and crazy. And if you want to just commit suicide, well... okay, I guess that's your own personal choice. But don't take the whole crew of the Defiant along with you, you crazy Jonestown motherfucker.

And he's made out to be some great tactical officer, and the right hand man of Admiral Ross. You see him commanding fleets in the war and all that, while Picard's off on the other side of the galaxy putting tribal beads on top of his head for diplomatic missions and whatnot. Yet Sisko's brilliant idea when the minefield goes down is just to try and defeat the Dominion fleet with his one ship? This is our tactical genius at work? What? Why do this? How does this accomplish anything? Is the Dominion fleet going to be stymied by the amazing prowess of the Defiant? Or are they just going to blow it up in one salvo? Why condemn Dax and Worf and Bashir and all his friends to death like that? Who does he think he is?

It's one of the stupidest moments in that show.

The Defiant is the single worst part of DS9.

Here we've got a ship that's a brick. Seriously, that's basically what it is, a brick in space. You ask me to describe the Defiant to you, that's all I can come up with. It's a turd. It's a little turd brick and that's about all I can do. The thing looks godawful. What is one of the reasons that people like Star Trek? Well, because Star Trek has beautiful ships. There's an aesthetic appeal that drew me in when I was a boy growing up. The Enterprise is probably the most iconic spaceship in pop culture, god bless Matt Jefferies for his innovation and vision. You look at the Enterprise, and while it might seem a bit impractical, the design itself is unlike anything that we had traditionally thought of as a spaceship. It is not a rocket with fins. It is not a lazy ass giant triangle. It is a saucer connected to a cylinder with a neck and long graceful warp nacelles at the back. That's ingenuity. That is something that we don't see everyday and it looked great and endured through the decades. Starfleet ships have proudly carried on that Jefferies visual aesthetic until the Defiant.

The Defiant just looks terrible. It's got this retarded looking snout up front, with the deflector dish. Only it's not even a dish, it's this weird triangular blue thingy that we've never ever seen before. But they say it's a deflector dish, so whatever. Then you've got the inconsequential warp nacelles on the sides. Except they don't look like nacelles, they're stuck on and basically part of the hull. And uh... there's not much else. You've got the weaponry, but they aren't really displayed either. I've never really seen the phaser cannon ports.

So it looks ugly. Visually, it's a disaster. There's nothing redeeming about the design. But now let's discuss the actual ship.

The actual ship itself, as written, is a fucking joke. It is a joke that is not funny. It strikes me as something that a fanfiction writer on usenet would be embarrassed to show people. This ship is tiny, about the size of four or five runabouts, but apparently is the most powerful goddamn ship in the universe. This ship possesses phase cannons that seem to rip apart battleships in one or two volleys. This tiny ship is portrayed as being as powerful as 2 or 3 Galaxy class starships, apparently. This is a retarded idea. This is idiocy. There is nothing as stupid as this in television history. This is a fanfiction ship. This is something that someone would write as being the hero ship in fanfiction. There is no goddamn way that I am gonna sit and watch a show that employs an ubership that is small, fast, and more powerful then much larger battleships. This ship is an insult to Star Trek.

Why even bother making any regular ships at all? Why do anything but make these ultra powerful pocket battleships that have phase cannons that rip through shields and oh yea... it's got ablative armor, so even if you somehow knock the shields down, there's still not much you can do? This is just retarded. The ship is insanely overpowered and completely ridiculous. Whatever happened to the beautiful Trek ships of yore? Can't we just be happy with nice curved saucers and regular phasers? Do we need phase cannons that are tiny but severely overpowered? What is this? I know it's designed to defeat the Borg, but that's no excuse for something this monstrous, this over the top, and this ugly. Plus, the Borg's greatest advantage was their ability to adapt. So even if you have phase cannons and quantum torpedoes, the Borg will just adapt to them and you're still screwed.

The Defiant had a cloaking device and after the first two episodes that pesky Romulan officer mysteriously vanished, so they could use the cloaking device whenever they wanted to, even out of the Gamma Quadrant. They just gave the Defiant the cloak so the ubership could be even more uber. Ira Steven Behr just liked doing whatever he wanted to, and he wanted to show you how kewl his ship could be, because fuck the Federation and Gene's policy of not sneaking around. Federation ships not having cloaking devices is so lamesauce, isn't it? So the Defiant had to have a cloak, which the friendly Romulans were kind enough to hand over. Sure, that made sense. Sure the Romulans, who had just brutally tried to turn Geordi into an assassin, sure they'd hand over their cloak to the Federation. Because they needed the data from the Gamma Quadrant, and they couldn't just get it in their own cloaked ship. The Romulans didn't have any cloaked ships of their own to explore with. They just had to get the data from the Federation, for some reason. They had to give the Defiant the cloak. Sure, they're not paranoid or secretive or hostile at all. It all makes perfect sense. And that Romulan officer leaving after the first few episodes... she probably just had some vacation time saved up and had to leave. No need to take back the cloak, the Romulans love the Federation. It made total sense. Or maybe that Romulan officer was still around, but we just never ever saw her oncamera again. Maybe they just kept her hidden inside one of the Defiant's supply closets, and she just monitored the cloak from there. Why not? Don't worry about pesky little details like that. The important thing is, we gave the Defiant a cloaking device. Because Federations ships are lame without cloaks. It's just so darn boring. We gotta give em more, more, more. Spice things up. It doesn't matter that they aren't allowed to have cloaks by the Treaty of Algeron. That's stupid, man. Give em cloaks, so we'll be such a cool show. It's such a cool little ship, ain't it. It's got a cloak and ablative armor and phaser cannons and it's really small and fast and it doesn't afraid of anything.

In all seriousness now: It's like the US giving China an F-22 stealth fighter in order to gather intel on North Korea. Would we ever do that? No, hell no. And it's obvious why. Not to mention that the Romulans had just learned that the Federation was trying to develop phased cloak technology and break the Treaty of Algeron, in "Pegasus." Is this knowledge going to make the Romulans more favorable to handing over their own cloaking technology? Hmmm, let's think about this one. I think the answer here is no. And one Romulan officer being sufficient protection is laughable. Remember, these are Romulans... a deeply paranoid people who excel in cloak and dagger. The thought of one lone Romulan officer protecting the cloak would hardly help the Romulan High Command sleep at night. And after the introduction, even that one Romulan officer disappeared. Even that flimsy excuse was done away with.

The Romulans also wouldn't care about risking one of their ships in the Gamma Quadrant, as opposed to relying on the Defiant. They seem to place relatively little value on life. They sent a lone ship across the Neutral Zone to test their new cloak (Balance of Terror). They sent a lone scout ship across the Neutral Zone to scout Galorndon Core (The Enemy). They blew up a scout ship to trick the Federation into buying the story of a defector (The Defector). They sent Warbirds to intercept Tinman at maximum warp, causing serious damage to their warp drives (Tinman). They blew up their own transports that were about to invade Vulcan (Unification Pt 2). They sent Remans to fight as cannon fodder (Nemesis). The Romulans were perfectly fine with risking their own ships and lives, so I don't understand why they now felt like they had to rely on the Federation for help.

And guess what happened when the Defiant went through the wormhole with the cloaking device for the first time. Answer: It got boarded and captured and the entire crew were placed in some VR simulation. The Dominion could now just take the captured cloaking device and reverse engineer it, or develop counter measures. So the Romulans would've never handed it over to some soft Federation crew. If they'd sent their own ship in to scout the Dominion, they could've given them orders to self destruct in case they were about to be boarded. The Romulans had no control over the Defiant or its crew. So no, it made no sense to hand the Federation a cloak.

The stuff the Defiant does is ridiculous. In its first episode "The Search pt 1", it destroys a Dominion attack ship with one hit from its phaser cannons. I don't think the Odyssey managed to destroy any attack ships with its phasers. Then in the episode where they go to rescue the Detapa Council, the Defiant manages to lower its shields and transport the council from a Galor class ship, while simultaneously holding off three Birds of Prey and a Vorcha attack cruiser. Then it goes back to warp and escapes any further attacks. I don't think even a Galaxy class starship would've been able to survive against three Birds of Prey and a Vorcha if it lowered its shields. I think there's a couple of episodes where it manages to destroy Birds of Prey with one or two hits from phaser cannons, which again... never happened with the Enterprise-D. If you'll recall the movie Generations... phasers weren't able to penetrate the BoP's shields.

Now, what does Ditl.org think?

To me, the Defiant has never made sense. She is, quite simply, far too small for the job she is supposed to do. [...] Defiant's small size means less space for weapons, for shield generators, etc. [...] Defiants pulse cannon are only about three or four metres on a side, yet four of these are supposed to put out a lot more power than the two hundred emitters which make up even one of the main arrays of the Galaxy.

I'm also reminded that I really dislike the Ferengi characters. Quark and Rom, they're just horrible. I can't stand the buffoonery that those characters showcase. And this is why I like TNG... there wasn't any of that bullshit comic relief. In TNG, the bartender was Guinan, and she had a sense of humor to her, there was a warmth, but she wasn't just used for cheap laughs. Whoopi Goldberg also brought a lot of dignity and gravitas to the role. Okay, there was the barber Mr. Mot, and I guess he's the closest thing to Quark, but he was in... maybe 2 scenes through the entire series? With Quark, I really feel that he's a lot like Neelix on Voyager. It's that same sort of comedy or buffoonery that I really dislike in my Star Trek. Not to mention all those ridiculous excuses they concoct to somehow place Quark on the Defiant, which always feels stupid.

And people will somehow complain all day about Voyager and Neelix, and rightfully so, but Quark on DS9 gets a pass. The whole Neelix and Tuvok relationship is just a repeat of Quark and Odo on DS9. And Rom, my god... Rom is like a functioning retard or something. Yet somehow he ends up marrying the dabo girl? What the hell was that about? I don't know, it seems really silly.

Now, the one Ferengi that I actually thought they did a good job with was Nog. Nog actually has this interesting arc through the series, where he starts as a no-good thief and loves to engage in mischief. And then gradually, over time... he's influenced by Jake to change his ways and even goes off to join Starfleet, which you'd never guess from his original circumstances. It's this unexpected but believable change that engages you and makes you want to see what'll happen. And uh, it's also just so much more interesting to see how Nog will fare in Starfleet Academy, as opposed to the bland overachiever Wesley Crusher in TNG. Nobody cares about how Wesley does in Starfleet, outside of "The First Duty" which added a wrinkle to his story.

So yeah, Nog I like. Quark and Rom can go die in a fire.

DS9's big space battles never had any ships with shields. Seriously, you watch them. No shield bubbles on any of em. It's ridiculous.

I didn't see shield bubbles on any ships, at all. No shields in Star Trek? Thank you DS9, you lousy piece of shit. Ugh.

Me, I've always been a stickler for the bubble shields. Conformal shields just look boring by comparison. Mind you, I grew up watching the TNG series, so I'm very very used to the bubble shield look. It's kinda ingrained in my consciousness. When I think of shields, I think of blue bubbles. There's a majesty and a pageantry to them. You get the feeling that the bubble is protecting you from harm. They're more visually impressive. The only time we got to see shields in the original series films, Star Trek The Motion Picture, they also used bubble shields. You could just sense the power of the Enterprise's bubble shields as they held against the destructive green power of V'Ger. It was awesome. The bubble shield, not the movie. God, that movie was boring.

And ya know, while Generations was also a terrible film, I really liked the visual look of the shields. Even when they got penetrated by that Bird of Prey. You could see the blue little shield light up as the disruptor bolts pierced them. You couldn't get that with conformal shields, no siree bob. And remember when the Enterprise actually fired back at them and the phaser fire was sorta streaming in every which direction, as it dissipated against the green bubble shield of the BoP?

I really like bubble shields. Conformal shields just don't do it for me. They don't say Star Trek. There's no visual splendor there. But uh, getting back on topic there... see, the thing is... the DS9 battles don't even show conformal shields. They don't. They just don't show shields period. No shields at all.

The evidence shows that yes, Deep Space 9 itself has shields. Apparently space stations are allowed to have shields, but not the ships. If there are shields, they're invisible. Since I believe shields flare up and are not invisible, well... there aren't any shields. This sort of thing ruins my immersion. When I watch Star Trek, I have certain expectations.

And the stuff with Section 31... wow. That was about as far from Trek as you could get. I mean, when you watched TOS and TNG, could you ever imagine them taking place in a universe that also had Section 31? I sure couldn't! It was just totally alien. And don't get me wrong, I enjoy black ops stuff, I eat that shit up in Tom Clancy novels. I really do. But that's where it belongs, in Tom Clancy novels. I don't go watch Star Trek for Tom Clancy stuff. Star Trek is a whole other universe, with its own ideals and philosophies. And Section 31 didn't make any sense in that sort of world.

And ya know, even when they do go with the dark and gritty atmosphere... they don't actually follow through on that. I'll throw out an example here. Right in the middle of the Dominion War, when thousands are dying in battle and planets are, for all we know, being exploded... they go and have a full baseball game in the damn holodeck. What the hell was that about? An entire episode devoted to this baseball game, right in the middle of the war. The whole tone was schizophrenic and very off-putting.

Contrast that with TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise" where we got a real wartime story. What is it that Tasha Yar says about food replicators?

"Standard rations. Food replicators are on minimum power. So everything else is diverted to the defensive systems."

See, that's how you do it. That's how you create a believably grim and immersive wartorn setting in Trek. Everything else is diverted to the defensive systems, and not powering up those holodecks. Why have your grim AR-558 episodes mixed up with episodes about playing regulation baseball or going on James Bond adventures on the holodeck? That just feels confused and tonally discordant to me.

And the Vic Fontaine stuff... ughhhh.

You think of Klingons as probably the fiercest close combat warriors in Trek, right? So they should be vicious and obviously not taking any prisoners and just a rapid torrent of misery and destruction once they board your ship or station. But the Klingons that boarded DS9 in that one episode where the Klingons attack DS9... uh, it seemed about half of them were just wielding bat'leths and getting cut down in waves by those silly little Bajoran security guards. It was just really funny. Why didn't they all equip themselves with heavy disrupters and whatnot? Why the stupid slow moving Klingons with bat'leths?

Edit: And one last thing I want to add. I really like Marc Alaimo's Gul Dukat on DS9. I think he's fantastic, and probably one of the best villains in a Trek show. But here's the thing... I don't think they really did as much with him as they could have. Gul Dukat starts the show as a big mustache twirling villain. But then we gradually learn more and see more and there's this evolution in the character. By the time of that one episode where they go to kill the Gowron changeling, he's gone and turned into a reluctant ally of sorts. He's helping ferry the DS9 crew in his commandeered Bird of Prey and things aren't so black and white. There's a sort of love-hate relationship between him and Sisko. That's actually pretty cool, and I was onboard with this. The character grows and changes over time.

But then... nah. They go back on all of that and drop all of the development and stick Dukat back as the main villain of the show. He's just pure evil, and he kills Dax and uh... yeah, none of that nuance is there anymore. He's just a monster who has to be put down. Well, I really disliked this regression. I wanted them to go further with that more dimensional Dukat we got to see.

DS9 also gave us "In the Pale Moonlight." This episode really exemplifies everything wrong with DS9. In the past, we've been aboard the Enterprise while our courageous Captains battled to take down corrupt or misguided captains or admirals in Starfleet. In "Pale Moonlight" we find that our protagonist himself ends up being the corrupt Starfleet captain. It's a supremely disheartening feeling. The entire story is about Sisko lying and tarnishing himself. Sure, Garak is the actual one who plants the bomb, but Sisko goes right along with covering it up, as well as pursuing the fake evidence in the first place. What was that speech that Picard gave in "The First Duty?"

The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based. And if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform!

And that right there is the problem. Sisko goes and violates the first duty of being a Starfleet officer. Star Trek has always been about becoming better and more civilized and moving past the old habits and prejudices. "Pale Moonlight" argues that when pushed, we simply revert back to those ugly, baser behaviors and tendencies. And I think that's certainly something that a lot of people believe. They're free to subscribe to that. But Star Trek has always believed otherwise, that we can move in the other direction. That we can make the right choice, and that the ends don't justify the means.

Is it a provocative and compelling hour of television drama? Yeah, I think so. But is it Star Trek? No, I can't say it is.

I actually went and saw Arrival the day after Thanksgiving, so it's been a while but I've been thinking it over in my head. It's a great sci-fi movie, and really hit the spot in a way that another hyped sci-fi movie, Interstellar, failed to do.

Deni Vill-a-new is a great movie talent and just comes up with these incredibly refreshing and innovative camera shots that you just don't see from most directors. That long panning shot from the helicopter as it settles down and lands at the base camp comes to mind. He does it in his other movies like Sicario too. There's just a real wide-eyed sense of wonder and imagination there that I really appreciate.

And ya know, the emotional stuff, all the scenes with Amy Adams and her daughter, that all completely worked for me. I'm sitting there in the theater watching the beginning of the movie and going "Oh, they're doing the first five minutes of Pixar's Up" with the daughter scenes and it's all completely effective and natural and just beautifully executed.

So it's a great movie. I haven't seen a lot of the acclaimed 2016 movies like La La Land or Hacksaw Ridge, so I can't really judge the overall landscape, but it was certainly the best movie I saw that year.

However, I gotta say... the ending does feel noticeably weaker than the rest of the film. The rest of the film maintains this very high level of quality, but then you get to the ending and it dips a bit. I've been mulling this over and I'm gonna try to explain my thinking on why.

First of all, Jeremy Renner's line of dialogue at the end (as best as I can remember it): "All this time, I thought the greatest moment of my life would be meeting them. But actually... it was meeting you."

Just c'mon. Come the fuck on. This was just too much. Way, way too much. Show a little restraint, screenwriter. Less is more. There was no need to actually utter his feelings there like that. They should've known to cut that line out of the script. The audience is not filled with dummies, we can all see what's going on and where their relationship is going to go in the future. Subtlety was what they should've gone with, instead of this awfully blunt line. The whole movie has been treating the audience very intelligently, so this felt completely out of place.

And secondly... the flashfowards into the future give Amy Adams the answer to the dilemma and then we just watch her robotically, step-by-step reenacting them in the present. There's something very rote and unsatisfying about this solution. The whole time travel scheme of future events going back and influencing past events to then create the future events and everything being consistent and working like a clock is not that uncommon. We see it with other famous time travel movies like "The Terminator" and "12 Monkeys." And I believe that this same mechanic is what we get in Arrival. But the problem is... those two time travel classics were able to effectively balance the twin concepts of "destiny" and "free will."

What I mean by this is that those movies ultimately had the characters acting in accordance with what they were destined to do, fulfilling their roles and insuring the future that had influenced them in the first place. They couldn't escape their "destiny", at the end of the day. Yet, at the same time, they acted throughout the story with a clear sense of free will and were very much active participants. Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese didn't have sex because they were intentionally trying to create John Connor and insure the future, they did it because it just happened naturally as a result of their interactions and the events of the story. They were not acting as if following a script from the future. Same with 12 Monkeys. In the limited perspective of the individuals, they were driven by their free will, and only in the larger context of the universe's timeline did they end up creating the future that they were destined for.

Yet the ending of Arrival goes a different way. We see Amy Adams getting the flashforwards, getting the solution, and then redoing the actions in the present. Here, I find the "destiny" portion completely overriding any "free will" that she had. It's just somebody getting handed a script from the future and then following it obediently. And that's just not that satisfying to me. The human aspect gets a bit lost for me.

9/10

...Well, I can see now why it got the rottentomatoes rating it's got. Sorry folks, but this is in the lower tier of Nolan's filmography. It's not up there with TDK and Inception. It's not as good as The Prestige. It's dipping down around the Insomnia and TDKR level. It's got amazing moments of awe that'll take your breath away, and also... a lot of really hokey moments that'll make you groan and roll your eyes.

Where do I begin? Well, for starters... I could've maybe missed something, maybe it was the midnight fatigue setting in, maybe I'm an idiot, but uh... I don't think they ever explained why the earth was running out of food. There's huge dust bowls, and... something something nitrogen in the atmosphere something something? I heard something like that from Michael Caine. But really, for something that important... no real clue as to why the earth is dying. Corn is the last crop but even it's eventually going to die out. Is it a plague? Is it just an abundance of dust? Is it something to do with radiation? I dunno, man. The movie really doesn't give anything to us.

Of course, I didn't catch every line of dialogue, because the sound mix seemed to be broken for my 70mm IMAX screening. The problem was this rhythmic, rumbling, vibrating noise that would start up in certain scenes. I mean, at first I figured it was part of the movie. Cause it was in the first scene where Matthew McC wakes up and stares out of his window. So I figured the vibrating noise was just the vibration from a nearby airborne drone or farm combine or something. Or an aftereffect from his dream about the crash. But then it reappeared when McC has to say goodbye to Murph in her bedroom, and I figured well... that ain't right. So it just popped up here and there and really just felt like the IMAX projector was spooling erratically so it was causing the vibrating noise. Probably just a bad film print. But yeah, it really ruined some scenes for me and made it hard to discern dialogue.

The film suffers from some of the same problems that TDKR had. Notably, it tips its hand rather obviously right at the beginning. When you watched TDKR and Alfred talked about his "fantasy" for the first time, you knew that that fantasy would play out for real at the end of the movie. It was rather obvious, right? Well, Interstellar, written by Jonathan and Chris Nolan, goes and does the exact same thing, because as soon as they get into the "ghost" in Murphy's bedroom, I thought to myself "Well, that's not normal at all... that's probably just her dad from the future. Or the past. Or somewhere." And uh... yeah, hey... I turned out to be right. And that's no fun, to guess the ending of the movie right in the first ten minutes. Cmon Nolan, we're smarter than that. This is just too much of a gimme.

And really, didn't it seem like they just completely glossed over the GPS coordinates from the dust piles on Murph's bedroom floor? As soon as they get caught in NASA's ultrasecret compound, they're interrogated about how they discovered it. And then... this amazing, freakish, otherwordly phenomenon... hey, it just goes away. Nobody seems to pay it any heed, and turn towards getting Coop to pilot their mission. Huh? Wha? Don't they wanna go deeper and figure out how the hell the coordinates for their base ended up forming in gravity dust heaps in a girl's bedroom? I think this is kind of a big deal, guys.

So we just keep moving right along. And we get to the cryosleep chambers and Coop realizes that Brand is in love with Edmunds. Now I, foolishly, got mixed up and thought Edmunds was the other astronaut. The Wes Bentley character. I was like, oh, okay... that sorta came outta nowhere. I don't understand how Coop came to that conclusion. But okay, I guess I'll go with that. Sure.

But then... we go further along and it turns out that... Edmunds isn't the Wes Bentley character at all? Edmunds (first name Wolf, important detail there) is actually... one of the faceless unseen Lazarus astronauts/MacGuffins?! WTF? And then Anne Hathaway goes on this minute long (it feels like five minutes long, Jesus Christ) spiel about how love is the one thing that transcends time and space and what the fuckity fuck is going on here? At this point, I am literally covering my face with my hand and groaning mentally at the sheer insanity and stupidity of this scene. This is why Nolan gave us the corny line about transcending time and space? For some unseen MacGuffin astronaut who we've never met and known and don't care about and what the hell is going on here? I just... I just dunno, man. I dunno what to say. It's the worst thing in the movie. It's the worst. I couldn't stop facepalming and groaning. It was awful. Jesus Christ.

So that was bad. The rest of the movie is better. But this was real bad.

Other pretty bad part... well, the morse code with the watch. I just... cmon. That's very far fetched. It seems hard to fathom that someone would realize a twitching watch hand was giving morse code. But of course, that's quite subjective. I think a lot of people are gonna go and buy that. Fair enough. But what's harder to dismiss are the corny, hokey scenes afterwards of Jessica Chastain diligently writing out the formula, smiling to herself, and flinging her papers into the air before kissing Eric Foreman. That stuff is just really hokey and kinda embarrassing to watch. It's such a departure for a movie that works to awe you with beautiful scenes of space and wormholes and alien worlds. You go from that to goofy nonsense with Chastain transcribing morse code from a watch with a big smile on her face and it feels utterly disjointed and tonally discordant.

We get to the end and Coop finally reunites with his daughter Murph, now age 95 or so. And uhhhh... yeah, I can't say I felt much. Again, maybe this was because of my midnight screening fatigue or whatnot. But it was probably mostly due to the fact that when you introduce a completely new actress, playing 95 year old Murph, well... it's hard to feel that much emotion for this new person. Conceptually, I know that it's supposed to be Murph, but it's hard to care when you know that it's a new actress and they weren't a part of the past 2 and a half hours. There's a big barrier there and I just wasn't able to feel much. Of course, I'm not sure I'm advocating for Jessica Chastain with heavy old age makeup either, that comes with its own problems I suppose.

TARS and the other AIs: the best thing about the movie. Fucking awesome. Sure, a little weird at first since it's a completely natural human voice and not a modulated HAL or GERTY-style AI voice, but you get used to it after a while. And hey, they provided great comic relief. For people who complain that Nolan's films are often devoid of humor or levity, well... I think they'll be pleasantly surprised by TARS. Doesn't mean that it turns into a Marvel flick, mind you.

Okay, now the other thing I don't understand: the 3D fifth dimension bookshelf universe. We're told that it was created by others. Probably aliens of some sort. But then later... Coop realizes that they're actually ultra advanced humans from the future. Which, sure... I'm not Kip Thorne. But I'll go with that. So from that point on... I figure that these advanced humans who are living in the fifth dimension, they must be descended from Anne Hathaway's successful colony on Edmunds planet, right? I mean, that's what I'm thinking. But then at the end of the movie, we see Anne Hathaway's colony and she's still just there all alone. And it looks primitive. So then... given that, are we supposed to believe that the fifth dimension humans aren't from Anne Hathaway's colony? I'm still unclear about all that.

And BTW, I do find it bizarre that the movie basically ended on somewhat of a sequel stinger. Like, we see Coop and TARS gearing up and flying off to go rescue Anne Hathaway. Which is kinda cool, but also just feels like a blatant appeal for a sequel, which usually isn't Nolan's style. It felt pretty bizarre to me.

I dunno. I was hoping it'd be great. I was hoping Nolan would hit another out of the park, the way he did with TDK and Inception. But Interstellar just has too many flaws to overlook. The highs are very high indeed, and I think Nolan does an excellent job paying homage to 2001 without, ya know, boring all of us to tears. But the lows are pretty damn low and reminiscent of his mistakes from previous films.

6.5/10

"Godzilla in the Background"

Oh boy. Just watched Godzilla last night, and I have to admit… the movie left me pretty underwhelmed. There was a great opportunity to finally make an American Godzilla film that would really show off the appeal of the Toho movies, but I can’t say they got it here. The movie we got from Gareth Edwards seems much more interested in playing up the human drama, which is laughable, and cockteasing the audience to the point of frustration and annoyance.

So the movie starts and Bryan Cranston’s wife inevitably dies. Besides being a complete waste of Juliet Binoche, the whole thing felt incredibly heavy and overwrought. This is the first fifteen minutes of the movie, guys… I don’t think it’s really a good time to break out the water works just yet? I mean, the torture and angst on Cranston’s face is tough to take, and you’re just wondering why they’re leading off with something this draining and tragic right from the beginning. There’s something to be said for giving a movie some gravitas, but this went a little overboard. The audience isn’t really sunk into the movie world just yet and you’re already trying to yank vigorously on our heartstrings? It felt a bit too artificial and needy to my sensibilities. And the whole sequence itself looked rather silly, as Juliet Binoche is being chased down hallways by this cloud of radiation that seems to have a mind of its own. For me, it harkened back to Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, where you had Jake Gyllenhaal being pursued through a museum by this sinister mist of… freezing temperatures. Of course, I also started wondering exactly why a heavy duty containment door at a nuclear power plant would have a structurally weak transparent window to look through? That doesn’t really seem like a terribly good idea for providing maximum protection.

Now, Bryan Cranston is reliably great and gives a good energetic performance for… ya know, the first 30 minutes of the movie. He’s stomping around angry and confused and delivering delirious diatribes like someone’s taken off with all his meth money, and it feels legitimately serious. We’re supposed to care about what’s going on, and we really have no choice but to, because the camera’s all up in Cranston’s grill showing him gnashing his teeth angrily and spitting vitriol every which way but loose. So that’s fine and all, but his storyline doesn’t actually go anywhere. I mean, it bridges the gap between the 15 years and leads to the movie’s revelations about what actually happened, but his death is abrupt and seemingly senseless and leaves us with incredibly limp characters for the remainder of the film’s running time. We were all invested in him and his tortured guilt and now that’s all thrown away by the script. It feels incredibly lame and unfulfilling and seems to be a foreshadowing that this movie intends to tease the audience with hints of greatness that never fully resolve satisfactorily.

Aaron Taylor Johnson now becomes the main protagonist and uhhhh… I found his on screen presence somewhat lacking. He seems to spend most of the film staring blandly at the camera. I’m not saying that he goes and gives a terrible performance… he doesn’t out and out embarrass himself like Hayden Christensen did in the prequels, for example. But it’s a middle of the road, dialed down, workmanlike effort. There’s none of the energy and spontaneity and righteous anger of Cranston’s performance. Instead we’re treated to bland, lifeless scenes of him pointing his rifle at something in the distance, or comforting a small child, or… well, that’s pretty much it. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins are likewise wasted. I have absolutely no idea why they even got Hawkins, an Oscar-nominated actress, for this role. She’s basically just playing the intern role. Hell, Kat Dennings gave us a better intern performance in those two Thor movies. At least she gave us some good laughs with her comedy relief. Hawkins just delivers exposition with a dour expression on her face.

Elizabeth Olsen does a fine job, though what she’s given isn’t much. As soon as she’s shuffled off into the shelter, we lose her until the end where she reunites with her family. I admit, I cringed mightily everytime someone spoke her name, but that’s just because her character has the same name as my ex. I fucking hate that bitch. But hey, that’s my own personal baggage. That’s not Olsen’s or the movie’s fault.

The movie suffers from generic ass generic scenes. These bugged me to no end. If you’re not going to show Godzilla, then you damn well better show us something interesting instead. Jaws accomplished that in spades. But this movie seemed determined to trot out tired ass generic scenes. We get the scene of Johnson tucking his little boy into bed, tenderly promising he’ll be there tomorrow. We get the scene of Johnson and his wife cuddling and being lovey dovey. We get the scene of the random dog barking at the oncoming tsunami, because dogs have a sixth sense about these sorts of things. We get the scene of this random little girl at the luau, looking cute and adorable. Then she’s whisked away by her dad and escapes, never to be seen again. Same with the cute little boy that Johnson suddenly befriends on the train. Then there’s a scene of all the kids on the school bus staring wide eyed out the window as it’s crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Wait, didn’t this exact same scene happen in Superman 1? Just a torrent of utterly generic scenes that we’ve all gotten sick of and roll our eyes at. Or at least I do.

The movie goes and tries to inject some cheap sentiment about nuclear weapons and the tragedy of the atomic age, but never gives us a meaningful theme or throughline with it. Serisawa simply hands the Admiral his father’s broken watch from Hiroshima. Well, okay. That’s ummm… that’s really not enough, Mr. Scriptwriter. You need to actually do some work and tie it into the storyline somehow, instead of jamming it in between scenes randomly. Later on he gives a line about how “the arrogance of man is in believing he can control nature.” That’s not bad, that’s a pretty good line I suppose. But how does that tie back to Serisawa’s broken watch? One scene is about the destructiveness of atomic power unleashed by man, while the other is about man’s hubris in his relationship with mother nature. Do they connect together in any meaningful message or idea? I don’t believe so. It feels like some vague hand gesturing without a well thought-out purpose.

The military is going to be a big part of any Godzilla movie and this was no different. Yet they acted incredibly strangely in how they treated Godzilla. For example… they seem to be okay with sailing alongside Godzilla for a large chunk of the film. Where did this come from? Why aren’t they attacking Godzilla? Had they reached a peace accord with Big G? Some sort of treaty in place here? You see aircraft carriers and destroyers sailing literally 50 feet away from the giant monster. This is ridiculous to me. And mind you, this is right after his visit to Hawaii where he created a tsunami. So I’m not sure what they were thinking here. And at a minimum, it seems incredibly perilous to sail so close to something that could easily change direction and suddenly capsize you.

So I don’t know why they weren’t trying to kill Godzilla with torpedoes and other weapons. They’re just sailing alongside it like they’re escorting it. That seems silly to me, but maybe they’re just gonna listen to Dr. Serisawa and leave it alone as some sort of way to balance nature or something. I think he said something about Godzilla acting as a way to restore equilibrium. Let’s go with that. So if they’re just gonna be cool with Godzilla… then why do they suddenly fire on it as soon as it enters San Francisco Bay? What changed? And why would you park a dozen navy destroyers right in the path of a giant monster? Wouldn’t you know that it would collide with your fleet if you park them all about 40 feet from each other? This seems like the dumbest naval formation ever. And when you open fire… why would you do it from point blank range, so that your missiles all go haywire and strike the Golden Gate Bridge instead? I’m fine with the military attacking Godzilla, that’s after all what they’re supposed to do in Godzilla movies… I’m just not sure why they’re doing it in this idiotic, ill conceived manner.

The MUTOs are the primary antagonists in the story, since Godzilla is mainly treated as a hero of sorts. I thought they were okay. I mean, their whole schtick about consuming radiation and radioactive reactors and bombs… that’s fine with me, that’s how these Godzilla movies have always been. I can suspend my disbelief and go with it. But appearance-wise, I didn’t think they looked all that interesting. Their basic silhouette is quite smooth and angular and featureless, which makes the creatures look like a low polygon video game model at first glance. It’s not a big deal, but it did make me long for the traditional Toho adversaries like Rodan, Mothra, or King Ghidorah, which had colorful and varied features and skin characteristics. You can sense a thriving imagination at work with those fantastical creatures, while the MUTOs simply had a smooth, bland exterior with no real distinguishing traits aside from their burning red eyes.

The military’s plan makes no sense. I mean, I keep trying to think about it, and see if I remember any details… but no, it makes no sense. You’re going to arm the nuke right near San Francisco with a 2 hour timer, and then hope that you’ll be able to take it far away from the area while two MUTOs and Godzilla are all converging on it, trusting that none of them will get their hands on it before it blows? Why would that plan ever work? They already know they can’t stop the MUTOs with anything conventional. So wouldn’t it seem obvious that the MUTOs would simply snatch it up and keep it in the populated area? Maybe I missed something in the exposition. But this plan seemed real dumb right from the get go.

Why transport the nuclear missiles by train? Surely it’d have been faster and safer to transport them by plane or helicopter. In fact, that’s exactly what they do with the one lone missile when they find it in the rubble of the train wreck! They fly in and haul it off with a helicopter. So why use the easy to locate and incredibly vulnerable railway system? Especially when all you can protect it with is one or two squads of soldiers with rifles? What good will that do against a giant MUTO? And why did the MUTO gobble up one nuke, but not the other? It finds the train and there are two nukes, but it just decides to leave after one? Why not eat both? Well, I suspect the answer is that the script required the other one to survive so it could be used in the final setpiece of the movie, that’s why.

What is the point of pointing your assault rifle at a giant monster? This question was haunting me all throughout the movie. Aaron Taylor Johnson and his Hispanic soldier buddy on the railway bridge. Those soldiers on the roofs of the hotels in Hawaii. The special forces squad sent to locate the Akula submarine in the dense forest. They’re all decked out with gear and pointing their guns with purpose. What exactly are you hoping to accomplish with that M4A1 with the ACOG sight, Mr. Military Man? The monsters are all enormous and don’t really feel anything from missiles, rockets, and tank shells. Yet over and over again, we get to see these idiotic soldiers firing their rifles. Firing them from the boat with the nuke. That doesn’t work. Then the camera pans over and there’s a bunch more of em firing at the MUTO from the pier. That doesn’t work. The MUTO just bends down and eats the whole pier. Then Aaron Taylor Johnson gets on the boat and he pulls his pistol at the MUTO. Really? This is why it’s a mistake to focus on the little people… the little people don’t do jack shit. It’s just one scene after another of nonsense that feels tired and empty. There’s no entertainment value in watching soldiers with M16s firing at Godzilla or MUTOs.

Gareth Edwards must be the world’s biggest cocktease. That thought kept circling around my head throughout most of this movie. Now, the first time it happened, I decided to cut him some slack. When the camera reveals Godzilla for the first time in Hawaii and then cuts to an SD television feed of it battling the MUTO, I guess I let it slide, since he probably needed to save money on CGI. I figured that’s why we didn’t see more of the fight from a normal perspective. But then he keeps doing it, over and over and over again. We’d get to see Godzilla battling, and just as we’re getting into it… he cuts away to some utterly dull human drama. Give us a little taste, then cut away. Finally show us his atomic breath, then cut away. That shit gets frustrating after a while… Jesus H Christ. That’s just being an utterly huge cocktease to the audience, and I could feel the theater growing increasingly restless as the movie wore on.

Take the example of Godzilla showing up to battle the MUTO in San Francisco. Elizabeth Olsen sees the flying MUTO perched up on one side of her. Then Godzilla arrives in a swirl of smoke and dust on the other side of her. They charge forth into a climactic clash for all the ages just as she descends into the shelter and… then we cut away. No more, Gareth Edwards says. Well that right there is something that no true Godzilla movie would do. There is a fundamental lack of understanding about what a Godzilla movie should deliver and appreciating his splendor and awesome power. Edwards seems to revel in shoving him into the background instead. Plenty of shots where Godzilla and the MUTOS are simply background set dressing, while the camera follows Johnson’s squad in the foreground. In fact, the whole movie might as well be retitled “Godzilla in the Background.”

Now, I did think the smoke and debris swirling around the monster battles looked cool. That was always something which you never got with Toho’s old man in the rubber suit movies, simply because you can’t really create the realistic smoke and dust conditions when you’re using miniature cardboard buildings. But having witnessed 9/11, we know now that buildings crumbling and collapsing will indeed create tremendous plumes of smoke and dust. So it felt appropriately realistic and lifelike to see such conditions in a Godzilla movie. I thought there was some real artistry in how they employed these large CGI clouds with the creatures’ movements in melee combat. It’s an impressive sight, and gives us something we’ve truly never seen before in a Godzilla film.

Godzilla’s atomic breath is another element that I did enjoy in the movie. I was legitimately curious to see how they’d pull it off with the CGI that we have today in 2014, and it turned out looking just fine. Instead of a pure blue pillar of energy, Edwards seems to have elected for something that more resembles a wind, or a gust of blue. Which is definitely appropriate for an “atomic breath.” The spines also do light up, though not as much as in the older movies. Here, it’s a more subtle effect that doesn’t call as much attention to itself. The signature moment where Godzilla draws himself up and summons up the breath from deep within looked very realistic and animalistic at the same time. Kudos to the animators.

So the final act of the movie basically plays out like a Call of Duty mission. I’m serious, that’s exactly what I felt like they were showing us. You have the whole squad of soldiers HALOing into the city and navigating through the smashed rubble to their objective, which was the nuke. And always in the background is this tremendous scripted sequence of Godzilla fighting the MUTOs. And this focus on the Call of Duty mission really hurts my enjoyment of the film. Godzilla taking a backseat feels wrong. I don’t really care about these soldiers, they aren’t actual characters that we’re invested in like we are in a movie like Black Hawk Down. They’re all faceless nameless soldiers with the exception of Johnson. But the camera keeps cutting to them and keeping them in the foreground, while Godzilla’s battle, the thing we really want to see, keeps getting the background treatment. It’s incredibly disappointing and feels like someone’s missed the point of this movie.

It feels clear now that Edwards took a lot of influence from Cloverfield. Yet Cloverfield was a found footage movie, and the camera being strapped to one of the survivors necessitated the frequent cut aways from the monster. After all, they’re all trying to run away from the horrible creature. Godzilla is not a found footage movie, and the camera can be anywhere at any time. Yet Edwards insists on cutting away just when we’re getting into the monster action. What feels right and appropriate in one movie does not in another. And the camera cutting away time after time left me feeling exasperated, because I was simply stuck watching faceless soldiers in a plotline that we’d already seen in plenty of other movies. The ticking-bomb-about-to-explode-in-a-city is something that’s been retread over and over again: Batman Begins, Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, etc. I certainly don’t ever need to see it again in a movie in this lifetime.

Now after the final battle… the nuke goes off and everyone’s safe. We’re left with retrieving people from the rubble of collapsed skyscrapers. And the news comes on and they proclaim… “Godzilla, Savior of the City?” Wait, what? We just had a battle that destroyed more of San Francisco than Zod accomplished in Metropolis, and yet Godzilla’s the savior of the city? How does that work? I mean, yes, if you were privy to the entire military situation and figured out that he stopped the MUTOs and that allowed the nuke to get away safely and the nuke detonated far away from the city… yes, I suppose that you might be able to see it that way. But I don’t really think the news reporters in San Francisco would be in on that information? As far as they’re concerned, Godzilla was just equally as responsible for the devastation in the city as those MUTOs. And considering how many people died in the fallout, I hardly think they’d be wondering about him being a savior. The whole thing just feels like a lame attempt to copy the ending of The Avengers. And while I thought that tv montage in The Avengers was pretty cheesy and hokey, at least it felt appropriate and earned there. Here, it feels ridiculous. And yes, I know that Godzilla has been portrayed as a protector of the earth in earlier Toho movies. However, I would respond by saying that A) I never cared much for those movies, and B) it really does steer away from the aspect of Godzilla that I prefer, which is as a force of nature. A force of nature is not a savior of any sort, he merely does what he wishes and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake. So to see him referred to as a savior left a bad taste in my mouth, which isn’t what you want for a closing scene.

At the end of the day, I would have to say that Pacific Rim is the better movie of the two. Now, I’m not saying that Pacific Rim is an amazing movie, and it certainly had problems that weigh it down: Too much screen time devoted to the wacky scientists and Ron Perlman, and poor acting from the two main leads. Those problems do hold the movie back… and yet when I walked out of the movie theater, I was rather pleased with the overall experience and wanted to return to that movie universe. And that is not really something I can say for Gareth Edward’s Godzilla. The stunning waste on display is a real shame and I don’t have high hopes for a sequel with him back at the helm.

5/10