"The Hunger Games" Sequel Is A Cut Above

It's been a while since we've been faced with a real trilogy.

There have been a couple of threes lately--Iron Man 3 happened this summer.  The Chronicles of Narnia got around to three before it sputtered and went out.  Harry Potter got us to eight, somehow.  The Dark Knight Rises brought us to three for the new Batman franchise.  But we haven't seen trilogies as a thing since Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings.



About an hour into The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I realized that I was in the middle of one for the first time in years, and I started to think about the whole thing differently.  By the end, I was convinced that we were looking at a pretty darn good one.

Trilogies are a tough business but they make a gorgeous structural challenge, with beautiful potential.  Look at the Star Wars films--if we only had a sequel, we would get Hoth but not Endor, Yoda but not Jabba.  If The Lord of the Rings ended with The Two Towers, we would explore Rohan but not Gondor, Theoden but not Denethor.  A trilogy gives a chance to explore deeply the world we have already met once, and to change our relationships with things we thought we understood.



Gosh, am I getting emotional?  So Catching Fire starts us in an unspecified amount of time after the first film, when Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Malark (Josh Hutcherson) jointly won a yearly massacre funded by the Capital of Pan Am to appease and distract the starving inhabitants of its Twelve Districts.  In order to win, Katniss and Peeta staged a sort of on-screen love affair that the world got attached to.  Katniss did it against her judgment, as she still had some sorta feelings for Gale back home, but Peeta from all accounts seems to reciprocate.

Katniss is a tough protagonist this time around.  At first glance, she seems weak.  Katniss is still haunted by the murders she committed the previous year, and Gale (whose only apparent virtue is being Liam Hemsworth) is still haunted by all the smackers she laid on Shorty McBreadmaka. And of course, like any self-respecting pseudo-boyfriend, he stays mopey about it for the entire movie.  Still, Ms. Lawrence's Katniss is still the most kick-butt heroine we've seen on screen for a while.  The middle installment of the trilogy shows a near-manic side of her, but the things we value her for (her love of her family, her self-sacrifice, and her prowess as a fighter) remain unchanged.

She seems weak, however, because she rarely makes decisions or follows clear objectives.  To her credit, Ms. Lawrence is not afraid of contorting her face in anguish, grief, or fury, but Katniss is even more accidental of a heroine this time than she was last time.  When attacked by a frightening sound of her sister being tortured, she curls up into a ball, showing no nerve.  When helping a wounded woman, she can do little else but give her a watered cloth and say "That should help" and run away.  At first this bothered me, but I think it's somewhat necessary.  In order for Katniss to come into her own as a powerful figure in the third film, she must go through a time of weakness here.



The film's story is surprisingly elaborate and surprisingly long, and both of these surprises thrilled me.  In an age where good stories are being compressed for movie-munching mindless audiences who can't sit still for two and a half hours, Francis Lawrence and company take their time, and it pays off.  Catching Fire, while full of heart-pounding action sequences, interesting characters, and an epic story, takes enough time to balance it with quiet moments of conversation, character development, and feeling.

Numerous characters stand out, and one of the film's strength is that all of them mean something to us by the end.  From Donald Sutherland's difficult tyrant President Snow to Jena Malone's elevator-stripping, f-word shouting Johanna Mason, portraits in Catching Fire always come three-dimensionally.  The film doesn't let us write off characters as bad, self-centered, or stupid.  Of particular note: Finnick Odair (Sam Claflin), an arrogant-rival-turned-friend, shimmers with complexity.  Mr. Claflin balances shirtless shallow-boy with selfless caretaker, and his journey for the audience is an achievement by the whole team.  Plutarch Heavensbee, the enigmatic new Gamemaker, is clearly important because he is played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, but even the Great PSH manages to live in the world of the Hunger Games believably and with the proper weight.



But the real star of the film is Mr. Hutcherson's Peeta Malark.  In an early scene with Katniss on a train, he admits "I don't really know you.  Friends tell each other the deep stuff." "Like what?" she replies. "What's your favorite color?" he asks. "Now, that's going too far," she answers.  I connected with Peeta because in a world where any sort of normalcy or friendship seems impossible, Peeta is trying to make things work.  Where Katniss often stands by, mouth contorted by fear or pain or wrath, and does nothing, Peeta steps in.  He makes bold moves.  He tries to help people, even as they are dying in his hands.

This might come from his need to be loved.  Everyone loves Katniss, but Peeta admits "Nobody needs me".  It's the same old unrequited love story, but Peeta gets the credit that is due to many unrequited lovers--they fight for what they want.  He is made even more heroic by Haymitch's description of him to Katniss: "You could live a thousand lifetimes and not deserve him." In yet another stroke of subtlety, the film doesn't let us love people simply because they are handsome or romantice--it asks to question why we do.

Like a good trilogy, Catching Fire lets us look at the characters and the story through a new lens.  The political commentary is never terribly deep and the moral lessons are surprisingly shallow for such a twisted story, but the characters make it worth seeing and experiencing.  It asks us to question our American-Idol style celebrity worship and asks us why we follow people, why we believe in other people.  This is still young adult literature, but rarely is such material treated with this kind of respect.

"Ender's Game" is Beautiful, Thoughtful

When I was eleven, my mother brought me to an audition for a Children's Chorus.  I capitalize those words for a reason--the three years I spent there demanded excellence from me in ways I had never expected.  In my first audition we were given a piece of music, taught it in a group of 300, and asked to come to the front of the group and sing for the rest.  Seeing a pattern in others' manner of doing things, I gathered my wits, memorized the words, and set down the paper on the auditioner's table before singing.  I was part of the eighty or so children who moved on from that audition and joined the chorus.

I felt like a loner for almost my entire experience in that chorus.  I accidentally hurt myself very stupidly in school during that time, and several other singers mocked my bandages, reinforcing my sense of absolute loneliness.  I barely made any friends, even at the summer camps we attended, and I spent all my energy trying to sing as well as I could.  Not make friends with the leaders, not make friends--I worked as hard as I could.  I saw other singers as rivals, and when I got solos over them, I rejoiced inwardly.  I was not a child prodigy, but I fought like one.  Perhaps for this reason, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is one of the shaping stories of my childhood.  Though it surely is not perfect, Gavin Hood's adaptation does a passable job of bringing it to us untainted and unhindered.



"Young people integrate complex data more easily than grown-ups," says Colonel Hyrum Graff, the hard-bitten recruiter (played with a thoughtful ruthlessness by Harrison Ford) to Ender, the young strategical prodigy.  Graff has a hard job: enlisting young minds to help humanity wipe out the aliens that almost killed them fifty years ago.  His journey and Ender's--not only to save humanity but to become adults in the process--is the basis of one of the most powerful, emotional, and effective pieces of science fiction ever written.

The story is centered on children fighting one another.  Even in his small school on Earth, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin beats everyone.  His strategy makes a much bigger boy call him a cheater, and when the boy corners Ender after school, Ender gives him a beating that makes the other cronies tremble.  He is not only smart, he is vicious--characteristics that make Ender at once frightening and fascinating.



Ender's nature as a fighter is very much played down in the film.  Asa Butterfield's performance shows a consistently compassionate, thinking boy who cries more than he shouts.  Though the screenplay shows him talking too much about his near-psychopathic brother Peter, he is clearly more like his sister Valentine (played lovingly but not very deeply by Abigail Breslin) whose compassion made her unfit for Battle School.

But fit is exactly what Ender is, and a housecall from Graff and a Colonel Anderson (Viola Davis) sends Ender skyrocketing up into orbit, where a few score children under the age of sixteen train for combat, leadership, and the eventual command of Earth's Fleet.



And this is where the games begin.  Once there, Ender and his new friends (enemies) are thrown into a zero-gravity space game that allows them to experiment, lead, and fight one another.  The film presents the idea more excitingly than could have possibly been done even ten years ago, and it is a sight to behold.  The few matches that we actually see are gripping and exciting, and the victories are satisfying.

The great weakness of the film comes in its first forty minutes.  Main characters are introduced and voiceovers tell us why they are important, but rarely do we get to see the interactions that make them that way.  Bean and Petra, key characters from the book, never have true interactions with Ender to show us why to care about them.  Thus their quips, little glances, and interactions later do not come with the emotional impact that makes the end of the book so moving.  The entire story clips along so fast that even Ender's family does not draw us as much as the beauty of the game.

Though it weakens the film completely, it still is somewhat appropriate.  Ender's Game reminds us how believing children are.  If they are told that the people around them are their rivals, their competition, they will believe.  They will fight one another, even when it makes them depressive, even when it makes them insane.  This game that may not be as serious as everyone believes comes to rule these children's lives, until they are willing to kill one another for it.



But the movie also explores compassion as an antidote or even a companion to competition.  The game begins with a text quote from "A.E. Wiggin" saying "In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him"--an axiom that, though arguable, brings up some interesting questions.  Ender thinks constantly about how to deal with his opponents compassionately, or more significantly with those he commands.  In order for him to succeed, Ender must know the weaknesses and strengths of his friends as well as his enemies.

The rest of the film brings us farther from the battle room and from Earth, to simulations of space battles with the aliens.  These antlike creatures, called Formics, possess a massiveness and terror that, through impressive work on the part of all the creators involved, become beautiful in their own way.  Ender's journey questions what the effect of any battle, even a simulated one, has on our consciousness and the way we view the world.



In the end, Ender's most impressive quality is his story.  The film can have all the weaknesses it will, but the depth of its story and the issues it considers might make it one of the best science fiction films ever, easily surpassing the Star Wars series for depth of meaning and emotional imagination.  Given these things, it is incredible that portions of the film community can brush off something so intelligent and worth-considering because of opinions held by the original author or (worse) because of the man's religion.  Such a thing is so petty that I wonder if even these children would do it.

I highly recommend Ender's Game, the film, and the book even more highly.  In watching it I considered myself again.  I have never been to Battle School, never fought aliens, but I have been a child who thought he had to fight other children in order to be better.  I have thought winning was better than friendship, that survival was better than love.  This book helped me recognize the cost of excellence, and though I do not think that I am perfect yet, I am glad to be able to look back and say that I have found, like Ender, a higher purpose.  I hope someday to teach this to my children, and when I do, it might be after we watch the 2013 film of Ender's Game.

'Thor' Is Not The Hero We Need

A few years ago, in another superhero galaxy, we heard: "He's the hero that Gotham deserves, but not the one that Gotham needs right now. So we'll junt him.". Batman, made a criminal, rode off into the night in the twilight of the best superhero movie perhaps ever made. The world considered anew what it meant to be a hero, the human toll of obsession, and the insanity of unbridled self-reliance.

Last night I watched "The Dark World", and as armored, red-caped Thor (Chris Hemsworth) bounded from a London street into a dark red cloud of CGI Evil, a shot of his lover-girl Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) showed a big red bus in the background. The ad on its side blared cheekily a false movie poster, for a film called "Moral Sacrifice". You, like me, might sense a lack of literary value.

Despite its clunkiness, "Thor: The Dark World" starts explosively. The beginning sequences shovel heaps of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings onto the pile, and it's admittedly glorious. Asgard soldiers (read Elves) swing glowy swords (read lightsabers) at white-helmed laser-shootin (Stormtroopers) foes, dark forces are locked away, and ashy landscapes in The Dark World contrast with the gold, fertile castles of Asgard. For anyone who has ears to hear, I kept waiting for some Protoss to show up.

See what I mean?

More impressive than the animators and art designers, however, is the establishment of characters. Tom Hiddleston's ever-Shakespearean Loki arrives in chains like an imprisoned Aaron (Titus Andronicus),Thor himself arrives making quips like Petruchio, and a particularly well-written scene shows the romantic tension and unrequited interest between Sif and Thor. Some of these moments are so believable, creating characters with whom we can connect, that I can legitimately compare it to the Lord of the Rings.  Elegant, deep, simple.

The rest of the film fails on this.  Sif, easily the most compelling and least predictable character, is shunted out of the limelight before she's had two seconds in it.  A lengthy subplot with Loki, instead of bringing any changes to his and Thor's relationship, resorts to name calling, even in a scene on a boat that had at least some potential.

Natalie Portman gets entangled in the plot, which seems basically to be: The bad guys need the red goo in order to destroy the universe.  The good guys fight them.  Poor Jane Foster gets some of the goo in her blood, making her dangerous and doing absolutely nothing to her in any other way.  (Another shoutout to the animators for the scene where is examined by Asgard "doctors" using some very fun equipment, clearly touch screen but cooler even than what us earthlings have.) Portman pales in comparison to Freda (Thor's mother) and Sif, who not only are totally awesome fighters and independent women, but stay modestly dressed throughout the whole film (if you're worried about nudity, Thor's impressive breasts are thoughtfully considered by the camera at one point).

The story is predictable, the fights are interesting but never emotionally compelling, and worst, Thor does not change in any way.  As a hero, he has no characteristics to admire or dislike.  He is blandly righteous, blandly temperamental, and blandly self-sacrificing.  Sort of.  Even when he is in danger he comes out with wounds that avoid his beautiful features.

Here I know I am in a comic book, not a story about heroes. Thor is a brightly drawn figure with very few defining lines, drawn by animators who make money on making more books. He "sacrifices" for his friends, and it leaves us thinking, "you know, I would do that. I would walk through fire for the people I care about".  What a good thing to be encouraged.  But that's rarely a story we live. Rarely are we faced with someone near death who we can heroically save. But we are faced every day with people who need help. Little things can be cries for help.  We can help even when we are not asked, instead of waiting until it makes us look heroic.  We can choose to open ourselves up and be vulnerable, allowing our faults and failures to be seen.  We can choose to care.  Thor does none of those, and still gets offered to be the King of Asgard.  It doesn't seem to be a good recipe for me for real heroism.

If Marvel is really hitting its stride in Thor, it is in connecting it stylistically with its source material.  Comic books were intentionally numerous, serialized, and individually rather bland.  We can feel comic book sensibilities in the naked Dr. Selvig running around Stonehenge, with Thor's hammer chasing him around the nine realms, with Jane's silly sidekick.

Perhaps it is a success, then, just not in my style.  The reboot genre has become a medium with value because it allows us to reconsider old things.  Thor: The Dark World is instead a loving revisiting of the same old melodrama.

The Math Solves All The Problems in Formulaic "Safe Haven"

I watched this movie on the 9-hour plane ride from London to Minneapolis.  In my state of time confusion, "The Place Beyond the Pines" was a little too intense and deep, I'd already seen "Gatsby", and "Oblivion" didn't catch my interest.  So I tried out "Safe Haven", which I'd seen trailers for and thought "I could like this for an hour and a half."

It tells the story of Katie, a girl who flees home because of a danger we don't understand and settles in a tiny North Carolina town.  There, she makes the acquaintance of Alex, a cheery widower who runs a little shop for people taking the bus through town.  He's got two children--adorable gap-toothed Lexie and disobedient, stern Josh who misses his mom.  I bet you have no idea where this is going.  If you really don't, I'll give you a clue.




Yeah, let's just say surprise is not really a part of the story.  She ends up with the guy, big surprise, he helps her solve her problems.

The first line that stuck out to me was a transaction.  She comes to his little store after escaping scary-man-Dan, and she buys something, and he says "That'll be 97 cents." I wonder what on earth these days costs 97 cents!  Did he not make her pay taxes?  The reason it stuck out to me is, because, like the rest of the movie, it was too easy.  The math works out.  You only have to pay three cents in change.  I was struck by this when she came again to get groceries, and he said "That'll be 18 even.  Out of 20?" Once again, two bucks change.  Let alone the romance, I just can't believe that all that food is this cheap.

"Safe Haven" falls into a genre of movies where unchallenged audience members watch people in an almost-perfect situation find their way into a basically-perfect situation.  What self-respecting girl doesn't want to come out of a bad breakup with the wrong guy and immediately encounter a selfless, gentle, normal guy who will take care of her come hell or high water?  And what self-respecting small-town convenience store widower doesn't want some humble, beautiful girl to come along, revitalize your life with a jolt of love, and become best friends with your kids who you feel you can't raise by yourself?  There's a soothing quality to watching things work out okay.  Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel have a nice chemistry, she appears to be able to speak English and look like an absolute bombshell all the time, and he actually acts most of the time, and it's nice.



The North Carolina setting is charming and underused, and the little girl is adorable even if she is so unrealistic and perfect as to be ridiculous.  The villain is only useful for making Judd Fry jokes.  It's a shame that it's so predictable, as I found myself pausing the movie and wondering how they intended to fill in another hour and a half of it.  Luckily I had a book with me to read during the boring parts.

Still, there's something to be said for a world in which such movies exist.  Besides the mathematics of love, which abound here, another idea surfaces, that of Tribe Dynamics.  Not only is Man lacking one (1) female, Woman needs one (1) protector, and both children need one (1) mother.  The real satisfaction of this film actually doesn't come from seeing beautiful people fall in love and vicariously enjoy their emotional and physical pleasures.  It comes from watching roles be filled and a narrative of happiness take place.  That's why it's a Tribe movie--not only does Katie come to love Alex, she comes to love the city and to be a part of it in a special way.  She fills a role, many roles, and I realized watching the movie that transcending non-entity status to become something is, for many, the great relief of life.

Literary folk and critics gawk at such a base display in a film (you know, such an elevated medium with its long history of not-shallowness) and thus give it a probably deserving 13% on Rotten Tomatoes.




Still, I think it's fascinating that humans find Love to be such a big deal, as it is such an everyday feeling.  The welcome arms of acceptance and the thrill of being able to make someone else happy drive us to complete the tasks that civilization lays upon us like bricks on Egyptian slaves.  And "Safe Haven" shows a sort of naive view of how it could work, a fantasy of seeing things work out okay, and only costing 97 cents.  I guess that's the part that's naive and predictable.

You probably don't have to watch "Safe Haven".  You could watch the trailer and get most of what I got out of it.  That is, if you're human.  If you're an alien, this is a great anthropological study about some pretty basic human ideas.  And it's got pop music in the credits, if you need incentive.

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" Is Gaiman's Anchor Work

The teeny little book that a friend gave me as I visited home, a thin hardcover that seemed bite-sized compared to the last four books I'd read, proclaimed itself A Novel under its big title and beautiful cover art.  I gave a knowing little hm.  Neil Gaiman was selling this book differently.  I wondered why, a little, and then forwent the thinking about it and just read the darn thing.



Neil Gaiman gets by on many things, but the key is charisma.  Tall, curly-haired, with a sort of knowing glint in his eyes, he draws an audience like a flea draws varmints--in multitudes, apparently.  He is the Joss Whedon of fantasy writing, and it's little wonder.

Those caught up in the dank labyrinth of Game of Thrones love George R.R. Martin, but the enormously-bearded man is not a peerlike, inquisitive sage, but instead a crafty, devious storyteller who has it in for everyone in his stories--the bloodier, the better, especially if they get naked a few times beforehand.  Supporters of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Jordan are more like archaeologists than bookworms, and Brandon Sanderson lovers "really dig" the dude who writes such "awesome" stuff.

Fantasy writing has its nuances, just as any genre, and Neil Gaiman avoids a certain camp: the camp of making-up-your-own-names, inventing crazy new species, making a storyworld you could play D&D in.  Gaiman pulls out of mythology, folklore, and the urban obscure.  Besides Stardust, his major works are universally set in the modern day, with protagonists living normal lives presented with the delirium, confusion, and beauty of the Other world.  And this is where he finds his niche, his charisma, and his magnetic draw:

Whereas other writers spin fantasies out of their dreams to amuse, startle, and teach, Gaiman always seems, just a little bit, to believe.  His fiction shows the reader a world that lurks beneath their apartment building, or at the other end of the pond behind their house, and instead of a neat moral to tie things up, the final temptation always asks "Why don't you take a look?"



Considering this introduction, it's important to point out that The Ocean at the End of the Lane is, essentially, a Neil Gaiman novel.  It follows his patterns, reads in his understated, clearly enunciated voice, and charms and enraptures as he knows so well how to do.

But The Ocean at the End of the Lane is more.

The book tells the story of an Englishman coming home for a family member's funeral and, by a sort of driving autopilot coincidence, visiting the backyard of an old neighbor.  Behind their house at the end of a long lane sits a pond.  The neighbor in question, the long gone-away-to-Australia Lettie Hempstock, called their pond an ocean, and this memory triggers a leap back into the man's memories as a seven-year-old.  His memories are the substance of the story.

The story of a young boy and his relationship with a family who turn out to be much, much more than they seem follows the same path as many fantasies.  There are dark things at work in his town.  One feels ripples in the water--ripples coming from Coraline, MirrorMask, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, an ebb pushing from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and a deep undercurrent from the tradition of English fairy folklore and other myths.

The story itself is a precious, well-hewn tale that walks down familiar paths with all the fear, wonder, and depth that we felt before, but where Neil Gaiman has spent his career as a jazz musician of folkore, improvising and riffing on what has already been told, Ocean draws it together.  It connects all of the stories of its kind ever told, and what's more, it tries to explain them to us, through the eyes of a seven-year-old.  For the first time, or at least in a new way as fresh as a homegrown tomato, Neil Gaiman hands his audience his heart and the reason that he tells the stories he does.

When facing off against a frightening aberration that is tormenting his family and now threatening to destroy him, our protagonist observes: "It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh.  She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win."

Ocean is so obsessed with children & adults that at first I worried for its well-being.  So many of those stories simply stop at "children are better than adults, they have that intuition thing" and it seems like a cop out to be escapist and displeased with growing up.

But that is not what the book is trying to do.  Like a young religious seeker, Gaiman dives into a secretive world trying to find answers.  Though seven-year-old eyes see the story, the man remembering them is middle-aged.  He is trying to come to grips with a past that he only somewhat understands and remembers.

The beauty of The Ocean at the End of the Lane is how many answers he finds.  This seven-year-old sees "the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty", and though he dreams of escaping to the world in Lettie's "ocean", what he eventually discovers is much deeper, much more real, and ultimately, amazing.

Note: (Added August 4th, 2014) Gaiman's book is not perfect; few are, and even perfectly-engineered books can seem silly.  But the book has grown on me.  There are passages here as powerful and mysterious as the Gospel of John, and just as the fourth gospel brings purpose to the story of Christ as the others cannot, so Ocean, I think, is telling the story of what nerds and geeks and dorks are really after.  Less mature, emotional works can celebrate the educated elite that make up those demographics, showing the innovation and smarts and community grown out of it.  But Gaiman looks past these things to the childlike sense that there are things beyond reality:

"I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.” There is fear and terror here.  But beyond it there is purpose.  When presented with a beautiful possibility of knowledge without hurt, a young witch tells the protagonist boy that knowing everything is no fun, because it means you can't play. "Play at what?" he responds.

This is the real quest of the nerd kingdom, whether they seek after it or not.  And though it may perhaps sink into obscurity, Gaiman's work may become the Gospel of John of the Bible of Geekdom, and hopefully, of all those who choose to imagine.

I recommend The Ocean at The End of the Lane without reservation to any human being, fairy, hobgoblin, kobold, spirit, selkie, or shadow creature that might come across it, or that uses currency to purchase books.  And more especially to those who do not read fantasy, I implore you:  Read this book.  Step into this ocean and see things a little differently.  Or maybe a lot.

Mercy is the Mark: Morality, Murder, and More in "Dishonored"

WARNING: This review contains what might be considered emotional spoilers.  No plot points or characters are revealed, but important events are discussed.

One reason I think I like to write reviews is because I like to read reviews.  I try not to watch R-rated movies unless I have some idea what's made them rated that way, and the MPAA is less than helpful, so I find myself reading three or four reviews of a movie before I watch it.

I was even more stringent when I was considering buying Dishonored.  The 2012 stealth/action game was praised for its setting in the deep, dark city of Dunwall, its exhilarating, creative gameplay, and some gorgeous art design.  Powered on whale oil and choking on a rat-borne plague, I breathed in Dunwall like secondhand smoke, crawling around on rooftops among smoke-belching chimneys and sneaking through houses where plague-ridden wackos set up shrines to the mysterious, malicious Outsider.

The game puts the player behind the eyes of Corvo Attano, the Lord Protector of Dunwall, who returns from a voyage just in time to witness the assassination of his close friend Empress Jessamine and the kidnapping of her daughter Emily.  Guards accuse him of the murder, and Corvo is sent off to prison and condemned to be executed.  Through some fortuitous circumstances, he escapes and meets up with an undercover team of dissenters trying to take back power from the people who stole it from Corvo.

A video game attempt at "The Count of Monte Cristo" ensues, but instead of wealth, intrigue, and betrayal, Corvo gains supernatural powers from the Outsider, wears a frightening mask, and sets out to eliminate the people who killed the Empress and blamed him for it.

This is where the morality comes in.  Early in Dishonored's creation, developers revealed that part of the design of the game was to allow players to win the game without killing anyone.  Corvo's targets can all be killed with a flick of the knife (or, more often, a gruesome, bloody shoving match) but every mission rather clearly presents a possibility to stop them from doing evil while still leaving them alive.  A religious character can be branded with a mark that makes him excommunicated for life, leaving him living but friendless.  Corvo has the opportunity to find a hidden voice recording of a high-ranking official, which, if played over public loudspeakers, is the equivalent of political suicide, rendering him imprisoned but unharmed.

In simpler situations, Corvo sneaks around guards and plague-wild Weepers instead of fighting them, or creeps up behind and knocks them out.  Their snores assure the player that the person they've taken out isn't dead, and will wake in the morning with a sore neck but little else.

This idea fascinated me, and motivated me to buy the game even if the trailers looked like a messy, blood-gluttonous massacre.  That option exists, and I won't talk about it much because I didn't experience it.  I did fight a few times, and it was fun.  Once I accidentally lopped a guy's head off and gasped so loudly that my roommate thought I was having a heart attack.  It seems fun but way too gory for me, and (important and cool) the game changes depending on how you choose to play, as well as the ending.  So I decided not to have that experience, and was interested in what emotional journey the game would take me on.

For much of the game, my choice disappointed me.  The Outsider as a deity is pretty shifty, and blesses Corvo with an array of gruesome abilities, such as sending forth a gust of wind to blow enemies off ledges and Splat-style deaths or summoning a horde of vicious, bloodthirsty rats to rip your enemies to shreds.  Using a short-range teleportation spell called Blink, the rather-awesome Possession, and the obligatory Night Vision, I felt limited.  Weapons, as well, seemed useless, though I did use a couple of incendiary bolts from a crossbow to draw the attention of guards before I sneaked up on them from behind and knocked em out.

Still, this was actually a small issue for me.  I am just as satisfied to explore a gorgeously designed world (which it is) and meet interesting characters and discover a deep, three-dimensional world as I am to use an array of weapons to destroy my enemies.

But here's the problem: The world isn't three-dimensional.  When Corvo stepped out of prison into the Hound Pits Pub, it was clear from the first look that the men and women enlisting him to help were not motivated by noble ideals.  Seeing echoes of City 17 and Half-Life 2 (carried over with the handiwork of art director and conceptual artist Viktor Antonov) I expected a world like that--dark, frightening, but filled with people to whom I could relate.  

The world of Dishonored, instead, is filled with people I didn't care about, and who in many ways I abhorred.  Their dialogue has no hope, no connection to other people in their lives.  I read a few books that detailed bizarre rituals or showed perverted sexual plots from plays.  I asked myself for the first several levels: "Why, if Corvo is a deeply moral man who cared about the Empress and Emily, does he agree to join Havelock and the rest?  They offered him revenge, but what does he care about that?  Why, if I refuse to kill, do my missions revolve around getting rid of people?" I failed to see a motivation for Corvo, and without that the story fell flat.  Part of this came from the choice for Corvo to be a silent protagonist.  I finished Bioshock Infinite a few months ago, and understanding Booker's amoral, hardened background, I had very little difficult roleplaying in his persona.  Violence was normal to Booker, and his motivation was strong--"Give us the girl and wipe away the debt."  Even if I didn't agree with him, I was able to learn from being in his shoes for a few hours.

At one point later in the game, everything changed.  A plot turn yanked Corvo from safety to being imprisoned again, and I had to find my way to my captor (a man with great significance from earlier in the game) and take him down.  Suddenly Corvo had motivation--people I cared about were in danger, and time felt short.  I escaped in a hurry and, immersed in the character, I didn't take the time to sneak past the people guarding me.  I dispatched them and hurried to find the man who was responsible for much of this.

The best scene of the game followed, and the conversation and one-on-one fight that follows are well-written and gripping.  I chose to spare his life, to which he replied: "And you choose mercy.  Extraordinary."

Corvo escaped into the dim evening and watched a train dump plague corpses into a trench full of the dead, and overheard a sick man talking to his friends in desperation, still hopeful for his own life.  On a bridge above us, two men talked about how they would escape the plague district, their cluelessness and despair becoming very clear.  

In the course of a view moments, I was transported from a hostile world of sick, unpleasant people who I could only really help by not stabbing in the face.  Instead, I entered a deeply wounded city, where people dreamed of many things that I could not give them, but wanted desperately to.  I snuck by them and hurried through the insanity raging around me, desperately trying to find the one person who still mattered to me.

Because of this experience with its last few levels, Dishonored won me over.  Its message came through for me--that in a world full of evil, it is hard for good to make any difference.  For most of the game, it seemed that no one cared whether I had integrity--whether I cut people to pieces or expended enormous effort to keep everyone alive, people greeted me the same way.  But by the end, it made a difference to me.  I loved the people of Dunwall with their flaws (though I could have loved them sooner if they were written better) and wanted to help them, even if it was harder for me.  It taught me, to some degree, that goodness is not always rewarded by the world, but it is rewarded in small ways.

If we did a do-over, I'd say to the developers: To give more strength to your peaceful-playthrough idea, make the missions about things other than getting rid of the bad guys.  Give us a chance to see what the people of Dunwall need.  Could Corvo get supplies to the flooded district?  Who would he have to convince, or steal from, to do so?  What about his mother?  Does she live in the city?  Wouldn't he want to find her and make sure she's okay?  These kind of missions would be much more engaging, and allow us to care about what we see, grieve for the sadness, and fight for better things.  

Anyway, I don't make video games, but that's what I think.

Small Things Make Big Differences in 'World War Z'

In a troop-carrier plane en route to South Korea, impetuous, passionate Harvard grad Andrew Fassbach (Elyes Gabel) tells bearded U.N. tough fella Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) something about the disease that for an hour of screen time has been ravaging the planet.

"Mother Nature is a serial killer," he says, a lilt of excitement in his voice, "No one's better or more creative...[but] she leaves crumbs.  Now the hard part, why you spend a decade in school, is seeing the crumbs for the clues they are.  Sometimes the things you thought were the most brutal aspect of the virus, turns out to be the chink in its armour...and she loves disguising her weaknesses as strengths."

Fassbach's insight turns out to be invaluable for the people trying to find a cure for a virus that, twelve seconds after infection, transforms people into ravenous, mindless flesh-eaters.  One might say the same of certain movies as he did of Mother Nature--that a film disguises its weak plot with big action, disguises its two-dimensional characters with big plot points or big actors, etc.  That is not the case about with World War Z--in fact, the opposite is true.

'World War Z' thrives on its own imaginative and emotional steam, even if the final product doesn't look quite like the blockbuster some expected.  What some might see as weaknesses are in fact its strengths, and the result is a film that brings to tears more often than it elicits a frightened scream.

The story starts with a montage of news clips, most of it meaningless, some mentioning a particular virus.  Pundits incite worry and other pundits mock the worriers.  Meanwhile, shots of insects are interjected into the slanted opening credits.  Ants devour huge beetles.  Ants eat each other.  It's all a little freaky.

But then we're thrown right into the very human lives of Gerry and Karin Lane (Mireille Enos) and their two daughters, having a normal day in Philadelphia, PA.  Dad is called upon to make pancakes for breakfast, Mom asks the older daughter if she's got her inhaler, little daughter hears some words on TV and asks "Daddy, what's martial law?" He answers cleverly "It's like house rules, but for everybody."




The film's greatest strength is established in this sequence, and it sustains the whole film: it is people.  Pitt and Enos (a BYU acting alum, at which I shout for joy) try desperately to live normal lives, but it is clear that they have lived difficult things before.  Their performances are grounded and understated, and following them around for the first forty minutes just trying to find somewhere safe makes up the most gripping, moving experience I have had in a theater this summer.

I am tempted to tell the whole story, but it begs being experienced.  My near-nonexistent understanding of Max Brooks' novel is that it attempted to be a what-if-it-really-happened scenario.  It is not supernatural, no aliens are involved.  The characters in it, including high-ranking members of the U.N. and U.S. governments, are clueless, cut off, and trying to figure things out with extremely limited resources.  It is precisely the natural quality of it that makes it stand apart from other zombie movies.

So what are the other little things that make it good?  The zombies do not immediately seem to be that incredible an achievement.  In fact, one on one, they are positively mediocre.  Just make-upped actors twitching around (though the transformation process, making a helpful human friend into a ravenous foe in a few spastic seconds, is chilling) and shuffling in the normal zombie fashion.  Heck, they look like characters out of "Warm Bodies." But it is in groups that they are like insects, swarming in thousands.  Shots from the trailer show thousand of ravenous humans climbing on top of each other, trying to get to the top of a huge wall, and hundreds of people leaping onto a bus, making it so heavy that it falls and crushes their friends.  This careless, insect abandon contrasts sharply with the character's intimate attachment to each other, leading to the next thing that works.




The film is full of tiny roles.  In fact, every role is tiny.  The little girls have a few scenes (and they are wonderful and believeable) and Gerry and Karin anchor the entire thing, but the rest of the film hops around from Philly to the Atlantic Ocean to South Korea to Israel to North England and plenty places else.

I wrote in my review about Man of Steel here that human beings weren't portrayed honestly enough.  They seemed like idealized caricatures, beautiful people who we didn't want to see die just because they were people.  World War Z succeeds brilliantly where Man of Steel failed.  A man who at first terrifies us then makes us cry with gratitude when he gives something invaluable to our protagonist.  A soldier in South Korea (played with integrity by James Badge Dale, who you may recognize from another movie this summer) (first to know it without looking it up gets points) appears to be another Call-of-Duty playing American dude thrown into incredible circumstances.  He's not a terribly honorable man.  He's a jerk.  But he is as real as they come, and that's what we need as an audience.

I could talk about more people--the Tenth Man in Israel, a girl who Gerry saves and who helps him out later, and others.  The film is full of them.  Matthew Fox makes a cameo as a helicopter pilot and I'll be surprised if he says five words or even has a shot of his face in the movie.

While 'World War Z' reminded me and will remind you that people matter most, I was struck by something else watching it.  I am an actor and many of my good friends are actors, and watching this film I saw actors.  But because of the measured reality of the writing and the integrity of the performances, I began to watch people instead.



Film and theater are a shared illusion.  The audience must trust all the artists--actors, writers, directors, designers, technicians--in order to truly experience something that will change them.  The audience themselves must decide to agree to the illusion, and believe it themselves.  It's hard to do that when writers and actors portray life falsely, whether it be through making things too dark or too light, too sexual or too chaste, too complicated or too simple.

It is not easy, and it is not common, but when it happens it affects us.  And it may just be that I've seen too many superhero movies this summer, but because of a lot of little things, that's what happened to me when I watched 'World War Z'.