The new God of War is utterly remarkable.
Every major element, from the presentation, to the gameplay, to the story, to the scope, is praiseworthy. But what makes God of War one of the best games of the generation is the way it all comes together into a cohesive whole. To get to the heart of it, let’s break it down piece-by-piece.
If you enjoy your studio films with a side of thoughtfulness, then you might want to start worrying. Last year, Warner Bros. stated that it wanted to move away from “auteur” directors who demand such things as final cut. Perhaps they were already worried about the release of Blade Runner 2049, which they distributed in the US. After that film’s inevitable box office failure (how they expected to profit on a $150 million budget with a sequel to a 35-year-old cult hit is beyond me), director Denis Villeneuve didn’t sound especially enthusiastic about the future either. “Let’s just say it would not be a good idea for me to make a movie like that twice,” he told The Telegraph. “It was only when I came out that I realized we had made a monster.”
Depending on who you ask, we’re either in the beginning of a transition to a fully-digital media environment, or we’re already there. Services like Netflix and Spotify have given users access to an unprecedented array of entertainment options, and platforms like iTunes and Steam have made true digital ownership a modern reality. However, when it comes to digital ownership of films and television, no one platform has truly taken hold. There are dozens of storefronts, such as iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Microsoft, Sony, and Vudu. But no store’s library is universally accessible from all devices, meaning digital owners often find themselves purchasing only on the storefront that is most convenient for them, or finding their libraries stretched out over a bunch of segregated storefronts.
In past years, the closest thing to a solution has been the Ultraviolet platform. While users can play back their movies and TV shows on Ultraviolet if they choose to do so, it’s true utility is in interconnecting various services and storefronts so that media is shared throughout. If somebody purchases a blu-ray with a digital copy or buys a movie on Vudu, that media will be shared with a linked Ultraviolet account which then redeems the same movie on studio’s storefronts, as well as other third party streaming services like (the now-defunct) Flixster. Even better, multiple Ultraviolet users can join together as a “family,” meaning all of their media is shared with each other across all platforms.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus was never meant to be an “important” game. It’s the gloriously stupid follow-up to the similarly ridiculous Wolfenstein: The New Order. Like its predecessor, it features an alternate-1960s in which the Nazis won World War II, and you and your crew go about slaughtering said Nazis. Despite its ultra-violence, few considered the first game to be especially controversial. Surprise! That’s changed.
Unlike The New Order, the majority of Wolfenstein II takes place in America. This led to an ad campaign focused around, well, Nazis in America, which didn’t go well with certain corners of the internet. It was a situation that most companies would pull back from, but the game’s publisher, Bethesda, showed tremendous backbone by sticking to their guns and taking a bold “Nazis are bad” stance. So the game came out, the people who wouldn’t play have played the game anyway kept away, and the rest of us had a pretty great time.
Like the original film, Blade Runner 2049 is intently focused on the question of what makes us human, inviting us to empathize with beings that were artificially created, but still feel. But where the original film zeroed in on the concepts of mortality and memory, 2049 expands its scope to include the concepts of subservience, purpose, physicality, and individuality. It does this by introducing new characters and subplots as thematic reference points, asking the audience to tackle them by degrees. It’s true that Blade Runner 2049 could have been pared down significantly from its 2-hour-45-minute runtime without losing anything central to the plot, but doing so would rob the film of the complexity that makes it so special.
I’m being vague here, because another element that helps make Blade Runner 2049 such a joy is its marketing, which doesn’t dictate even the most crucial plot and character details. There’s a reveal in the very first scene which had not been spoiled for me ahead of time, and it’s essentially the linchpin of the whole story. These moments come frequently throughout the film, the world becoming larger and more complicated as the story draws the viewer deeper and deeper. I would hate to spoil that experience with a block of text.