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Mad Max: Fury Road Review

George Miller is not a man who grew up in today’s climate of shoot-first-and-CGI-everything-later. This is a filmmaker who took less than half a million dollars in 1979 and turned it into a classic of vehicular action and destruction, and, with more than ten times that amount for a sequel, created the enduring spectacle that is Road Warrior only two years later. He knows better than anybody that the appeal of those films was the sense of actual danger and destruction, a feeling that can never truly be recreated solely through the use of computers and animation. So, going behind the camera for the first time since 1998, George Miller looked at modern technology and, instead of a crutch, he saw a toolset.

The most immediately apparent modern element in Mad Max: Fury Road is in its attention to color correction. Unlike the earlier films, Fury Road is set in a world oppressed by oranges and yellows, a deserted hellscape its inhabitants are eager to get away from. This is visually portrayed by the cultists’ otherworldly white-colored skin, which contrasts strikingly with its surroundings. The same can be said of the enormous geyser of water Immortan Joe temporarily showers over his followers at the start of the movie. The water is not only refreshing to the thirsty commoners, but to the viewer, replacing the red hues with cool whites and blues. There is a real sense of contrast here.

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May 18, 2015
P.T. and Art Revisionist History in the Age of Access

Last year, a free promotional game called P.T. hit the Playstation Store. It was a wildly inventive and terrifying experience, entirely set in a single repeating hallway. Unlike a lot of horror games, which rely on jump scares and enemy AI, P.T. felt intentionally and masterfully designed against your expectations. Complete game or not, it was a marvel of game design and, at least in my personal opinion, the most interesting video game released in 2014.

Enter today: Konami, the same company that published P.T., is trying to erase it from history. As I mentioned, P.T. was technically a promotional game, and the game it was promoting was Silent Hills, a reboot of the classic survival horror game series. That game (and P.T., by extension) was developed by legendary game designer Hideo Kojima and his team at Kojima Productions, in creative collaboration with Guillermo del Toro and starring Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead. Unfortunately, Konami has been on a roll of self-destructive decisions that ultimately led to the loss of Hideo Kojima from their company. While he’s staying on as a contractor to finish the nearly-complete (or, if you believe some rumors, the complete-but-standing-by-for-a-fall-release) Metal Gear Solid 5, his other projects are being killed. That includes Silent Hills.

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May 14, 2015
The Last Man on Earth Season 1 Review

(This review contains spoilers. Also, too many instances of the name “Phil Miller.” Having two characters with the exact same name makes writing hard!)

I wrote about The Last Man on Earth roughly halfway through its season in my “Deep End” section, which you can read here. At the time, the show’s success or failure was still in question, as it was changing its status quo on a near-weekly basis. Now that the season is complete, it is a little easier to put everything into perspective. The Last Man on Earth may have been built on a high concept (the extinction of the majority of life on Earth), but it ultimately settled for a pretty standard premise.

While many praised the early episodes of the series, focused on Will’s isolation and his forced relationship with Carol, the season started to derail around the time the character of Melissa showed up. From that point on, every episode could be summed up by saying “Phil wants to have sex with _______, but _______ is getting in his way.”

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May 11, 2015
Marvel’s Daredevil Review

The most immediately noteworthy thing about Marvel’s new Daredevil series, the first of five planned series for Netflix, is how little it feels like the rest of Marvel’s cinematic universe. Netflix lists Daredevil with a TV-MA rating, and the show earns that rating with nearly every episode, portraying a gritty and violent Hell’s Kitchen. Even the texture of the image, captured with late-Michael-Mann inspired low-light digital photography, creates a gritty canvas for the show to work on. With an emphasis on street-level crime and political corruption, Daredevil never comes across as a series that coexists with colorful Gods and superheroes like Thor and Captain America.

Yet, from a narrative standpoint, they DO coexist. Multiple mentions of the “Battle of New York” make their way into the story, along with some newspaper headlines and plot-points. Much of Hell’s Kitchen’s redevelopment, spearheaded by Wilson Fisk (known as Kingpin in the comics, although never referred to that way here) is supposedly due to the damage that occurred in the first Avengers movie. Even if the characters only make one or two passive references to Captain America and The Hulk, the events that drive Daredevil can be traced back to their actions.

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May 7, 2015
Broken Age Review

(You can watch me play Broken Age Act 1 and part of Act 2 here)

The adventure game has had something of a resurgence in recent years. After being a dead genre since the late 90s, developers have started to realize how well it fits with the mobile marketplace. The basic gameplay mechanics of clicking things on-screen and dragging items out of your inventory to solve puzzles make quite a lot of sense on smartphones and tablets, where touching and dragging are the only real ways to interface with a game. Meanwhile, Telltale Games’ adventure game efforts ultimately led to their re-alignment as a Bioware-esque creator of player-driven narratives with the success of The Walking Dead. However, the basic “click around a screen to explore the environment” model of the classic adventure game still shines through these later efforts.

Despite this resurgence, though, adventure games are simply not marketable enough to greenlight without an attached license (like Telltale’s Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, Borderlands, and Game of Thrones series) or a very small budget (like most mobile games). While an adventure game would never require the budget of a Call of Duty game, the game industry somewhat mirrors the modern-day film industry in that moderate-budget projects are no longer considered viable. So when Double Fine, headed up by adventure game writer and legend Tim Schafer, decided that they wanted to build an adventure game, they went to Kickstarter.

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May 4, 2015