Author: Shmee

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Shmee Takes One Last Ride With Logan!

After seventeen years and ten films Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine needs no introduction.  Even if you have never seen any of the X-Men movies he is instantly recognizable, so the only question you could possibly have about Jackman’s last turn as the titular Logan is, “Is it any good?”  Yes, yes it is.

If you are wondering where Logan takes place in the ever shifting X-Men timeline, I would say don’t worry about it.  Technically it takes places in 2029 or about fifty years after the events of X-Men: Apocalypse since that is the last movie in the current timeline, but both Logan and Xavier reference things that happened in the first X-Men movie which took place in 2000.  However, due to X-Men: Days of Future Past, the first movie probably didn’t happen.  In the end, the movie is based on a comic book that was supposed to be a “what-if”, so it is best to treat the movie the same way.  Logan is ‘a’ future for the X-Men films, not ‘the’ future.  Also all references to earlier films are minor, so there is no need to watch them all before watching Logan.

Polygon wrote that Logan and Legion signal a sift for superhero films because they no longer need to conform to the ‘superhero’ genre.  They are now just films with superheroes in them, and I think that is true.  Logan is very much a western with the horses swapped out for trucks and the hero’s guns swapped out for retractable claws.  It is a genre that works very well for the lone gunmen that is Wolverine.  A lone gunman being forced to care for a young child, who happens to be his clone, and an ageing man, who happens to be the world’s most powerful psychic.

It is a heavy and sad film (I cried a little), but one I am glad they made.  It lets Huge Jackman take his character out on probably the highest note possible, and if this is the last film for Sir Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier, he gives a wonderful performance too.  Which only leaves a couple of things to say, “Please don’t take your kids to Logan just because it is a comic book movie, it earns its ‘R’ rating”, and “How are they going to bring Dafne Keen’s Laura back from an improbable future to be the new Wolverine?  Because she was great!”  If you meet the age requirements to view Logan, you probably should.  It is a great movie, and easily one of the top three X-men movies.

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I Think I Liked Taboo?

How much you like Taboo will come down to how much you like Tom Hardy.  This is his show.  When the camera is not following him it suffers, but when it is,  it can be engrossing.  With the amount of material that they had, part of me wonders if Taboo would have worked better as a movie instead of a prestige TV show for FX, since it can be a little slow at times.

Hardy plays James Delaney who was once thought dead after his boat sank off the coast of Africa, but he has returned to 1814 London to take out his vengeance on the East India Company.  He will enlist all sorts of colorful characters in his quest.  The show is named Taboo after all.

The problem with Taboo is that no one really has an arc.  They are all the same people at the end that they were at the beginning, and besides Delaney none of them are really that interesting.  The only real fun part was trying to figure out what Delaney had planned.  With the small exception of his stepmother played by Jessie Buckley.  I was always wondering what her deal was, but then Taboo never really got around to telling/showing us.  None the less, at least they made her character worth wondering about.  Though much like Hardy, maybe the credit should go to Buckley and not to the writers.

Looking back at season one it is just impressive how watchable Tom Hardy can be.  He is just wandering around grunting and mumbling and spitting out orders, but somehow that is good TV.  Once it kicks over to someone else you realize how threadbare the script is, and how none of this may make any real sense.  If anything Taboo shows why TV and movie studios are bending over backwards to get Hardy to work on their projects, if he can get people to watch and enjoy Taboo, he can probably elevate just about anything.

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Arrival Isn’t The Movie I Thought It Was!

After Sicario I should have known that Denis Villeneuve doesn’t like to conform to conventions, but I just assumed I knew how Arrival was going to turn out before I watched it.  I was so sure it would just be a tense movie about Amy Adams trying to talk to aliens, and to an extent I was right, but I was also completely wrong.

Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks who is so good at her job that she is the first person the Army calls when beings from another world show up.   The Army is hoping that she can find a way to communicate with these aliens.  She of course takes on the task even though she is haunted by the death of her daughter.  She is teamed up with a charming scientist named Ian Donnelly played by Jeremy Renner.

I don’t want to give anything away, but this movie is all about the ending.  It is almost impossible to talk about without discussing how the film ends.  It is almost like an early M. Night Shyamalan film where the ending changes everything, so that just leaves me with what the trailers show.  Which is squid-like aliens and whiteboards.  You will see a lot of those two things in this movie, along with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.  I will say it was very nice to see a movie with aliens that didn’t involve a bunch of shooting.  It was refreshing that everyone’s first thought was, “Let’s try to talk to these squids!”.

While the movie had a lot of talented actors in it, this movie belonged to Amy Adams.  She must have had like 80% of the screen time.  Thankfully she is very talented, so she is a joy to watch.  Renner, Whitaker and Co. are pretty much there as human props for her to play off of, and they do their job well.

This movie is kind of a slow burn, but it pays off in the end.  I am a big fan of original Sci-Fi, and Amy Adams gives a great performance, so this film is well worth watching.  Next time however, I am not going to let Villeneuve catch me off guard!  Though his next movie is Blade Runner 2049, so … maybe he will?

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Shmee Rides The Tides Of Numenera And Finds Joy Not Torment!

The spiritual successor to the cult classic RPG ‘Planescape: Torment’ came out yesterday, ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ by inXile Entertainment, and if my initial impressions are anything to go by, this game is something special.  For most of you that don’t remember ‘Planescape: Torment’, it was based on the weirdest parts of the D&D universe, so just exploring what the game had to offer was most of the fun, and the characters were all wonderfully written.  ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ continues this tradition.

In Torment you play as the Last Castoff of the Changing God.  The Changing God gained immortality by creating new bodies every so often then casting his old ones aside.  However when he moves from one body to the next, his old bodies gain consciousness with no memory of being the Changing God, and if they survive being fully grown infants, they become mostly normal people.  Normal people with strange daddy issues.  It turns out that a monster hunts the Changing God and his castoffs, The Sorrow.  You need to need to stop The Sorrow from killing you, and confront your ‘father’.

Most people now think of RPGs as games were you get cool loot from killing monsters, level up to better kill monsters, and then every now and then make decisions about what monsters to kill.  Torment is not that game.  That is not to say there aren’t monsters, loot and leveling up, but more that this game is about talking to people and exploring.  Even in combat it encourages you to use your skills in ways to end the fight without directly attacking the enemy.  Pretty much it is a very large choose your own adventure game, and one that is easy to get lost in.  I just started, and all I can think about is the people I met and the different decisions I could have made.

Because of all this, you will need to get a good pair of reading glasses.  This was a Kickstarter game (of which I was a backer), so while there is some recorded dialog, most of this game is text based, and there is a lot of text.  Just about every character with a name has an expansive dialog tree, and you will want to read it all in order to better inform your actions, or just not miss out on something cool.

The weakest parts of ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ are the visuals.  While the backgrounds are wonderfully detailed and strange, the character models are low-res and muddy, and even those cool backgrounds sometimes get jaggy and muted.  Also, the combat isn’t super interesting, but since combat is not the focus of this game that is okay.

There is a lot more to talk about with this game, but I am just going to say, if you like the idea of walking around and talking to people with interesting backstories, and then thinking your way out of problems, you should give ‘Torment: Tides of Numenera’ a try.  The fact this game is so strange and weird makes it even better.  If you want to just shoot or hit stuff, this game probably isn’t for you.  inXile Entertainment did a great job of capturing what made ‘Planescape: Torment’ the classic it is and channeling that in to Torment.  Maybe next time they can upgrade the graphics a bit.

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Shmee Enters The Wildlands With The Ghost Recon Beta!

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands feels like the more realistic version of Mercenaries 2.  Mercenaries 2 was an over the top open world action title where you overthrow a fictional Venezuelan government, and you got to pick whether you helped the Chinese or the Americans.  You overthrew the government by taking out targets.  You do the exact same thing in Wildlands except it is Bolivia, it is drugs not oil, and you can’t call down airstrikes to level entire cities.  I am not sure that it is an upgrade.

Because of the more grounded world that Wildlands (also Wildlands is not a word) takes place in it just feels kind of off.  You are supposed to be helping people, but you can jack their cars or accidentally kill them.  Now if you disrupt the local populous too much they will stop helping you out, and killing civilians ends the game, so you go around driving the speed limit and carefully shooting when in cities.  However, you do a lot of shooting, so there will be some collateral damage, and that hurts this game’s serious tone.  It is hard to have a good time after I accidentally murdered some poor farmer, and then have to reload to a save.

All is not lost though.  The world is varied and lush.  The shooting is top notch, and something tells me if you have a group that you play games with, the co-op would be a ton of fun.  So, I am not saying not to get Wildlands, I am just saying it feels different for an open world action game.  Kind of like how Mafia is different from GTA, but again the Mafia games always have those moments where the tone of the game conflict with the structure of the game.  Between For Honor and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ubisoft really has a lot riding on Q1 2017, and sadly for them, while both games seem fun, I am not sure either of them are for me.  Though if you convince all my friends to get it, I might just have to join in on some open world co-op.