Many weapons have been used by our favourite characters throughout the history of cinema, but only rarely do those weapons become so ingrained in the mythology of the film that they become extensions of the characters, and even become symbolic of a franchise. In the following list, I've selected (in no particular order) what I think to be the most interesting, inventive and iconic weaponry to grace the screen over the past few decades.
M41-A Pulse Rifle (Aliens)
The primary firearm of the Colonial Marines from James Cameron's Aliens, the M41-A is an assault rifle capable of firing 10mm caseless armour piercing rounds, and is also fitted with a pump-action underslung grenade launcher and a digital ammunition counter for monitoring the capacity of its 95 round magazines. The prop itself was constructed from a live firing WW2 era Thompson sub-machine gun, the action of a Remington 870 shotgun and the casing from a SPAS-12 assault shotgun all fused together under a manufactured carry shroud. The principal weapon design was sketched out by Cameron himself, and its distinctive firing sound is instantly recognisable.
Thursday, 31 May 2012
Monday, 28 May 2012
Alien and Prometheus
Space Jockey in Alien, 1979 |
With Prometheus only a few short days away, I find myself trying to understand the film I'm about to see. Is it a fully fledged Alien prequel, or an entirely original film with minor Alien influences? Will it be a horror film, or is it a sci-fi epic with horror elements? Will the film conclude where 1979's Alien began - despite the Director insisting that it doesn't contain the planetoid or the crashed alien vessel from that earlier movie - or will it expand the series in new directions? We know the Space Jockey will feature at some point, but will the original alien organism also make an appearance? Or are we getting an entirely new variant of the Xenomorph's life cycle?
Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Call Of The Military FPS
Battlefield 3 - Quite stunning on a high spec PC |
It's hard to think that running around on a virtual battlefield, trying to shoot the opposing player in the face to score bonus points towards your next weapon unlock was once a novel idea. While it was fresh and groundbreaking in the likes of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the formula is now as tired and predictable as the cliched action heroes who were once the stars of the the previous generation of corridor action shooter. Now, we get a new Call of Duty game every year, each one being nothing but a minor readjustment of the previous outing on the same tired and dated graphics engine. Once upon a time, material like this would only have been fit for an expansion pack. And in some cases, that expansion pack would have been free.
But it's not just Call of Duty. EA's Battlefield 3 is heading down the same path, set to announce a paid subscription service later this year and also pulling support for its official servers, instead leaving it to the players to rent servers through the game interface at extra cost. While Battlefield's more sandbox approach to the genre is admirable, and it pushes the envelope in terms of graphics quality and scale, it's clearly a game living in the shadow of mega blockbuster Call of Duty, and the pains the developers are going through to try and emulate COD's success are starting to become obvious. Battlefield - a once genuinely innovative PC shooter and a leader in its field - is dumbing it down in order to appeal to the mass market of twitch shooter junkies.
But again, it's not just Battlefield. Any developer who wants to release a shooter these days must add an obligatory Call of Duty inspired multiplayer mode - complete with awards and killstreaks - in order to stand any chance of success. The upcoming FarCry 3 - which you might expect to be a single player experience about a man fighting for survival on a sandbox tropical island - contains a multiplayer mode with points for kills, weapon unlocks, levelling and killstreaks. It's sad that all of these games will be merely living in the shadow of COD. By sacrificing their own multiplayer identity in favour of trying to pick up a few stray COD fanboys, they will never be recognised as anything but poor imitations of an overrated formula. Originality is dwindling due to the ridiculous demand for more and more of the same, much in the way the demand for sequels and remakes has damaged the film industry.
Achievements? |
While all video games have to deliver a certain sense of accomplishment in order to make the experience rewarding for the player, the current wave of military shooters have refined this formula to perfection. The format is painfully addictive, using stat tracking and achievements to take advantage of the human need to compete, complete and collect. And once they have a broad market of players wrapped up in their multiplayer world, the publishers of these games can charge whatever premium they want for downloadable content. Sure it's good fun to play, but once you've delivered the same template in six nearly identical Call of Duty games in as many years (and that's not including its imitators), it starts to become quite stale. But the average gamer laps it up year after year, and that's why Call of Duty will always stay fundamentally the same. The developers have been pressured into a corner where they're encouraged not to change anything substantial for fear of it not selling. And thus the creative barrier is reached.
Call of Duty 4 - The last time the series was truly innovative |
With my current Battlefield 3 playtime at an astonishing 7 days 10 hours and 47 minutes (which I'm sure is nothing when compared to some), and Call of Duty long out of the picture for anything but alcohol fuelled splitscreen gaming parties, I've decided to take a step back from the military shooter in an attempt to find something more daring and original. Aliens Colonial Marines looks promising from a horror/shooter standpoint, as long as it utilises the strengths of the movie franchise to create a unique multiplayer experience and doesn't try to emulate Call of Duty.
I might even try a niche, low-budget WW2 flight simulator while I'm at it (Birds of Steel) which is currently being reviewed as the best combat flight simulator on the console, if not on any platform. I wonder how many people might thoroughly enjoy that game, but will miss it entirely due to the dominance of Call of Duty or Battlefield 3 in their console experience? My local supermarket isn't even stocking this new release simulator, possibly because their shelf space is taken up by dozens of pre-order cases for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which isn't even due out until November.
Infact, I may even go back and finish Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which was a gripping single-player adventure with a genuine sense of player choice and atmosphere, and had me gripped until Battlefield reared its head and all other games were all but forgotten.
I know I'll eventually go back to Battlefield in order to rejoin the online ranks of multiplayer, and I'll no doubt grudgingly part with my cash in order to get the most from the game I'm playing. It's a predicament all current-gen gamers face - they know they're being taken for fools, but the temptation is all too much.
There's a whole world of video games out there, and it feels refreshing to acknowledge their existence, even for a little while. Indie and low budget game studios are struggling to stay afloat despite their valid concepts and lesser financial motivations, and if we want innovative games for the future, we need to start supporting them now, and not lining the pockets of studios who have limited their creativity to 'whatever sells.' Dare to play something different.
Thursday, 10 May 2012
Outpost: Black Sun - Review
Straight to DVD releases are an odd sort of film. You can rarely recommend them due to their low production values and unoriginality - they're quite often just inferior ripoffs of whatever popular cinema trend happens to be making big money at the box office at any particular time. They're always the films on the bottom shelf at your local supermarket with the overly photoshopped cover artwork and ridiculously cliched titles. One would think they might have become obsolete by now due to the competition of blockbuster Blurays and the incredibly cheap prices of mainstream film on DVD, but the direct to shelf releases just keep on coming, whether we want them to or not.
The first Outpost movie had lots of this... |
2008's Outpost was one such film. With a budget so small it could barely afford to expand beyond one primary filming location (the producer mortgaged his home to raise £200,000 to fund the movie), and featuring a cast of straight to DVD regulars including Ray Stevenson and consistently typecast psychopath Richard Brake, it wasn't looking as though it would deliver much. But instead, Outpost was a low budget gem steeped in eerie atmosphere, depicting a team of mercenaries hired by a scientist\businessman named Hunt with a top secret agenda to investigate the ruin of a German WW2 bunker in Eastern Europe. There, they discover a machine constructed by the Nazi occult, designed to develop and sustain an army of supersoldiers capable of crushing the Third Reich's opposition. But the Nazi soldiers who were used as experimental candidates for the machine back in the 1940s are still being kept alive by the machine's electro-magnetic field, and like apparitions - not quite alive but not quite dead - they materialise out of the shadows and brutally exterminate each of the protagonists one by one.
...and this... |
For a film with a budget so minuscule, it's remarkably impressive.
...and this |
Outpost was bought up and distributed by Sony, and was quite a broad success in terms of straight to DVD film making. It even managed to gain a limited European cinema run after Sony recognised the film's potential, and Director Steve Barker was encouraged to make a sequel once the market for supernatural Nazi horror films was realised. Before long, Barker had written a sequel and a prequel alongside original co-writer Rae Brunton, and production of the sequel - Outpost: Black Sun - began.
With Black Sun being written and directed by the same individuals as the original Outpost movie, you might expect it to be a film of equal quality. I wouldn't be too quick to get your hopes up. I will admit that Black Sun certainly looks like a sequel to Outpost - the same eerie use of exaggerated light and dark dominates the movie. It's certainly shot very well and can't be faulted as far as its visual aesthetic is concerned, but that's where the similarities end.
Outpost Black Sun has some of this... |
...and some of this... |
This is the first and possibly most major problem with Black Sun. There is simply too much going on. The first movie was a simple, tense and elemental horror movie. Black Sun tries to strike up a tale of dramatic action on an epic scale, with obligatory cutaways to military commanders giving orders from field HQs and shady background conspirators. There are too many non-essential characters throughout, and too few developed characters with any real weight. For a film on this budget especially, its own ambition weighs it down.
Another issue is that by bringing the undead Nazi force out of it's bunker, the filmmakers have simply 'bypassed' one of the most crucial devices from the first movie. The stormtroopers no longer materialise from the shadows and disappear at a whim (the previous film describes this as the effect of 'unified field theory.') They now run and sometimes shamble about in broad daylight, waiting to be shot at by nameless, faceless soldier patrols. This departure from the first film's concept is never explained, and therefore the Nazi undead in this movie do not come across as mysterious, supernatural apparitions with the potential to lunge at you from any dark corner. Now they are generic 'Nazi zombies,' and the suspense and horror from the first movie is almost entirely absent. With the atmospheric formula so well balanced in the first entry, I'm genuinely surprised they didn't make a more concerted effort to stick closer to that idea.
..and this |
Also disappointing are the two primary cast members. In Outpost, Ray Stevenson hardly delivered an award winning turn, but atleast he had some balls and bravado. In Black Sun, we get Catherine Steadman as Lena the female Nazi hunter, and while she certainly looks the part, her questionable acting/overacting really grated with me. I'm sure she's a capable actress in the right role, but here she feels drastically mis-cast.
Then there's Richard Coyle as Wallace, who is much more convincing in his role but lacks any of the heroism or personality that we expect from a leading male. He is a weak lead, and considering the first film was all about tough men with big guns taking on invincible Nazis, I certainly expected a more dominant male character.
And the group of swearing, grimacing soldiers they encounter midway through the film are lacking much in the way of character development - most of them are there just to act as fodder for the killer Nazis later on, and serve little other purpose. Atleast the mercenaries in Outpost were fleshed out a little bit more and instantly identifiable.
Taking the questionable conclusion to the movie into consideration aswell, which features a climactic scene that I can only describe as Castle Wolfenstein Lite and a plot twist that felt included for the sake of having a plot twist, and I have to say I can't heartily recommend this movie. It just felt like the filmmakers tried to cram too much into one film, and strayed too far from the original formula. It's a sequel to Outpost, but it's almost in a different sub-genre entirely.
This time they're in your Nan's living room |
The film just isn't exciting enough either. When you think about its limited locations and scope, not much happened in the original Outpost film, but the consistent suspense and atmosphere kept it gripping and it maintained a steady pace. Not much happens in Black Sun either, but there's just no tension to fill in the void left by an overstretched narrative. Outpost felt like a substantial blockbuster movie mistakenly released straight to DVD, but Black Sun feels like the direct to DVD shelf is exactly where it belongs. I don't dislike the film, but it just isn't exciting enough to recommend either.
Outpost: Black Sun is an admirable effort from a low budget, independent production team, but ultimately it will be forgotten much more quickly than its predecessor. Unless you absolutely must watch every Nazi themed horror film in existence, you can probably afford to give it a miss. There is a planned prequel on the way titled 'Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz,' which will apparently show the origins of the Nazi supersoldier programme and pit the undead troops against Russian special forces. But considering the nature of Outpost and its surprise success, I don't anticipate the prequel will be of the same standard either.
But I encourage you to watch 2008's Outpost at the first available opportunity. It's a creepily atmospheric Nazi themed horror topped off with a quality finish that belies its painfully low budget status, and it's also an incredible lesson in how to make a good movie without Hollywood production values.
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