I read Dante’s Inferno in high school, and it was probably my favorite assigned reading until I got to college. Dante’s interpretation of hell and how people are punished in various circles for various sins still holds up as extremely imaginative, and strangely entertaining. A reader can’t help but visualize what’s going on because it’s so extremely descriptive. It’s also certainly not for the faint of heart– some of the descriptions of the souls tortured in hell are really gruesome. When I read it, I knew it would only be a matter of time before some visual medium got ahold of it, because it’s so ripe for screen. The trouble is, Dante’s journey through hell is more like a trip to a very dangerous museum than it is a character driven story, so a filmmaker would have to take huge liberties if it were made into a movie.

So now we have Dante’s Inferno in video game form, and indeed, huge liberties have been taken. I’m okay with that. I guess you could make a game where you simply have to find your way through hell like Dante does in the Divine Trilogy and never actually fight anything, but this is the age of M-rated titles, and a lot of adult gamers are more interested in shooting or hacking people to bits than they are in seeing a classic piece of literature brought line by line to their X-Box 360 or PS3. I can’t blame them. Video games are supposed to be fun, so Visceral made a fun game. And it really is quite a ride.

The biggest criticism the game continues to get is that it’s a rip-off of God of War. What I really like about it is that it’s a rip-off of God of War. This is for a couple of reasons. First, it isn’t a bad rip-off. The controls are tight, the weapons are fun and most of the magic is useful. There are boxes to pick up manna and health just like in God of War. You can unlock new combos throughout the game. And there are several places where you’re trapped in a room and you have to figure out what lever to pull or what box to drag when and in what order to escape. It works great because it was borrowed from a great game. And if you’re going to make Dante’s Inferno an action game, this is really the best formula to give it. I’ve said this on a podcast already, but ripping things off in games isn’t the same as doing it in a narrative. Games are, first and foremost, about fun game play. If you had to reinvent the wheel every time you made a new game, you’d have fewer fun games. Tons of games borrowed the side-scrolling platformer scheme from Mario in the 8 and 16-bit days, and a lot of them were great. No one complained they were rip-offs.

So you’re Dante and your wife has been dragged down to hell and you have to try and find her. Pretty contrived way to get Dante to hell, and sadly, this story is the biggest let-down in the game. First off, I don’t complain a lot about game stories. Once again, they’re secondary to the point of making a video game– the interactive game play. So if a story sucks but the game is fun, I don’t generally care. Sometimes I’ll even skip the cut scenes in cases like that. But this is a game based on a book with maticulous instructions for anyone who might want to recreate hell. And since the developers took great care to do something reminiscent of what’s in the book with the first three circles but then skimped out on the last six like they got bored or assumed the player wouldn’t even get that far, I would have liked the story to at least make a little more sense. I have no idea what’s going on in this game. In cut scenes, Dante is shown to be guilty of nearly every sin there’s a circle for, he’s said to have the “blackest soul,” but he also has the ability to absolve souls of their sins and send them to heaven. And if you’ve played the gam, would you please explain the ending to me? I don’t get it.

But like I said, it’s a lot of fun to play. Traveling through hell really is interesting, although there’s a little more climbing up and down walls and swinging from vines than I would have liked. The early levels, especially the idolaters and the gluttons, are the most creative bits in the game. When you get to the fourth or fifth circle, things get redundant. Every level after this has the same recycled enemies from previous levels. This is a shame since the souls in hell are supposed to be punished in various ways. We don’t see enough souls being punished, either. That would have made it more graphic, sure, but this is  game about hell, after all. I found myself wondering where everyone was sometimes. I’m in hell, but nobody’s here. Seems like most of them are trapped inside the walls you have to climb on, which is cool at first, but then it seems like they’re all being punished the same.

It’s a pretty short game– took me about 8 hours to finish, and I’ve heard some say they’ve done it in as little as six. It’s definitely worth playing through, especially if you don’t have a PS3 and won’t get to play God of War 3 next month. I’ve been told this is only Visceral’s third or fourth title, so I have to cut them a little slack about the game not being as in-depth as God of War, with the redundant enemies and such, but it does seem like they got lazy about mid-way through the game in level design. And I still hope one day to see something in a visual medium do closer to what’s described in the epic poem. If you haven’t read it, at least give your brain a little cuture and skim the cliff’s notes.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Let’s be realistic.  This franchise achieves its popularity by appealing to the libidos of young to youngish females and cougars.  Of course I can’t judge them too harshly.  I’ve had several conversations with men whose major reason for liking the Transformers franchise is Megan Fox.  It’s as if people are willing to sit through an entire film, just to watch an attractive person be attractive.  Let me not mince my words.  That is not enough to make a good movie.  The most compelling thing these characters do is look attractive.  Beyond that, there’s very little to appreciate in New Moon.

The only good thing to say about the film is that it looks polished.  The movie was assembled into a body of work that looks like it was intended for wide release.

But even that aspect is riddled with flaws.  Judging from the way the movie is shot, it can’t decide whether it’s trying to be a music video or a commercial for jeans.  I didn’t mind this so much because it gives the audience a break from camera angles that are far too intimate.  Often times the camera shots  feature one character on screen and place the crown of that character’s head directly at the top of the frame and the character’s chin at the bottom.  Even during the few fight scenes the camera is placed equally as close on two characters that are ripping into each other.  The extreme motion featured in these shots make the image indiscernible from blurs with eyeballs.  It seems like they took the lazy route in the scene so that they didn’t have to choreograph the fight.

When I saw the first movie I dismissed the actors as being awful.  Then I saw Kristen Stewart in Adventuresland among other movies.  She has talent.  So I have to conclude that she’s not taking the material seriously.  Who can blamer her?  There’s no way to deliver the dialogue with a completely straight face.  Most of it is stereotyped and extremely overdramatic.  On occasion there’s a funny line that was intended to be funny, but mostly it’s funny unintentionally.  No character is rounded enough to have interesting dialogue.  In fact, the best lines and delivery comes from the secondary character Jessica (Anna Kendrick).

The film is way too long.  It is two hours and ten minutes.  The story doesn’t really begin until an hour into the film.  I’m not saying that the final hour and ten minutes don’t need a set up, but it could have been condensed into ten minutes.  I have to conclude that the writer thinks the plot points are people staring broodingly/listlessly into each other’s eyes.  There’s only one significant event that happened in the first hour.  Edward decides to leave Bella and his family because he loves her too much.  Again we see a stereotype, but it’s used a little differently in New Moon.  It doesn’t make sense.  Now that Bella has been introduced into the monster world, Edward should know that Bella would be in danger without protection. 

Edward refuses to turn Bella into a vampire for two good reasons.  Doing so would break the treaty with the werewolves, and it would also make Bella lose her soul.  Apparently it’s very difficult to kill a vampire, so what does it matter?  If she’s a vampire she will be immortal, and should learn to stay away from werewolves.  Treaty or no treaty, as long as she’s careful she will have a greater chance at survival and attaining her stereotypically broody sense of happiness.  It all leads to an attempted social message.  Despite it’s obviousness I wasn’t aware of it until Captain Logan pointed it out to me.  Edward refuses to turn Bella into a vampire until she marries him.  The bite of a vampire is symbolic of the act of sex, and has been hypersexualized in vampire films previous to this one.  So the big social message is that kids should wait until marriage to have sex/vampirism.  I suppose I should applaud the film for attempting to weave in a message, but the movie is so silly that it becomes a parody of what it was intended to be.  Even the message was stereotyped.  Therefore it could be said that it almost mocks its own message.

The Verdict:  There are more problems than what I’ve outlined in this review, but for the sake of economy and sanity, I’ll let it end here.  I give Twilight Saga: New Moon a 0.5 out of 5.  There is very little that redeems this film.  The only enjoyment that can be pulled from it is that it’s easy to make fun of, and that it’s unintentionally funny.  I recommend only seeing the film if you have a private viewing with your wittiest friends who will riff on it throughout.

-Vince