Watchdogs – A Review

It has been a few weeks since I beat the game Watchdogs on the PC. I’ve had some time to let it stew in my head, and these are my thoughts. (Spoilers ahead).

I got the game free with the purchase of a new video card. I had recently upgraded my entire system and this was as good a game as any to test my new system with. On my own I probably wouldn’t have bought the game when it was released, the reviews came back mostly positive but I knew a few people who had lots of trouble running it on their PCs. It booted up and ran fine on mine though and it was a reasonably fun game, you know, when you weren’t really paying attention.

The main character, as many others have noted much better than I, is boring. Most of the plot is stupid and the computer stuff generally doesn’t make sense but fine, I’ll roll with it. I hooked a 360 controller to my PC and found the driving and shooting were good. Using the keyboard and mouse was not as fun. But being able to order any car you had unlocked, and then just go driving around was enjoyable.

Side missions were generally well done. In the vein of run around to find the thing to hack, or run around to find the guy to punch out, or drive around through shortcuts and whatnot. Its fun trying to sneak past the entire staff of guards using only the video cameras to hack your objectives. It generally looks like the programmers put time and effort into making these particular missions work either by run and gun, or by sneak and peak. I only wish they had done more of that every where else.

The games and side missions are a hodge-podge of random things thrown together that end up being less than whole. Each is fun enough in its own way but they don’t connect. And for a game where the whole philosophy is connectivity this feels like blasphemy. Case-in-point, the human trafficking side mission ends with you killing the man responsible. But then at the end credits the TV anchor notes that this man was just arrested. Its just sloppy to have that kind of incongruity.

That example just leads into a point about being given no real choices. Many others have already talked about the beginning of the game having to shoot Maurice. This is only one of the many times that the possibility of a choice is displayed, only to have the gamer figure out that there is no choice. Is this some sort of meta commentary about the nature of man? That we can hack into other people’s lives, see them at their most vulnerable and steal from them, but we can never give back? It feels like they were missing deadlines and started tearing parts out.

My final grief with the game is just everyone else in it. I liked that it wasn’t the cliche wife and son of the main character, but the sister and nephew didn’t end up feeling that different. I guess they did this so he could have his family to protect and still have a “blossoming romance” happen. When he forces his sister out of the only place she has even known to be home, she just accepts it and tries to make Aiden not feel so bad about doing it? Terrible. The mobster isn’t really given any motivation other than a lust for power I guess. The ex-CTOS programmer becomes some crazy junkyard artist which I accepted at first as a clever break from his previous lifestyle, but the fact that he doesn’t change when coming back into fold means either he was always like this, couldn’t adjust quickly, or the writers were too enthralled with a “unique” character to bother making him believable (its never made clear, but I’m pretty sure its the third option). Iraq is the only really interesting NPC in the game and he defaults to the bad guy. I wonder how he learned his epic hacking skills. I invented a whole backstory for him because I was honestly interested but the fact that I had to do that rather than have it revealed to me in the course of the game is another mark against it.

Final word is that its a cool concept and has some cool parts, but in the end it doesn’t live up to the hype. I did like the multiplayer stuff, and I might mess around with that some more, but I won’t be playing through the game a second time. Score – 5 out of 10.

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December 8, 2014

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Battle: Los Angeles – A Review

Batman once said that he was the not the hero Gotham wanted, but the hero Gotham needed. Battle: Los Angeles was neither the movie I wanted, nor the movie I needed. I wanted a well done war movie in a sci-fi setting. What I got was an ultra-cliched action movie starring soldiers. Seriously is it so hard to ask that characters in movies make sensible decisions? This movie is three years old but still I have to note thar’ be spoilers here.

Movie starts with the gang in helicopter heading to the staging point, Santa Monica airport. As the camera pans around the faces, I’m thinking what an interesting way to start a movie. Perhaps this will defy the conventions of this genre and put us right into the action with no back story on either the characters or the plot. Maybe the movie will reveal what is happening and who these people are as the story progresses. What an innovative style of… oh wait here is the 24 hours ago flashback. Cue up cliche number 1.

As far as I could tell the only point of the first scene was to establish that no matter how boring the next 30 minutes might get, that you should stick with it because eventually something will happen. What a terrible way to start a movie. I don’t even want to talk about the things I didn’t like in this movie, so here is what I’m going to do. I’m going to list a series of cliches that this movie does that I hated, then I’m going to talk about how I would remake this movie to be better.

Action movie cliches, in no particular order:

• Aging “too-old-for-this-shit” soldier hands in his resignation and is told he’ll be done tomorrow, you know unless something weird were to come up at the last minute, totally unlikely though.
• Fresh out of school commanding officer is eager to see real action, then totally freezes up when confronted by it.
• Establishing shots show one soldier is about to get married, and another is going to have a baby soon. You now know they have something to fight for unlike all the others who are just there for the paycheck or something.
• Rescue helo loads up wounded and then is shot down like 20 yards away, surprising probably no one. (Side note: super convenient that the wounded were on the helo when it blew up. Imagine if the chopper had gone down before picking them up and the marines would have had to make a moral choice whether to leave the wounded behind. Thank goodness we never had to see that).
• “The enemy doesn’t have an air force” and then they do.
• First half hour in the combat zone has zero visibility, afterwards I don’t think we ever see smoke again.
• Ambushed by enemies who jump from roof to roof like they live there. Rest of movie never use roofs again.
• First enemy to die takes like 100 rounds. Forever after go down with like 2 hits.
• Non soldier grabs gun and totally takes down enemy despite previous bullet point of highly trained soldier requiring 100 rounds.
• Conveniently there is only 1 command and control center. Thank god this super advanced race of warriors doesn’t understand the concept of redundancy.
• “The side streets are blocked. Take the freeway.” No. Just no.
• That last bullet just made me so mad I have to stop now before I burst a blood vessel.

Look, I see a core of decent movie in there somewhere. Like I had said at the beginning, that opening scene should have been the actual start of the movie. Straight into the action, almost documentary style. Also lose all of the bullshit musically cues. If you have to insert a swelling chorus then you didn’t do something right – for a war movie anyway. So straight into the staging area, audience has no idea what is going on. Do a quick debriefing for the commanding officers and to help orient the audience and no long pauses and sweeping shots to show confusion and frustration among the men, these men are goddamn professionals. So then the mission is laid down, it can even be the same as in the movie, go to the police station behind the bombing line and get the civilians out. You have 3 hours. And we’re off.

One thing they say about the military is that its hours of boredom for seconds of “oh shit”. No reason not to bring real life in to movie. Hell the time spent hiking up and back from the station is perfect time to do a little character development without needing to resort to flashbacks. A little banter between troops can go a long way towards getting to know them. And I don’t mean a contrived “oh this is my first day with you guys. Tell me about yourselves,” although done right it could be ok. So we get some backstory, get an introduction, and here we want to keep the squad small enough so that everyone gets some screen time. I want the audience to know at least the name of each guy, even the ones who are about to die.

Final point, I want everyone to make smart choices. Or if they aren’t smart then at least they are believable. I can’t believe that that squad took a bus onto a freeway 40 feet above the ground. What is their egress if they happen to run into the enemy? Oh turns out you don’t have one? Someone probably should have thought about that before hand or at the very least disagreed with the decision.

Its possible to have characters who are fleshed out human beings, who make reasonable decisions, and follow them through a small role in a larger conflict and still have the movie be compelling and watchable. Unfortunately that is not this movie. I give it 2 stars out of 5.

 

Movie Review

July 28, 2014

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Book Reveiw – The Ghost War by Alex Berenson

I will start out by admitting I haven’t read anything else by Alex Berenson. To start with his second novel, a novel largely preoccupied with what happened in the first novel, may not be the best way to start reading him, but I had the book and it wasn’t going to read itself. I will say that this review will contain spoilers, but this book is 6 years old at this point, and I’m pretty sure there are like 5 sequels so I really shouldn’t have to.

The plot revolves around John Wells, the only undercover CIA agent ever to embed himself with Al Qaeda the account of which makes up the basic plot of the first book. In The Ghost War John Wells is back, haunted by the events of the first book, untrusted by the higher-ups at the Agency, but untouchable because of his heroic effort to stop a major terrorist attack. His direct superior, who is also his girlfriend (though maybe I should reverse those two descriptions because one is more important than the other. I’ll give you a hint which one – its not supervisor), while giving him the space he needs to recover from his PTSD (PTSD stands for Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder which the author helpfully points out because he can’t leave an acronym to the imagination) discovers that someone is helping train the Taliban in Afganistan. Meanwhile an extraction in North Korea goes terribly wrong, and also meanwhile China and Iran are working together for some reason that no one can figure out! Could any of these seemingly completely unrelated events somehow actually be related? Well if you haven’t basically figured out the entire connection by the halfway point of the book, then maybe you will enjoy the book more than I did.

The New York Times book review praises The Ghost War for its intricate depiction of world politics simplified down to a smart fast-paced read. I agree with the Times review in so much as the book is face-paced and economically written. The descriptions and scheming evoke a journalistic style that is well suited to large scale geopolitics. Berenson obviously knows his stuff and writes convincingly about both the large scale political plotting and the small scale human decisions that lead to larger consequences. He writes about all the minor characters with generosity, the Chinese day-laborer who ends up starting a riot is written sympathetically and is one of the best passages of the book, though it takes up less than a chapter. The American soldiers of The Ghost War are fighting the good fight, arm in arm with their companions, while the higher-ups don’t know what they are doing.

But ultimately this is a book devoted to a very particular spy trying to stop all of this and that is where the book fails.

None of the characters trying to stop the outbreak of war is well characterized or even really likable. Each can be distilled to one or two attributes that are used to differentiate them. One of the blurbs on The Ghost War compares the book to John le Carré and thematically there may be some slight overlap, but in terms of characters and shear likability the two authors are not in the same ballpark.

John Wells is a 1-dimentional stereotype. His defining features are that he likes to ride motorcycles fast, can speak fluent Arabic, and refuses to seek help for his mental health issues. Every single one of his attributes are a cliche of the uber-masculine, macho loner. If he can’t do it alone then it didn’t need to get done. I mean I could even see, because of what I can gather how the first book ended, he could be distrustfully of the CIA authority, have trouble asking for help, and want to do things his own way and those would be interesting aspects of his personality to explore. But none of these issues are addressed in the book. He lets the CIA arrange for him to go to Afghanistan and embed him with the SF (that’s special forces says the author) to go on a special mission, but other than being distrustful of being followed by CIA helicopters at the beginning of the book (a plot line that looked like it was going to lead to conflict with the CIA head office but then didn’t because it was his girlfriend who order it and I guess that’s just fine) he shows no signs of distrust.

In Afghanistan he is supposed to be working as part of a team, but instead he goes off alone into a cave looking for terrorists. That he kills one and captures the other one I think is supposed to be heroic, but it doesn’t end up feeling that way because what did he learn about himself? That he can do anything by himself with no consequences. It would be an okay lesson if later in the book that turned out to be false. And you know where that would have been good, when he abuses his authority to break into a weapons-dealer’s house. If this scene had him caught or hurt or just simply been a failure because he hadn’t been able to ask for help, then there could have been some character growth. But what does he do instead? He asks his girlfriend to help him break the law in order to participate in some extra-legal torturing while just chapters before he was lamenting the tarnished image of American because of the way we’ve treated detainees in the past. Conveniently act out of character to move the plot along.

The torture works (somehow) and he rides off, as far as I know never to think of it again, not remorsefully because of his actions. This happens all the time in the novel. He mercy kills some guy and notes that he will be having nightmares about this for a long time, and never again do we hear about nightmares at least not until all of the action has passed. He thinks he might have PTSD but won’t get help and (other than sleeplessness that doesn’t seem to affect any of his actions) never seems to show any symptoms of. He contemplates how he loves his girlfriend, but maybe leaving her would be for the best because of the things he sure he’s done to hurt her, and she thinks about the those things as well, but we really never see these things. Unless its how as soon as she starts asking questions that might lead to an emotional break though he stops her talking by having sex with her.

The girlfriend/supervisor, Jennifer Exley, is again a very flat character. We see her inner monologue but it never seems to revolve around anything other than her work and her boyfriend. We are told she has kids but I don’t think I would ever know this. When she thinks about John its not how she can get him to get help, its not whether she should leave him because he won’t get help, its what she can do to distract him from his problems. Its how much she loves him and how she can do more for him. Its completely self-less in a way that no real rounded human being ever is. I don’t mean selfless in that she does for other, but “self-less” in that she doesn’t do for herself. Which if it were just a character flaw and it ultimately led to growth I could even forgive, but it doesn’t. Everything works out fine at the end.

If this book were a series of distinct episodes shown from multiple different peoples’ perspectives that coalesced into a coherent narrative that might be a book worth cherishing. As it is this book takes the idea of multiple perspectives, makes one guy the driving force to connect them and in turn the book moves mechanically forward with no real surprises or really any suspense. I give it a B-.

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Alex Berenson, John Wells, The Ghost War

June 17, 2014

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