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Insidious

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Paul

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Insidious is so sure of its intrinsic thrill that it allows the audience in on its every machination. Ringing, dissonant piano notes not only accompany every scare, but foreshadow them long before Character A finds himself alone at Location B to await Grizzly Fate C. Director James Wan, of Saw and Doggie Heaven fame, dolls out the suspense with all the subtlety of an ACME sledgehammer to the face, so satisfied to bask in his macabre, B-movie prowess that he forgets to offer anything more.

If the audience wants to know what’s coming, they don’t have to wait for the sound cues. It begins with Renai and Josh (Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson) moving their family into a new home, only to find previously-shelved books mysteriously thrown to the floor. Renai is too frazzled to think much of it; perhaps she hasn’t seen the horror films we have, in which evil spirits signal their intentions by throwing books and banging around as a matter of course. There are more overt signs to come: Dalton, her inquisitive son, explores their attic by a lantern that shadows his worst nightmares on those suburban cave walls. A piano chord strikes, and he falls into a coma for which medical science has no answer. Mightn’t they ask the attic furnace, you wonder, its hinged door growling like a demonic mouthpiece?

Months pass with little apparent progress, but their other son, Foster, knows the truth: “I’m scared of Dalton” he tells his parents, “I don’t like when he walks around at night”. Unburdened of petty exposition, the film concentrates on mining its rudimentary scares. Ghostly figures appear in windows, only to disappear upon second glance. Josh investigates a loud banging at the front door, finding nothing but bad omens. At the other end of the house, an alarm sounds while an unattended door swings open in the howling wind outside. The modulation of outdoor noises and transient sightings indoors mimics The Strangers, an overlooked Liv Tyler vehicle that evoked similar horror with a far clearer sense of dread. Here, I mostly just felt like they needed a handyman.

Horror movies live and die by their patience for keeping the menace off-screen: think of Jaws’ infamous reticence, or that James Cameron’s Aliens allowed an hour or more to pass before our first sighting of Giger’s Xenomorphs. For a while at least, Insidious follows their path to a passable sense of foreboding, but even the shrewdest purveyor of horror would struggle to ring any real tension from this tired plot: a young boy’s soul acting as the prize for ghouls from beyond is a plot point as creaky as the house it takes place in, and Insidious makes no attempts to re-imagine the scenario. It even conspires to bring a lively Jessica Fletcher-type to the door as the bearer of bad news and dramatic pauses. “It’s not the house that’s haunted” Elise (Lin Shaye) remarks, heralding the films one moment of nostalgic thrill, “it’s your [PIANO CHORD] son”.

Josh is unconvinced by her sorcery, which is odd when you consider that five minutes earlier he was standing in a bedroom torn asunder by rampaging sprits. How does he suppose that happened? The answer comes in a vaguely intimidating séance enabled by an unlikely World War-era gas mask. Elise dictates from the spirit world to furiously scribbling Ghostbuster sidekicks – a screwball flourish all on their own – but the film’s predictable escalation to full-on possessed allows any accidental tension to dissipate into pantomime scares recalling nothing more terrifying than Rentaghost.

Consumed by its fascination with all things that go bump in the night, this is the progression from a familiar story of possession to the kind of amateur dramatics one might encounter on a ghost train at the fair. Insidious isn’t sad because its story is dull – though it is – but because Byrne, Wilson and Shaye deserve so much more. Granted, Shaye need only show up for our own recognition of her role and purpose to do most of the work for her, but Bryne and Wilson do wonders with limited material to give their marriage heartache in a few tender scenes. They sit on the porch to their house, and Renai pleads with her husband to share the burden. “I need you, but you’re never here. Where are you? You’ve avoiding this, like everything else”. Hints to past heartbreak are scenes that belong in a different, better, movie, but which instead find themselves sharing the screen with ridiculous, unearthly contrivances, and the single piano note that follows them everywhere.

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Portal 2

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Paul

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The story of how a little-known game from DigiPen called Narbacular Drop became a global sensation is a well known one, but it’s a welcome reminder that with development costs spiralling towards $50 million, a simple idea can still get you noticed. Valve – no stranger to acquiring successful mod teams – saw the potential in Narbacular’s deceptively simple portal mechanic, and brought the team in-house to rework the title. Within two years, they had taken a great idea, as timeless and enduring a puzzle device as any, and given it something it lacked: a voice. GLaDOS, the meddlesome AI with a missing morality core who spawned a dozen now-exhausted memes, gave irony and wit to a title that could easily have been just an engaging curiosity, but was instead crowned Game of the Year.

Completing Portal 2 some four years later, I marvelled at how completely Valve had transformed not just Narbacular Drop, but the very idea of Portal itself. They had retained the soul of the game, but shaped it into something bigger and bolder. It is the realisation of everything that has come before: equal parts competitive and engaging, humorous and biting, Portal 2 is all you’d hoped it might be, and almost nothing you feared it would. The greatest compliment I can give is that it makes the first game – one I have feverishly played to completion many times – look little more than a sketchy proof of concept, and one that now seems impossible to return to.

On paper, Portal has always seemed easy. You begin on one side of a typically sparse room, and must simply navigate to the exit on the other. Create an entrance portal (A) on an appropriate surface, an exit portal (B) on another, and voila: you walk on through to the other side (C). There are rudimentary obstacles to navigate and buttons to activate, but that’s the basic premise. It’s simple, because all great puzzles are. Throw in some turrets, a few rotating platforms and an array of dizzyingly impossible jumps, though, and you’ll be tumbling head first into bottomless pits of infinite darkness quicker than you can say ‘Wilhelm scream’.

Portal 2 uses those concepts as the first strokes on a much broader canvas. Things kick off with a courtesy call. Your character from the first game, Chell, awakens in a relaxation suite straight out of a Holiday Inn commercial, and immediately it’s apparent that things have taken a turn for the worse since you were placed in stasis. The Aperture Laboratory is in a state of disrepair, the backup generator has failed, and the room you’re standing in is being dragged, collapsing, through a vast network of tunnels and warehouses by Wheatley, a friendly personality core.

The room crashes through a wall into a familiar, if broken down, test chamber, and it’s clear the venerable Source engine has been given a significant update. As the debris settles, stunning attention to detail reveals itself: vines hang from fracturing ceiling beams, with shards of light casting dynamic shadows across the overrun environment. The test chambers now fizzle with a kind of sentient frustration, the panels and supports struggling to shake themselves free of their housing before finally snapping into position. Video screens adorn the walls and crackle to life with the charming blend of advice and callous mockery the series has become known for. “Remember your evacuation training!” one cautions. Another reads simply “Animal King Takeover” as a giant leopard-skin turret stands expectant in front of a mock UN.

Your new surroundings bring a host of environmental challenges. So-called Exclusion Funnels act as tractor beams to be manipulated and traversed at will, granting access to otherwise inaccessible areas. They’re joined by cunningly named Advanced Aerial Faith Plates (jump pads to propel you at high speed across the chamber) and Hard Light Bridges (a Tron prop that can be used to build bridges or allow for movable defensive shields) to further complicate your task. With so much going on, you barely have time to mourn the Pneumatic Diversity Vents that never were.

Perhaps the biggest departure for the sequel are the gels (another DigiPen creation) that can be applied to surfaces within the game. Consider the following scenario: coming to rest on a rickety platform, the exit you seek is above and behind you on a different level. A sheer wall adjoins the two platforms, but it’s impossible to get enough momentum to allow a portal jump from one the other. The Conversion Gel is no good here, its creamy white spray simply a distracting arc of furiously pumped liquid silk. Far more appropriate is the Propulsion Gel, an orange ooze that allows for increased acceleration. Combine that with Repulsion gel to gives Chell a bounce from even the most lifeless plains, and your makeshift propulsion runway will soon have you bounding through the air like it was Q3DM17.

Obvious and fun additions one and all, the new surface characteristics have enabled Valve to build upon their puzzle repertoire without devolving into ridiculous constructs to facilitate additional chambers. The first 4 or 5 hours are a blur of fresh environments, taxing challenges and consistently sharp writing, that introduce new gameplay elements with enough frequency that there’s always something new to contend with. Best of all, you venture into long-abandoned areas of the facility, uncovering a 1950s era Aperture Innovations that is preserved as monument to scientific endeavour. There, in a world that owes much to the rich tapestry of Rapture, you hear the ghostly echoes of Cave Johnson (brought to life with wonderful panache by JK Simmons), the former CEO whose voice still plays on a loop to candidates not seen down there in decades.

That slice of history shows Valve at the height of their powers, combining a sense of history and atmosphere in a chapter that sees Portal 2 make the leap from add-on to fully-realised sequel. It’s a burst of vitality that makes your eventual return to standard (albeit charmingly unfinished; “You can hardly tell, can you? Seamless”) test chambers all the more disappointing. The plot might offer clear motivations for bringing events full circle, but the tests still feel routine; a retrograde step when it should be ramping towards a conclusion. Gabe Newell once surmised that the trick to making games wasn’t in worrying about specific cuts, but merely cutting enough that whatever remains could be honed to perfection. I agree. Portal 2, meanwhile, feels like a game Valve were afraid to cut at all.

There are other problems too. The plethora of loading screens – a familiar concession to memory strapped consoles – or the cursor that no longer indicates which surfaces can be portaled onto. And then there’s the voice acting which, if always of the highest quality, nonetheless begins to wear thin. Simmons might be ideal as a man out of time, and Stephen Merchant’s Wheatley – if a little too close to his own personality – may well emerge as a surprisingly complex portrayal full of emotional shifts, but Valve simply doesn’t know when to stop. They paid such close attention to the adulation heaped upon Portal 1′s GLaDOS that they promptly put her and Wheatley everywhere. Even the magnificent Turret Repair Station, an area mirroring the foreboding interior of City 17′s Citadel, is eclipsed by painful oversaturation: as well written as he is, Wheatley just won’t. shut. up.

Good writing, of course, is about as rare as an unmolested Activision property, so having a gluttony of material is a dilemma any developer would kill for. And it’s something that applies to more than just the voices: even the design is overwhelming. The game’s tightly controlled structure compels the player to push on, which inevitably means rushing past lovingly crafted details: malfunctioning arms pound at the laboratory walls as soothing jazz is piped in from on high. Glass panels shield us from the birds who have taken nest in the facility. As the floor crumbles, disparate pieces of machinery whizz by in far-away forbidden enclaves. All of this life crackles around you, yet you’re always looking to the next challenge. If not strictly a design flaw in itself, you can’t help but feel its at least a tragic waste of abundant riches.

In the context of an otherwise faultless title, these are but minor imperfections; if your typical shooter failed merely on length and being too enamoured with its script, it would be a considerably more respected art form. At its best, Portal 2 is a near-perfect update to a game that required no obvious improvement, and at worst it’s simply a great one. People will manufacture controversy over release-day DLC, but Portal remains as glorious as it is sublimely ridiculous, utterly at ease with asking us to jump from Turret Redemption Lines, across makeshift scaffolding and down into pools of spunk conversion gel. You’re encouraged to shepherd your companion cube through broken Emancipation fields, over obstacle, time and distance, only for a re-energised GLaDOS to gleefully destroy it. “I think that one was about to say ‘I love you’”, she says with a familiar, cold inflection.

Namco’s Inversion will arrive later in the year to send us on a similarly gravity-defying trip, yet Valve remain the Picasso of Puzzling, and this is the Portal you’ve always loved, magnified ten-fold. It takes you to unseen locations, searches far and wide for compelling narrative and devilsome puzzles, and it does so with good humour and an AI that remains a paragon of enthusiasm and encouragement. The addition of a friendly companion brings colour to a previously monochrome palette of test chambers and forbidden cake, with an interwoven story of duelling computers delivering an irresistible fiction; one whose conclusion spins on a million-to-one shot and a grin just as unlikely. I’m not sure where Aperture Science can go from here, but Portal 2 is a fresh, vital realisation of that most cherished of maxims: that we’re doing science and we’re still alive. We feel fantastic, and we’re still alive.

Still alive.

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The Tourist

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Paul

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Watch Angelina Jolie walk through the streets of gay Paree in her French finery for all of five seconds, and it will become apparent that she is being trailed by some of the most conspicuous agents this side of the SA Brownshirts. Their surveillance of her character Elise is in aid of arresting a contact owing some 700 million dollars, so you’d imagine they would allow a little breathing room between themselves and the target, but no: they mooch along in a van – complete with large camera up top – just yards from where she’s standing, before cementing the integrity of their deep-cover operation by rushing on foot to a cafe she had vacated not five seconds before. You can even see her in the very same shot.

Their haste was to retrieve a discarded letter, addressed to Elise, before it could be destroyed; in it were detailed instructions on where and how to lose those same agents (need the writer have bothered?). She is told to board a train to Venice, where she will align herself to a man of similar height and build to her contact, Alexander. As it happens, just such a figure presents himself in the second carriage, a demure gentlemen by the name of Johnny Depp (or Frank Tupelo). She glides in next to him with the comfortable ease of a woman who has done it all before, and a wildly amorous tone is immediately struck. Satisfaction hangs heavy in the air as she corrals him into asking her to dinner and a nightcap, though I’d caution against undue smugness given that – being Angelina Jolie – such a feat hardly requires any particular level of criminal mastery.

What must happen next is apparent to everyone but poor Frank. He is targeted first by Interpol, and later by assorted mobsters, all convinced that he is the illustrious Alexander. To their utterly out-of-character credit, the police soon realise their mistake, but a plundering James Bond mastermind flying high above the city isn’t so wise. Instead, he commits men and resources to hunting Tupelo across the Venice rooftops in a chase that combines obvious green-screen work with a pyjama-clad, tip-toe mincing Johnny Depp to achieve an effect not dissimilar to that of a modern day Three Stooges.

The same could be said for much of a film that, at best, winks to its farcical nature, while at worst seeming powerless to prevent it. The Tourist is of similar comic vintage to True Lies, but many of the action scenes feel far too infirm by comparison to work as a similarly fanciful romp. Frank trying to explain his predicament to the authorities isn’t without good humour (“That’s not so serious” remarks a police officer upon being told of a mere attempted murder. “Well, not when you downgrade it from murder. But when you upgrade it from room service, it’s quite serious”), but his mugging ends up feeling backward and the film struggles for momentum amongst plodding exposition that never gets out of first gear.

Elise and Frank are allowed room for some furtive entanglements, yet their relationship remains hopelessly saddled by those placid action sequences: sequences in which killers lurk and boats are upturned in the dark tunnels beneath the city, and still Depp remains utterly unconcerned – comatose, even – as to the treacherous peril that has befallen him. Not unreasonably, you might argue, when the rule of Heroes-Make-For-Impossible-Stationary-Targets is so carefully observed: bullets prove impervious to any reasonable degree of aiming, and exist almost entirely to add sound and accompaniment to the stars putting the necessary pieces together to make good their escape.

The whole thing is a sham, if an entertainingly glossy one. Even while Depp hews too closely to an understated method that suffocates any hope of expression, Jolie’s provocateur is devastatingly alluring, and her passage through Venice with a Maths teacher from Wisconsin makes for easy, disengaged viewing. The Tourist follows a formula of the beautiful and loud to make up for a dim-witted plot bereft of stakes, and if Jolie’s last movie – Salt – was guilty of the same, then at least this is more enjoyable, if barely and not always intentionally. There are germs of a brisk Hollywood thriller here, but when the same director helmed The Lives of Others, it isn’t unreasonable to expect more.

More competent survelliance, for one. Nothing bad ever came of that.

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