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eth-an · 3 years

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Modern Love and Broken Promises: Romance in Edward Yang’s Cinema

Around halfway through the runtime of Edward Yang’s 2000 film Yi Yi, the audience is given a portrait of a pitiful man reaching one of his lowest points. A-Di, brother-in-law to the film’s protagonist NJ, is shown lying half-naked on a mattress in his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, portly and slothful, engrossed in a porno playing on the television at the foot of the bed. As Yun-Yun turns off the bedside lamp and the space goes dark, the scene recedes with nothing but the reflection of the TV’s glare on A-Di’s glasses and the moaning of porn stars reverberating around the room. A-Di attempts to ask his ex- for help with his money troubles; she ignores him, leaving him talking to himself. In Edward Yang’s oeuvre, characters are often left conversing with themselves, hearing the echoes of their own voices, constantly talking past the ghost of their partner rather than meeting them on an intimate common ground. As Franz Kafka wrote in a correspondence to his lover at the turn of the twentieth century: “writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts” (230). Edward Yang, a key player in Taiwan’s New Cinema at the end of the century, then could be said to extend Kafka’s formulation to match the new material technologies present in a globalizing city. While Kafka remarks on the letter and its inability to consummate a human connection, Yang replaces ink and notepads with more timely motifs: the TV screen, the fax machine, the tape recorder, the film studio, the business card. As A-Di lies with his limbs sprawled out, made agog by the material on the cassette tape, the television screen erodes the boundary between private intimacy and public spectacle. Critic James Tweedie has commented, “the television exists at the threshold between those two social spheres” (14), making the divide between the personal and public more porous than ever before. While giving the illusion of connecting A-Di to a richer outside world, we can see how the television only serves to further alienate him from Yun-Yun; from an active, embodied experience of his own sexuality; and from the conversation he halfheartedly prolongs. Yang’s films then are instructional in understanding how modern media technologies have turned the traditional triumphant romance narrative into an “intercourse with ghosts”—perpetually frustrated, mired with failure, and unconsummated. While this may seem like a cynical indictment of modern love, I hope to show through an analysis of Yang’s films Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day that Yang’s characteristic melancholia opens up new potentials for making meaning out of romance in an era of increasing fragmentation. As Fatty deftly comments before his murderous rampage at the end of Yi Yi, “we live three times as long since man invented movies” (1:51:18). Yang’s films live up to this charge, offering their audience three times the intricacy through their characters’ ultra-mediated relationships.

One of the most compelling romantic arcs in these two films is the rekindling of the long-lost flame between NJ and his first love, Sherry. Although NJ and Sherry are both married when they come across each other unexpectedly in the gaudy lobby of some Taipei hotel, circumstances give them a chance to temporarily forget their spouses and reconnect. However, their new intimacy is spurious. Rather than offering either of them closure from the thirty years since their last meeting, their connection is mediated through shadows and fleeting impressions. At first, their reconnection is facilitated by nothing more than the exchange of flimsy business cards. Sherry hands off one of her cards—a symbol of the professional success she has found since moving to America—to NJ, who does not reciprocate the gesture. This scene marks their relationship at its most obviously superficial, but as the story progresses and their interactions become more and more frequent, their reliance on flimsy forms of mediation persists. NJ misses several calls of Sherry’s, only to dial her number and pour his heart out on her answering machine. Technology, rather than making the world a globalized paradise, then offers NJ and Sherry little more than the ability to talk to strangers they used to know. Yang then problematizes the supposed forward march of global communication, showing how it causes NJ and Sherry to miss each other’s messages just as often as it lands on the mark. The context and location of their phone calls also plays a crucial role here. Walter Benjamin has commented on the “sanctuary” (171) of private living spaces in opposition to its “complement” (154) of the office workspace, but in Yang’s film this dichotomy is collapsed as well: Sherry and NJ are only afforded the opportunity to speak to each other in the context of a business trip, NJ always reaches out to Sherry through his office’s phones, and the details about meeting up with Sherry at a Japanese hotel are routed through NJ’s secretary. The office phone, just like the television screen, then refigures private intimacy as one more piece of a larger global loneliness.

Even once NJ and Sherry end up meeting each other in person, the damage has been done so that they are seemingly doomed to speak past each other. NJ meets Sherry along with Ota in the lobby of yet another hotel, and they briefly converse in English, a language which none of them grew up speaking. No matter how technically proficient they are in speaking this foreign language to each other, this adds yet another level of mediation to their conversation. Throughout the trip, NJ and Sherry go on walks together, each monologuing their discontents from their long-gone relationship to the air around them, as if the other was not even present to comment. “I wouldn’t know how to live on!” Sherry yells, to no reply (1:53:03). She later breaks into tears and screams at NJ in his hotel room, only to realize that she has missed the mark and that her yelling was out of turn, directed at a vision of their relationship that no longer exists, or perhaps never existed in the first place. In these scenes, Yang represents their lost young love not as a monument worth rebuilding, as might be the case in a more traditional romance film, but the crosshatching of faulty memories and miscommunications underwritten by modern technologies. In a 2000 interview conducted between Edward Yang and the magazine Cineaste, Yang comments that his stories try to deal with “the universality of being human” (Sklar 6). While it is difficult to pin down a specific meaning from such a broad and totalizing claim, surely the increasing “connectedness” of the world under globalization is one such universal feature of being human at the turn of the millennia. While many take this connectedness as an a priori feature of modern life, Yang remains critical of those media and communication practices that ambiguate meaning in our relationships. In a concrete way, the trains and planes that connect Taiwan, the U.S. and Japan—the modern transportation that brings Sherry and NJ physically closer together—only serves to ultimately push them further apart. Focusing again on the boundary between the personal and the outside world, Yang shows a shot of Sherry’s reflection in a train’s window: her face is contemptuous as NJ sleeps, unaware next to her.

In addition to those features of globalization like mass-communication and transportation, Yang builds in a reflexive critique of the proliferation of video as well. The porno that A-Di watches is likely a specific reference to the increasing production of Taiwanese porn films at the end of the 1980s, which made up over half the country’s video output at that time (Zhang 242). Likewise, Taiwanese news media makes up an important expository narrative device at the end of Yi Yi, when Ting-Ting learns of Fatty’s unfortunate demise by watching the television hanging in the police station. The seriousness of the situation is brought down into an almost humorous register by the TV program, which illustrates exaggerated CGI visuals of the way the crime may have occurred. While the viewer is able to experience some much-needed comic relief from this scene, a certain darkness underlies its motivation. Ting-Ting, who is as personally acquainted with the situation as anyone could be, learns of the attack the same way as the rest of the public. The boundary between personal and public is collapsed, and her formerly innocent crush on Fatty is plagued with the same failure the other relationships in the film suffer. If critic James Tweedie is to be taken literally in his claim that CGI animation is “staging in its purest and least encumbered form, without the limitations imposed by photography” (15-16), then the news media’s recreation of an animated murder is nothing less than pure spectacle, absent of substance. In terms of Ting-Ting’s own romantic arc, this form of media represents an emptying out of meaning from an incredibly impactful event: though her former lover is going to jail for life, she can (almost) safely feel that it is some distant event happening to another person, in another time. Fatty becomes just as much of a ghost by the end of the film as the lost romance between NJ and Sherry, and no trace of him remains save the hand-shaped blood stains on the front of their apartment complex.

While this emptying out of meaning is the most common effect of modern media technologies in Yang’s films, this does not necessarily make Yang a pessimist in the face of globalizing technology. Yang himself, who attended “the newest and hottest program” for engineering at the University of Florida in the 70s, could hardly be accused of rejecting the adoption of modern technology (Sklar 8). Instead, his films try to explore these technologies’ effects on human life and romantic relationships, rather than tackling their broader structural, societal causes. Yang himself claims that he attempts to portray the events of his films as “neutrally as possible” so that his audience can make any moral judgements for themselves (Sklar 6). This neutral exploration is perhaps best exhibited in his 1991 epic work A Brighter Summer Day, which masterfully portrays the young love and hate between two Taiwanese teens, named Xiao Si’r and Ming, in the dangerous Taipei streets of the early 1960s. Si’r and Ming’s initial introduction is made wholly possible by a chance encounter at a film studio, without which they would not have forged a bond of friendship. One day, as Ming and Si’r are wandering outside their school grounds to spy on the production of a film in the cavernous building next door, they are caught trespassing by the film director. The director, so taken with Ming’s beauty and fitness for the lead role, asks her to come by the next day for a camera test, so that she might take over the position from the previous actress. In many ways, this occurrence is the genesis of Si’r and Ming’s romantic relationship, which grows more fruitful as they pass each other in the halls of the night school.

In one of the film’s most beautiful scenes, the camera cuts to Ming’s face, covered in tears. Yang does not give this scene any prior context. The preceding scene features Ming in a hospital overhearing her caretaker haggle with the doctor about her mother’s medical expenses. As the camera cuts to Ming’s crying face, the viewer expects that she might be crying about her mother’s asthma attacks, or possibly about her boyfriend’s disappearance. Then, a disembodied voice simply asks: “Are you thinking about something sad? Can you tell me about it? Maybe you don’t know where to start” (1:07:58). Soon after these questions are posed to Ming, the camera broadens out, and Yang’s audience sees that Ming was crying during her camera test in the film studio. On the one hand, Ming’s performance could be cynically read as yet another of Yang’s demonstrations of the falsity of meaning in cinema. Although Yang’s audience is initially led to believe that Ming is crying due to some tragedy in her life, it soon becomes clear that she is simply acting. Like so many other instances in Yi Yi, the personal affective labor of Ming is then appropriated by a objectifying public medium, in this case the film camera. However, a more reparative reading of this scene offers a new understanding of how the boundary between personal and public can be recast in spite of modern media. Although the director’s assistant asks Ming to reveal her personal thoughts that cause her tears, she refrains from giving the audience insight into her most intimate thoughts and feelings. Ming’s obstinacy shows that there is still a final frontier of the personal that cannot be captured in written letters, animation, 35mm film, or phone calls. This boundary is preserved in this scene, and Ming refuses to become another ghost for the audience to empty out and recreate to their own liking.

This also becomes evident in Ming’s romantic relationship with Xiao Si’r. The sound stage of the film studio is also the literal stage for the beginning of their romance, and Yang shows how the stage can possess both of these meanings without compromising these characters’ intimacy. When the studio’s cameras are off and the lights are dimmed, Ming and Si’r share their fears and hopes. Ming calls Si’r “honorable” and says that it will get him in trouble (1:00:59). Ming does not leave Si’r with an overly picturesque view of herself, and willfully tells him about other men who flirt with her. In a world that could easily subsume Ming into empty spectacle, she remains an strong example of how intimate and open communication can continue to exist. Ming discovers a modern love that is able to work within both the public and the private without letting one destroy the other through their collapse. She is flexible in finding love not necessarily in a single monogamous heterosexual relationship, but variously works with and against the contingencies of her life in Taipei to maintain and consummate connection with others. When her lover Honey is tragically murdered, she finds generative dialogues with Si’r reconstituting to her self, and this allows her to find a stability in modern love where other characters fail.

Ming does not give herself over as a passive subject to modern love, chasing after Honey’s ghost (in this case, his ghost would be literal), but instead finds a way to move forward and make new meanings in life. In A Brighter Summer Day, Yang offers several other notable features of modern romance that employ a similar ethos, each making meaning in spite of the collapse between public and personal brought about by new media and globalization. The popularity of Elvis’s music among the Taipei gangsters in the film is one such example. Although the gangsters do not speak fluent English, and can only sing Elvis’s songs through phonetic transliterations, they still find deep personal meaning in this global phenom. Although it may seem campy to a contemporary viewer when a Taiwanese child with greased back hair and a white tee starts singing songs by the “King of Rock,” the teens in the movie take this mass-media sensation and make it re-signify in their own community. Even though the film’s title, “a brighter summer day” is a misheard lyric meant to be “a brighter sunny day,” this hardly seems to matter as it makes meaning for these characters personally. The divide between a public, globally recognized rock star, and the individual, personal (mis-)interpretation of that music is then shown to be a generative process that nevertheless allows for new bonds to be made and new relationships to be formed. In Yi Yi, while Ota and NJ sit together in a parked car, they commiserate with each other and agree that music has a unique ability to bond people across time and place. In A Brighter Summer Day, music is another valuable site for modern love to make meaning, as teen lovers lean against each other’s shoulders on the dance floor.

In both A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi, romance seems to be perpetually, invariably in the throes of failure. NJ and Sherry, Ming and Si’r, Ting-Ting and Fatty, even A-Di and Yun-Yun: these films offer no shortage of romances ending in spectacular violence or dissipating in dispassionate indifference. As such, it is hard to see how Edward Yang could ever be seen as a romantic filmmaker in the conventional generic sense, or an optimist when it comes to new, modern modes of connection. However, I argue that this unashamed willingness to deal with failure on its own terms is just one of Yang’s many virtues. As critic Jack Halberstam has said, “failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd” (187). In addition, “failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” in modern society (3). Under the strictures of NJ’s soul-sucking office job, or the angry disciplinarians at Si’r’s night school, or even the covertly violent interrogation practices of the Taiwanese nationalist government, perhaps failure is a viable alternative that ought to be explored. Yang’s romances do not usually offer a happy ending, but their exploration of love does offer something else: an alternative to the rigid and confining norms of modern life that threaten to empty us out and turn us into ghosts.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. Schocken Books, 1986.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

Kafka, Franz. Letters to Milena. Schocken Books, 2015.

Sklar, Robert, and Edward Yang. “The Engineer of Modern Perplexity: An Interview with Edward Yang.” Cinéaste, vol. 26, no. 1, 2000, pp. 6–8. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41689311.

Tweedie, James. “Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs.” Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199765607.013.0023.

Yang, Edward, director. A Brighter Summer Day. The Criterion Collection, 2016.

Yang, Edward, director. Yi Yi. The Criterion Collection, 1999.

Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. Routledge, 2010.

#yang gang #fuck andrew yang though

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gamerszone2019-blog · 5 years

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The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Synchronized Sinking

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/the-dark-pictures-man-of-medan-review-synchronized-sinking/

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Synchronized Sinking

Man of Medan is set almost entirely at sea on an enormous, abandoned boat. Loosely based on the real-life mystery of the OSS Ourang Medan, which became a shipwreck in the late 1940s after its entire crew were lost under mysterious circumstances, Man of Medan is also the first part of Supermassive Games’ proposed Dark Pictures Anthology–a series of short, branching horror narrative experiences in the vein of its tremendous 2015 surprise hit, Until Dawn. If you’ve played Until Dawn, you’ll know what to expect. But despite a smart online co-op mode, Man of Medan’s weak narrative ultimately makes it a disappointing first installment.

The game’s plot jumps between five different playable characters who are all experiencing the same event. You’ll determine their ultimate fates by making decisions for them, as well as responding to quick-time events. There are reportedly 69 different potential deaths you can experience (including those of non-playable characters), but it’s also entirely possible that your whole crew will survive. Alternatively, they might all die. Man of Medan’s main selling point is that your decisions will affect how things play out, how the relationships between your characters will develop, and what you’ll uncover and experience along the way.

In conversations, and at pivotal points in the plot, you’ll often be given three options, one of which is always to say or do nothing. So focused is Man of Medan on its story, there are no puzzles to solve or combat systems to master outside of these choices, just lots of exploring and quick-time events. However, the game is plagued by a big central problem: a fundamentally weak plot.

The story isn’t engaging, as the player is given little reason to care about the characters and the horror tropes being explored mostly feel hackneyed and uncreative. After a brief prologue scene set in the ’40s, you spend Man of Medan’s four-hour (give or take) runtime in the present day. The story opens with the crew planning a dive to a previously untouched sunken fighter plane from World War II, which ultimately leads to a series of events that sees them trapped on the Medan, a seemingly haunted abandoned ship, held captive by a pirate gang who are convinced that the ship–which is riddled with dead bodies–contains treasure. Naturally, things start going bump in the night, and the gang finds themselves dealing with various ghouls and terrors too.

There are plot holes and character inconsistencies throughout, some minor, some more blatant. It’s perhaps easy to forgive the questionable presence of rats all over the boat, still gnawing on hunks of meat that have been on the ship since the 40s, but it’s less easy to excuse how blasé the characters act about the horrifying situations they find themselves in. They’re mostly unlikeable, too–There’s the cool but insecure Alex, his dorky younger brother Brad, Alex’s outgoing, wealthy partner Julia, Julia’s obnoxious but well-meaning brother Conrad, and Fliss, the captain of the small boat the four have chartered at the story’s opening. The dialogue is generally not very good; at times it successfully recreates the feeling of watching a fun-but-silly teen slasher, occasionally hitting that good-bad sweet-spot as a character awkwardly refers to something as ‘lit’ or flirts awkwardly, but it can also be annoying when the five central characters’ interactions sound stilted and unrealistic. Without spoiling anything, the story also explains a little too much about what’s happening on the Medan in a way that makes repeated playthroughs much less satisfying.

There’s also an over-reliance on jump scares, which cheapens the horror experience. One standout sequence midway through the game that does a great job of getting under your skin, as Brad finds himself stuck in a looping hallway that grows just a bit weirder every time he travels down it, but otherwise Man of Medan is reliant on spring-loaded cats and lots of suddenly-morphing faces. On the plus side, it looks tremendous–the character models can be a bit waxy, but the ship is extremely detailed and creepy, and the game effectively communicates how unpleasant the act of exploring a creaky rustbucket full of dark corners and rotting corpses must be. The trade-off, at least on a base PS4, is that animations frequently stutter, breaking the mood as frames slip away.

There are pacing issues, too, especially with the extremely slow opening section that weighs down repeat playthroughs. While you can see different scenes or experience unique outcomes with each playthrough, some scenes will be essentially unchanged each time, which can quickly grate. You’ll also occasionally have to check in on ‘The Curator’, an omnipresent suited man who is clearly meant to be the mascot for and host of the Dark Pictures Anthology. He’s a pompous version of the Crypt Keeper (from Tales From The Crypt), but without any of the “good evening, boys and ghouls” merriment you want from a horror anthology host, and as a result, he doesn’t quite fit.

Multiplayer is Man of Medan’s big addition to the formula laid out by Until Dawn. There are two forms of co-op: Shared Story, in which two players tackle the game together online, and Movie Night, where up to five players can play together offline, playing through the chapters of whichever characters they are assigned at the start. Playing together on the couch is perhaps meant to evoke that “don’t go in there” feeling of watching a fun horror movie with friends, but Man of Medan’s relatively straightforward level designs, which never make it seem dangerous to wander off-path and explore the open doors and alternate pathways you encounter, don’t particularly facilitate this. Death is more often down to a failed QTE rather than a dialogue choice you made or because you decided to investigate something spooky. In fact, right near the end, a mistimed button press can be the difference between everyone surviving and everyone dying–being responsible for that in front of your friends is more embarrassing than it is funny.

However, so many of the game’s issues feel like much less of a problem when you jump into the smart and innovative online mode. It is, without a doubt, the definitive way to experience Man of Medan, especially if you’re playing with another person who is familiar with the material. Shared Story sees you both playing at the same time, taking control of different characters as their scenes play out simultaneously. You’ll both, eventually, get a turn with every character (if they live long enough), and often your paths will diverge. Once the five main characters meet after the initial prologue, Shared Story immediately offers a more engaging experience than the single-player campaign can.

Early on, for instance, I played through a sequence where two characters dived down to inspect something underwater, while my co-op buddy stayed on the boat and experienced a different part of the story. In single-player, you’ll still see both scenes, but one will be greatly truncated. In online co-op, some scenes are expanded, or you might occasionally see parts of the story, or make choices, that cannot be accessed in single-player.

This led to the two of us conspiring to make certain things happen, to bend the game’s story to our will. We were more successful with some outcomes than others (a failed quick-time event led to an unexpected death early on), but working together to achieve dramatic satisfaction, and choosing when to reveal what just happened and when to let the other player try to figure out what we’d done in our scenes, was a delight. Each player won’t see every scene when playing this way, and it’s entirely possible to play without ever communicating, which makes the plot more unpredictable.

No matter how much or little you choose to share, though, Shared Story is absolutely the right way to play the game. It’s very well designed; my co-op partner and I never found ourselves waiting for the other player to hurry up and trigger the next cutscene, and being able to see how your friend is trying to direct a scene, and deciding whether to help or hinder them in that, is excellent. It feels like you’re working together to wring as many interesting outcomes as you can out of the game, and effectively doubling the number of potential choices leads to a much stronger sense of variety.

Man of Medan is still telling a weak story, though, as much as Shared Story plasters over this with its excellent take on co-op, which lets you plan things out and work together to craft the narrative you want to tell (and kill the characters you find the most annoying). If you can organize a session with someone else who owns the game and play through the whole thing together, it’s an excellent experience; but if you’re after another single-player horror narrative experience like the one offered in Until Dawn, it’s very disappointing. As a show of the potential for the Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan is largely a success, but as a first episode, it leaves plenty to be desired.

Source : Gamesport

#Game Reviews

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chrismaverickdotcom · 6 years

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Thanos Shrugged... or A No-Spoilers Review of Spoilers: the Motion Picture (a No Spoilers Avengers: Infinity War review)

So I’ve seen Infinity War twice now. That’s rare for me to do before I write a review. I saw it originally Thursday night and then again on Friday. I wanted to really think it through so I could find a way to review it without spoilers. I did write up a “call for comments” for my podcast blog (cheap plug, go subscribe to my podcast!!!) as our next episode is going to be about film franchises as a new media type, but I went out of my way there to address the movie as little as possible to avoid spoilers for people who haven’t seen the movie yet. And then I realized that the reason this is so hard is that this isn’t really a “movie” per se… not in the traditional sense. It’s not even just a Hollywood blockbuster… and it’s not just an entry in the MCU Franchise TV show that we only get to watch in movie theaters. This is may be the greatest ever entering in a different type of motion picture altogether. This is a spoilerogram!

Sometimes people complain about my star scoring on some movies. Especially the superhero or otherwise genre based blockbuster ones because I never put them that high. As I’ve explained before, I try to rate movies on the same scale just so that the rating have some sense of meaning, even though in reality I know it’s impossible to really compare say a Ladybird to a Logan. They’re different types of movies, trying to do different kinds of things. This also allows me to analytically take my personal enjoyment out of the review. My key example is always Suckerpunch. A movie that I personally LOVE!!! Even though I am completely aware that it isn’t very good.

When I do this I try to think of how the movie stands up to classic rules of cinematic story telling. How well does this tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end? How well can a person who has no experience with this world become invested in it and enjoy it? Are the characters fully developed and realized and engaging? How does this piece of art stand as a complete and cohesive work in and of itself? And if I had to judge this movie on THOSE merits alone, it might very well get a zero. A one at best.

I’m not sure this is a movie.

It does not stand alone. Even more so that other films that are part of long running series. I don’t expect Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers to stand alone. It is a part of a greater narrative. Similarly, I especially don’t expect Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 to stand on its own. In both of those cases we are looking at a film that is intended to be part of a much greater whole. And yet, there is enough there that they feel like complete movies. There is a beginning to the narrative. There are character introductions. There is a building action and a decisive end point that makes it feel like the end of one story and makes you excited for the next one. They are complete.

Infinity War is more like picking up a 24 chapter novel and skipping to chapter 19, reading it, and then setting it down.

It’s a good thing that those two chapters just happened to be really good. But they’re not a story.

At least not by themselves.

Crossovers have been a staple of super hero comic books for over seventy years. And the comic book mega-event crossover for over thirty. Up until this point, attempts to bring this to the movies have worked by movie rules. There can be related to other things but each one stands in and of itself. Essentially, both the first and second Avengers movies were Secret Wars. There was an assumption that the reader had some passing familiarity with the characters at least. There is an awareness that there are other movies in the franchises, and that the moviegoer is looking to see all of these characters in the same sandbox. But if you aren’t aware of what was happening in some of the individual franchises, it just didn’t matter. Thor even tells you this in the first film Avengers film. There’s a question as to why he is even there, since according to the continuity between his first and second film, he should have been trapped in Asgard. He basically says “magic, don’t worry about it” and the film moves on never thinking about it again. Because, despite it’s protagonist being one of the stars of the film, the concerns of the Thor franchise are outside of the scope of that film. This is similar to other blockbuster franchises. If I am a fan of Star Wars movies, I am able to watch the films and ignore all the side novels, comic books, cartoons and other supplemental media. Everything that is important to the main narrative, happens in the main films.

This one is different. This is more like a more modern comic book crossover event. The narrative is split over a billion separate parts in different series and the main series assumes you are following all of them. From the very first scene of Infinity War, it is readily apparent that the concerns of the Thor franchise are very much relevant to this film. As are the concerns of every other MCU franchise. But since this is chapter 19, of the novel, the film isn’t going to bother to recap chapters 1-18. They matter, and you should have read them asshole! It feels like that’s what this film is saying to you. So much so that the inconsistencies in the film with other chapters seem to REALLY STAND OUT from that very first scene (mostly due to the absence of certain characters, presumedly for budgetary reasons).

That’s not to say that this is bad. It has emotional stakes. It has pathos. The actors make you care about the events that happen to their characters. It’s just that the film relies on you being “all in” to the greater narrative that is the MCU. Whatever this is, it’s bad… it’s just not… a movie.

And that’s what makes its hard to talk about without spoiling anything. There’s no building action to this. It starts out in medias res and doesn’t let up. It’s hard to talk about any specifics of the film because it really is two and a half hours of continuous pertinent plot points. The film is nothing but spoilers.

What I an say is that it does pose interesting thematic questions. What has made the Marvel films so successful is that at heart they have attempted to be movies first and superhero movies second. A large part of this has been, rather than focusing on big beefy guys punching the shit out of each other, many of the previous films have been built around the same complex thematic questions that one would construct any other speculative fiction film around… and then having big beefy guys punching the shit out of each other. What I found most interesting about the film is that the narrative, such that it is, is built around a very fascinating moral question that places moral objectivism in conflict with relativism and asks you to consider, not only whether or not philosophical objectivism can even exist, but which side is even subscribing to it. If deconstructed to its bare bones, the central conflict amounts to a trolley problem… one where I’m not sure which side of the conflict is trying to throw the switch and which one is trying to hold it.

And that is fascinating… it is a question that I think in a different film, could be debated for hours, with no one ever coming to a conclusive decision. In this film, even though it is central to the narrative and a constant question throughout almost every scene, there is so much more going on with regards to the greater MCU narrative, the worry of who will live and who will die, the ramifications of those events, the incredible amount of pathos that Marvel has frankly completely earned through the previous films even if it doesn’t come from this one in specific and the constant visual spectacle from the very impressive beefy guys punching the shit out of each other, that the thematic philosophical question kind of seems to fade into the background.

And that’s a shame. But maybe that’s just what we do. After all, how many people really understand the deeper philosophical ramifications of Atlas Shrugged anyway… it’s easier to just say “oh, this means I can be selfish and lower taxes for the rich!” than it is to question which side of the ideology you are actually embodying. And Galt or Taggart had been a giant purple alien with a magical bejeweled oven mitt would it have made any difference? Wait, which one are we supposed to be be admiring anyway? *shrug*

((∞✊🔴💜🔵💚💛🔶)/√-1)☆☆☆☆(STACK OVERFLOW – RUNTIME ERROR out of 5 stars)

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Thanos Shrugged… or A No-Spoilers Review of Spoilers: the Motion Picture (a No Spoilers Avengers: Infinity War review) was originally published on ChrisMaverick dotcom

#Avengers (comics)#Infinity War #marvel cinematic universe #Marvel Studios #Production of Avengers: Infinity War and the untitled Avengers sequel #Star Wars

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The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Ship Of Ghouls

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The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Ship Of Ghouls