owen_twistfield Reviews

The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005)

The only star in this movie was the crow: avoid at all cost

[1/10 · 8 March 2009]

Wicked Prayer(wp) is a badly directed movie in which the action is constantly broken up and players are badly casted and under-performing.

The plot for wp is simple. Band of bad dudes want to summon Satan to take revenge for something. They kill the lead character and his love interest. They kill a lot of other people as well. Lead character turns into the crow and takes his revenge on the bad dudes and fights it out with lead bad-dude-turned-Satan and defeats him in the end.

To make such a movie spiffy we need something that kicks ass: stylish direction, sizzling conversations, fast and bloody fights and captivating lead characters. This movie fails in everything.

In reversed order:

• Lead characters. Furlong is boring and unconvincing. In the love scenes he looks like he is about to nod off. His eyes squint, his face expressionless, his jaw slack. As crow he looks like a goth boy who find himself teleported into a country and western bar. He neither looks cool, nor dangerous, nor sad. He looks like a loser with paint on and clothed in black leathers. I was expecting people to fall over laughing whenever he entered a bar. Look at the dumb-ass goth boy.

The lead bad guy put's in a bad guy performance, but he never excels in anything.

The sidekicks of the bad guy have a constant look on them which boils down to: Am i really doing this? Gee. I am a real bad dude ain't I? What am I going to do next? The only one who actual looks the part his the female bad girl. Although most of her performance ends after the first half of the movie.

Then there are a bunch of Indians who count a cop and priest amongst their number. During the entire movie they perform like the keystone cops, without meaning to be funny. They spent their time talking, praying, meandering about and rifling the bad guys and the crow without actually hitting anything. In fact in the end scenes the bad guy fighting the crow actually kills more bad guys that the Indian posse. I can't think they hit anything. There is a superb dumb moment when the bad-guy-turned-Satan exits the satanic church and confronts the group of morons. Armed with pistols, rifles, shotguns they do nothing. And when mister Satan passes them they just gawk at him and then when he has left they do an sort of Indian dance that looked dumb to say the least.

• With this I come to the fights. Well nothing spectacular, nothing interesting. At the end there is a fight between the crow and Satan and it is just boring. What amazed me was that this crow dude could actually defeat Satan without help. So Satan is actually weaker than the crow?

• Sizzling conversations? Nothing. No memorable quotes. I can't think of anything interesting that passed the lips.

• stylish directing? Nope, unless walking around in goth makeup and dark leathers and the satanic church scene is considered stylish. The problem with directing is that the action is constantly interrupted. There are odd scenes. There are many many flashbacks. I think I have seen the hanging at the beginning of the movie being flash-backed at me a zillion times.

This movie is sad thing and I would advise you to avoid it. There are hundreds of better and more entertaining movies.

Near Dark (1987)

Great start but rapidly degenerates toe curling bad movie

[5/10 · 5 March 2009]

This movie is a balance of good ideas and bad plot as it starts out great but degenerates rapidly into a toe curling bad movie. As such it isn't worth the trouble to watch it a second time. And I would advise people to think twice before buying it.

At first the movie starts out great. It is a kind of a road movie. Cowboy meets girl. Girl turns boy in a creature of the night. Cowboy get's drawn into a life of violence as he is dragged along the road by a group of undead who travel around killing people and sucking their blood. These are't the sleek and nice vampires that say sorry when they bite, but the kind that kill for the fun of it and leave a trail of corpses in their wake.

Well this is at least a new take on the vampire movie. In fact the new cowboy vampire has to earn his place. The other vampires pressure him kill. Killing is graduating to full vampire stardom. It is the point of no return.

But then suddenly the bright idea's stop and the movie degenerates into misdirected violence. On it's own violence can be something that adds to the movie, but this movie just serves up fights that are odd and illogical. Let me explain.

The turning point is actually the bar scene halfway. The group of vampires descend on a bar and start to kill everyone inside. Oddly enough the normal people don't even make a break for it after one of the girls cut the throat of the waitress. They sort of blink their eyes as if someone just downed a pint of lager in one go and then stand around waiting to be killed. The bartender in the meantime takes forever to get is double barreled shotgun loaded and apparently two loads of buckshot in this movie doesn't do much to a vampire. Aim for the head I always say. One of the customers is allowed to flee by the cowboy vampire as he still reluctant to kill people.

The next step is ridiculous. The vampires hide from the sun in a bungalow. The police, tipped by the escaped customer, surrounds the place during the day with two cars and four man. This customer has previous seen the vampires survive a full load from a shotgun up close. He has seen the vampires drink the blood of their victims. He has seen the whole shebang. But the police turns out with four men and two cars.

Then the vampires escape during the day because the cowboy runs out with a blanket, jumps into a van and drives it through the bungalow so the other vampires can get in. Then he drives it out at the other side. And the police can't chase them for their two cars have been damaged in the fight.

At this point one unbelievable scene tumbles over the next. The vampires escape. The family of the cowboy happen to be in the same motel they lurk in. The family is threatened by the vampires, but they escape because the young daughter throws open the door and the sun streams in, while a few minutes before it was still dark.

The cowboy and family take a hike. The cowboy get's a blood transfusion and is human once more. Then they totally forget that they have been chased by a bunch of killers and sit around idly at the ranch in the night with the windows open. So the young daughter is kidnapped.

The cowboy chases the vampires. He confronts them, without any weapons. Then a fuel truck comes along and he get's in and whacks the vicious vampire when the truck blows up.

Next cowboy somehow manages to get his sister free in a scene which involves one of the vampire girls throwing his knife at another vampire by mistake because the cowboy ducks in time. The girl lets cowboy and young girl run. The vampire pulls out the knife, tries to fire, good vampire girl pushes the gun way and then he decides not to fire his gun a second time, instead they jump into the car to chase the cowboy and his sister.

The cowboy and his sister run out of town into the surrounding countryside. The vampires chase them. They grab the little girl again. The sun pops up. The daughter and the nice vampire girl escape the car. The bad boy vampire runs after them and is then blown to smithereens by the sun(but the nice vampire girl not). The remaining vampires get the same treatment when the sun sizzles them and the car to kingdom come.

The nice vampire girl gets a blood transfusion and everything is forgiven and forgotten(including the mountain of corpses she has created.)

Happy end.

For some reason the vampires are continuously active around sunset so the director can serve us burning vampires, humans who escape the clutches of the vampires, and vampires scrambling for cover. This ploy is used again and again. For another reason it is unclear why the vampires don't just kill the cowboy vampire. They give him a week to kill someone and he fails to do so. In fact he let's someone escape who then sets the police on them. Why?

The movie shows that great ideas and a able cast do not make a great movie. It starts out well and then becomes a badly directed action movie. Can't think of a reason why I should watch this twice. Seen better.

Black Book (2006)

Verhoeven returns to his native country and brings with him....

[5/10 · 15 February 2009]

Verhoeven has come back from that Walhalla of movie making. What did he bring with him in his little bag?

Clueless warfare.

I am cursed by the fact to be interested in warfare and astounded again that even the simplest of warfare concept are trod upon in this movie. Some examples: almost all firefights see the Germans stand up in full view fire-hosing their MP 40's. Might I point out that the essence of modern warfare is to take cover. Nobody in his right mind is going to survive combat this way. Another example: during the movie a armored vehicle is driven into the building. Argg. That is the first and foremost fault one can making in armored warfare. Even tanks might get stuck or shed a track. Weapons are transported with their magazines and in a lose fashion. More number one mistakes. People seldom reload their guns. During the armored car incident a Thompson is used to kill five Germans in a prolonged firefight and not once is the magazine replaced.

Cardboard baddies.

The story boils down to the fact that a resistance fighter hero is in fact an egocentric, selfish bastard who has entered into a deal with the SS to exploit the Jews and has no problem in killing off all his resistance buddies. And this then is the pivotal story. Oh and the German bad guy has no qualms about this resistance fight massacring German soldiers. And oh. The resistance people are all happy to lay down and die. Tow being murdered by the bad guy with a knife in broad daylight. It was one of the baddest scenes.

Unbelievable plot.

No believable plot is made to explain these actions. No anguish on the part of the killer. No the bad guys are cardboard baddies that need to be hunted down and killed. And of course only the hapless heroes know the truth of it. (and they are not believed by anyone).Break out the guns boys.

Poinless scenes.

The movie is filled with pointless scenes. Examples: the Israel shoot at the beginning and the end. The abuse scened after the liberation. The bomber flying at the beginning.

Bad directed scenes.

Did you note how fast the relieve column arrived after the bomber dropped the load on the farm? Within minutes. Even in modern times with cell phones such speed would be amazing. Another one: within a minute after the resistance fighter are found out by the police to transport guns an armed force of Germans arrives. Such speed is amazing considering they had no helicopters. Why are the resistance to entered the SD HQ by the SS when it's a trap. If caused them a lot of dead Germans.

Bad music directing

Music is important to a movie and Verhoeven shows that even his budget has it's limits. So we are treated with the same melancholic string music most of the time. Only at some key moments the melancholy is dropped for something more fitting.

Let's compare this movie to let's say L'armee des ombres and this Zwart Boek just falls flat on it's face. Karakter and Antoina are far better movies with better story lines and believable people. And they had far less budget to work with.

Verhoeven has returned to bring us nothing in particular. Welcome back, mate.

Dalziel and Pascoe (1996–2007)

Dribble

[5/10 · 14 February 2009]

This series is the epitome of the concept that you have to scoff, abuse, badmouth, down talk, jeer and deride your inferiors to get the best out of them. Clues are handed to Dalziel and his team without any proper investigation and usual by people who get scoffed at by Dalziel. Not a word of thanks will ever pass his lips. What Dalziel actually does for a living is unknown because he just follows the trail of corpses to find the perpetrator. Not very difficult because with each death the circle of suspects diminishes. Lucky for D and his team the baddie get's whacked off at the end or confesses his guilt because none of the evidence or methods used to acquire them would stand up in court. The investigation general sees D and his trusty sidekick Pascoe talk to various people who talk and talk and then say something that doesn't fit the story of others. "Aha" they will say! The two investigators will drop the hint to the public so they will know if they had missed it. But how they know themselves is a riddle as nobody ever writes anything down.

For proper detective series one turns to A touch of Frost or Morse.

The Four Feathers (2002)

Beautiful scenery, but told in a casual offhand and thus sloppy way

[6/10 · 24 September 2008]

The four feathers is the latest addition to a list of movies with the same name and theme. The story: It is the high tide of the British empire. Harry Feversham, a young officer in the queens army, asks and gets dismissed from his regiment after he hears it will be sent to the Sudan to fight against the Mahdi insurrection. His friends and fiancé don't appreciate this behavior and each sent him a white feather as a token of their disfavor. Harry then tries to redeem himself by going to the Sudan and help his friends against the Mahdi.

I watched this movie to get a better understand of how movies are made. This movie certainly has amazing scenery that bring tears to your eyes by their beauty. The sharp sand color, the exotic people and desert landscapes, it all is impressive, as is the moist misty green england. But while the landscape, people and buildings are given much attention the story is told as if in afterthought and with a lot of movie errors. So many that even I noticed. Things in the movie just don't add up.

The first pivotal moment in the story is when Harry gets to hear that he is off to the Sudan. We seem him have an anguished talk with his friend Jack, then see him have bad dream and then next he gets himself dismissed in one go. It all happens in three minutes flat which seems enormous hurried compared to the ten minutes the movie takes to show the happy live. It is somehow too brief, too unexplained and too unbelievable that he can leave on the same day hey he tenders his resignation, without letting his friends know or him being thrown in the brig for cowardice?

You might expect that an important moment in the film is when his bethrotted sends him a feather(thus breaking off the engagement). But we are only told when someone comes visiting Harry: oh by the way who's the fourth feather? My former wife to be. The entire scene is also strange because we hear someone knock on the door, Harry opens the door and next the visitor is inside and they are talking about the feathers. Since the scene was dark I had the distinct feeling the visitor was still standing in the door opening.

Harry takes a trip to Egypt and then travels as part of a small caravan to the Sudan. The caravan brings hookers to the English army(we are told), but they aren't hookers(we are told later), but black Ethiopian princesses? And how come someone is bringing black hookers from Egypt to the Sudan? Should it not be the other way around? Anyway they kill the obnoxious caravan leader(who seems to be alone and unarmed?) knock out Harry who drags himself on a camel and rides to some place. After a while Harry drops to the desert-floor, the camel wanders off and in the next minute someone finds Harry! In addition we see in the background tracks in the sand. The desert seems quite a busy place.

Jack is chasing a Mahdi sniper, he carries a rifle, the next moment Jack has a pistol in his hand. The sniper is chased down a street and a minute later he is chased down the same street again.

Harry, disguised as a Mahdi, is charging amidst the Mahdi horde, first he carries a sword. Then he drops it when his horse is shot. Then he is on his horse again without sword, next he has the sword again. All the while he is at the head of the Mahdi horde even though he fell behind in a previous scene.

The English are attacked by a Mahdi horde. The Mahdi horde is killed to the last man with gun fire, but only the people fall, the horses are bullet proof. In fact the horses seem unimpressed by the fire.

A cavalry Mahdi horde attacks across the desert and we see the shot alternating between cavalry and infantry who arrive at the same time by the English forces.

We see in the background a Gatling gun twice, it is never used. But Gatling guns where never used by the English. English guns are limbered, the next scene unlimbered. The guns hold fire until the position is about to be overrun by the Mahdi. Rifle fire is used at the latest moment? English troops march in close order? Nope that is not normal.

The English cavalry is called tirailleurs? Tirailleurs are light infantry not cavalry. The cavalry chases the retreating Mahdi horde, then is ambushed by Mahdi infantry buried in the ground the Mahdi horde just moved over twice. Come on. English cavalry(now on camels?) movie into a village. They ride without guards. Of course such ineptitude must be punished with an ambush.

The entire movie has a feeling of careless sloppyness. Kapur seems to be in a hurry to get to the desert and it's fine scenery and the story is second to those nice views. Important moments are hardly played out, unimportant events are dragged out because they seem to offering nice pictures. This movie has a remarkable sloppy feel which is a shame really. A six for effort.

Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (2007)

History for the masses: another 'historical' movie.

[5/10 · 7 September 2008]

Summary If you are into beautiful landscapes, genuine looking Mongolian customs and music, and the typical slow moving tale with the obligatory sex scene(it is at the end), then this is the movie for you. If you want a historical accurate story of one the greatest conquers of all time or a saucy epic tale of conquest( with steamy sex scenes) then give this one a pass.

With great effort I am trying to fulfill the promise that I would try to focus on a movie as a work. This time however I break this promise because first and foremost I have a love for history and I am a historian with a particular interest in warfare. Invariably the depiction of warfare in mainstream (Hollywood) movies has not progressed much since the days of Errol Flynn, whose movies, by the way, are fun to watch as long as nobody tries to claim they are 'historical' in any way. So when someone makes a movie suggesting that we will be told the 'untold' story of one of the greatest conquers in history, one would expect that somehow the current state of historical research would find it's way into such a movie and thus finally some historical accurate fights will be shown. The more so because this movie shows a pivotal development in history and one would expect to be enlightened in how this Temudjin(aka Genghis Khan) succeeded in forging the loose tribes of the Mongols into a powerful conquering force.

What a utter fool I am to think that would happen.

At heart this movie is as historical inaccurate as any other Hollywood flick and in addition it lacks consistency: in this movie things just happen without any explanation. An example: the opening scene shows us Temudjin as prisoner in a Chinese town. He looks to be in his late thirties. Wait a moment, I thought, wasn't he by then khan of all Mongols? Yes, but not according to the movie. Another example: at the end of the movie his wife liberates Temudjin from the Chinese by bribing the guards and posing as a rich woman. But when she travels to the city, she has no money and she pays a merchant for the trip with sex. The merchant then disappears. Did she kill him and take his money? We are not told. More: Temudjin travels back and he is able to raise a big army out of the blue in no time. How? Where? What? Who? And more: Temudjin becomes the blood brother of Jamukha, one sons of the most powerful of khans. Why? It just happens.

The biggest part of the movie tells us how Temudjin and/or his wife are being hunted down, captured, escape, get captured again, escape again, get captured again, get liberated, get captured again(argg!!!!!) and escape again(!!!!!). In between we witness the odd fight that only shows that Temudjin has no power to speak off because he is being captured, on the run or being defeated and needs the forces of others to liberate his wife.

With combat we come full circle. Historical warfare, I suppose, is boring, so the director comes up with ridiculous fantasies. Examples of such: Temudjin and Jamukha ride at the head of an army to liberate the wife of Temudjin from the Merkits. The all cavalry force ride into broken country totally unsuitable for cavalry: there is no vanguard, no scouts, it is just a bunch of horses. They are subsequently ambushed by infantry. Serves them right.

Another smart tactic. Temudjin is chased by Jamukha and his army. To allow wives and children to escape Temudjin remains behind with a small force to hold of Jamukha. What does he do? He erects a makeshift barrier between two hilltops that are easy to climb. What does Jamukha do? He attacks it frontally while it would have been no effort to outflank Temudjin and occupy either or both of the hilltops with his superior force. What does Temudjin not do????? His men are equipped with bows, but they don't use them, instead they let the enemy advance over the barrier to engage them in close combat.

Then finally, after these examples of how not to conduct warfare, the final battle is upon us. Temudjin has gathered a force, Jamukha has gathered an even greater force. They face of somewhere on the plains. Jamukha orders a compliment of his cavalry to attack Temudjin. Temudjin answers with a ploy that is totally pointless. A group of cool looking black cavalry equipped with double swords attacks then enemy frontally(!) holding both swords in a way they couldn't bring muscle power to bear. Then these men turn tail and run in their own line of hidden archers with the enemy cavalry in hot pursuit. Even without this absurd attack the enemy would have run into the hidden line of archers: what use was this attack? This entire fantasy attack, worthy of lord of the rings, is based on no historical evidence whatsoever. The final charge ordered by Jamukha is another sad affair. The army streams forward as an amorphous mass: there are no units, no tactics, no lines. Just a vast group of soldiers that run at the enemy. Oh, and they finally get defeated by a thunderstorm.

I am completely baffled again and again directors even fail to grasp the simplest basics of warfare. If you don't know, phone Sandhurst, West Point or Saint-Cyr, but if you don't want to know, then don't make a movie about guys like Genghis Khan. And don't render these ridiculous battles.

What amazes me though, that even if you forget about history, that this movie is so boring. The fights are bloody enough, but most of the time you watch things progress at a snails pace. I don't understand why people give it such high scores. It is a boring inaccurate inconsistent movie.

Vampires: Los Muertos (2002)

More is less. How to make your directors life difficult

[6/10 · 3 September 2008]

(In this comment I try to focus on the movie as a work. When you judge my comments please sent me a message to tell me what and why as I can then work to improve the comments)

I recently bought the DVD with comments from director Tommy Lee Wallace, which gives me some idea of the directors choices. I like explore if the directors ideas worked as well as he hoped it would.

The movie tells of Derek Bliss who earns a living as a vampire exterminator. He gets a assignment to help a Mexican village get rid of a vampire infestation. He tries to assemble a crew, but soon finds that each veteran vampire hunter he tries to recruit is either dead or otherwise unavailable. Finally he gathers a group of unfit who nevertheless help him defeat the main villain: a female vampire named Una.

Wallace tell us he wanted a movie that was at the same time a sequel and one that could stand on its own. Wallace also remarks how he likes cowboy movies like the magnificent seven in which a group of gunslingers are hired to get rid of a band of scumbags. In addition he wanted to have both a scary movie with funny moments. For a low budget vampire movie this is quite a lot to strive for.

The main problem of the movie is that it a lot of it's consistency has been lost in the editing room. Una at one moment kills a handful customers in a diner in the space of time that the main hero needs to throw a bit of paper in a waste basket. This, so tells Wallace, is to show us how incredible fast she is. Most of the associated scenes have been removed. At an important moment Una discovers that one of the vampire hunters(Zoey) has a medicine that prevents her from turning into a vampire herself. Yet story wise there is no reason how the vampire can make this link, but Una somehow knows and then tries to acquire the medicine for herself. How did Una know? Because of her incredible listening powers. But since the associated scenes had been removed the entire part is illogical. But consistency is lost in other ways too. In itself however Una's superhuman power creates a problem on it's own. Someone who can move as fast as her would kill the heroes in no time, even if they are armed with guns. So in the end battle Wallace made her less powerful but also create the problem that he has to shoot movie with a low budget and speed tricks work nice when the actor is on her own, but would create problems in a big battle. Another problem is that Mexico has a lot of daylight and a lot of sun. A subplot in the story is the attempt by Una to become immune from the sun by conducting a old ritual. The vampires that are caught by the heroes and dragged into the sun burn to death instantly, yet all the places in which vampires lurk, are all lightened by the sun. The vampires seem to be hardly affected by this light. In the same vein during the movie Ray, one of the vampire hunters, gets turned by Una He however hides his condition from the others. We see him subsequently move about in broad daylight without any ill side effects before he is finally found out by Bliss. In addition at some point in the movie there moments of bloody gory violence. For example: a bartender who get's his head ripped off and then is turned upside down so the vampires can drink his blood. This scene by the way has also been heavily cut to the point that it seems to be pointless. Violence that leaves a lot of dead body alerts the authorities and triggers their involvement.

If we take a look at the story and the conversations in the movie then both are hardly great stuff. The entire story seems to be developed during the shooting of the movie. What do we do next? Well maybe have a car explode. OK we can do that.

It seems to me that Wallace overreached himself. Where he states during the comments that less is more he does it the other way around. He tries to do more, but ends up with less. There is a big clue at the end as he frankly confesses that he lacked the money for a big end battle. The movie has some strong things going for it: the beautiful landscapes of the Mexican country side; the plot development in which Zoey has a medicine that prevents her from becoming a vampire: if she loses the medicine she will turn into a predator; finally the music score made by Brian Tyler. For some reason I had to think of Reservoir Dogs: a low budget movie that works. Less is more and Wallace should have taken that lesson at heart. I think that the movie would have had a better change if the entire part of traveling towards the Mexican village had been replaced by the more horror like thing of a group of reluctant heroes who find themselves trapped in a Mexican village and try to escape to safety but then are compelled to face the horror that is stalking them. The interaction between the group has a lot more potential. The Mexican country might still have been used as a backdrop for the story. The medicine ploy might then be used in such a way that brings dynamic in the group and is should have been the sole MacGuffin. Simplicity is the key

Rise: Blood Hunter (2007)

Interesting vampire movie, but could have been better, because now it's neither fish nor foul

[6/10 · 31 August 2008]

(In this comment I try to focus on the movie as a work. When you judge my comments please sent me a message to tell me what and why as I can then work to improve the comments)

Rise is not an ordinary vampire movie. I expected it to be one as the text on the DVD hinted at this. But the word vampire is never used and the persons afflicted by the condition never show fangs or fall to pieces in the sunlight. Yet on the other hand some vampire signs are on evidence: the dependency on blood, the fact that they don't cast a reflection in the mirror and that the afflicted are uncommon strong and resilient. What is different is that the movie spends time on how Liu feels when she finds out that she has become a thing of the night, forever barred from normal live.

At heart rise is a revenge movie. Lucy Liu is a reporter who is killed when her investigation set her on the trail of a weird sect. These people turn out to be a sort of vampires and Liu becomes one of their victims. Liu however rises from the dead(hence the title)as one of the creatures and hunts them down one by one.

Woven into the revenge story is the story of Chiklis who plays a police cop whose daughter got the same treatment as Liu. He is hot on the trail of both Liu and the top bad guy, either in the hope to find his daughter or find out what happened to her.

At the end both stories interconnect as Chiklis catches up with Liu and face each other and finally the top bad guy.

The choice of having both stories into the movie makes the revenge story more intricate as Chiklis as 'normal' human can as well help Liu as sabotage her desires. In this way also him being a cop is at odds with him being a concerned father.

The story itself plays at night, in dark and usually uncomfortable places(I use this word as this is what all these places are meant to be). This is also interesting as it illustrates how Liu's world has suddenly become estranged.

The story is mostly made up out of one-on-one confrontations that exist mostly out of conversations. The camera is close to the person and shots are medium and close up mostly. The fight scenes are short and unspectacular: most are more like executions.

The story itself is easy to follow, yet at some turns one wonders about the choices made. Liu comes in contact with someone called the alchemist who has been usurped by the leader of the weird vampiric sect. He gives her a small crossbow with which she kills all the others, yet seen doesn't turn on him. Also the choice of the crossbow feels odd as it's such an unhandy weapon to use in a fight. The killings of their victims by the vampiric sect are strangely bloody, with bodies and surrounding furniture covered by blood and blood splashing and spraying everywhere. It somehow doesn't fit in with the mood of the movie, certainly as compared to the subdued fighting scenes. It seems as if at regular intervals the movie needed to interrupted by a horror scene.

It is a common thing that 'vampire' movies are associated with seduction. In Rise this is downplayed. Liu herself seduces one(well she actually more or less jumps her victim). In all the other cases seduction seems more or less a side story then a pivotal event.

Acting is reasonable but it loses at the point where the script seems to bare the actors from playing out their role. Liu seems to be shocked at first time and there are some tears when she realizes what she has become. But you would expect someone to show more emotions after she has been brutally murdered and risen from the grave: just some sign of mental stress beyond the anger Liu displays. Also Liu is somewhat too certain she needs to kill herself. Liu lacks things like doubt, uncertainty and fear. She show mostly anger. Chiklis also does not a really great job when he moment of truth comes as he is confronted by his daughter turned-vampire. She pulls a gun out and shouts abuses at him and he is quite emotionless. Nor is he in doubt once Liu has shown him that she can't be seen in the mirror. This latter seems actually a plot device that is needed to convince Chiklis of Liu's condition. I found it so unfitting as everything else vampiric is merely hinted at and then suddenly this inescapable proof is offered.

Rise makes me think of The Brave One. Both involve women who undergo a traumatic experience that changes their world forever and exact revenge on perpetrators that are the cause of the change. But where Jodie Foster convinces in the role of a woman that suffers a lot and who's action are in tune with her person and experiences, Liu fails to convince as she mostly displays anger. Her change from an reporter into a determined one-woman-murder-squad leaves enough to desire. The movie seems neither fish nor foul: for those people who expect another underworld there is not enough fighting, beauty and sensuality. For those who like movies like the brave one, there is just not enough reality in the movie. The gory bloody scenes are in either case misplaced.

Rise is a reasonable movie that I think could have been better if the creators had decided either to infuse more of the fantastic or if they had introduce more of the realistic. They could probably have played out the break between her normal life and her undead life better. Nevertheless a interesting vampire movie.

Mass Effect (2007 Video Game)

Despite being a short game it is a benchmark game that mixes rpg and shooter elements well

[8/10 · 22 June 2008]

Remark: this review addresses the PC version released in Europe on 5 June 2008.

Summary

Mass Effect is a good game with a captivating story and offering a stunning movie like gaming experience. It thus belongs among the top ten of rpgs despite the fact that the story is short, it reuses known science fiction aspects and has a limit in choices in equipment and classes.

First let me start with the good points.

Without a doubt the strongest point is the way it integrates a life like movie experience in an astounding way. Gone are the days that there was a distinction between in-game playing, cut-scenes and movies. ME let's you determine the looks of you character and it will be part of a integrated mix of graphics, sound and story development.

I give you two examples. First, when you start the game you can determine the look of your character. Once done the game will immediately start like a movie. You look at your character from the side while he/she looks through the window of the star-ship Normandy towards the Earth. A conversation, in over-voice, starts between the ambassador Udina and your commanding officer discussing your background. Music starts to play. You hear the ship computer start a countdown, your character steps away from the window and walks up to the bridge. The camera follows from behind. Music changes pace, the camera swings around to give you a look on your character, the countdown ends and then the star-ships blasts into space.

The second example is the conversations. In this game your character no longer looks like a lifeless dummy spurting out line, but any conversation let the participants show facial expressions and support it with movements of the body.

Another good point is that ME successfully combines rpg and a shooter aspects. A rpg is always somewhat at odds with a shooter. Where a rpg has a tendency to let you win by leveling, a shooter requires tactics. Me has achieved to combine the two in such a way that you have to feel that you play both a rpg and a shooter. ME achieves this is in two ways. One, by having the opposition level in relation to the players level: a system that is also used in Oblivion. Two, by getting rid of the turn based mechanism. None of this hasn't been used before, but ME raised the bar by integrating it seamlessly.

A third point is that ME let's you roam around the Milky Way in the space-ship Normandy and travel across planets in your all terrain vehicle(called Mako). When you do you will be treated by very impressive sights. As another comment has said: when you go to the moon you can see the earth rise above the landscape and this is just one of the astounding landscapes the game has to offer. The mako also let's you fight with a vehicle, which gives you an different experience.

A fourth point is that the game offers to gain achievements(like killing 150 creatures with an assault rifle) that give rewards and even unlock skills for other characters you can play later on. This way you can play the weaker classes without getting massacred.

A fifth point is that the story is interesting and has nasty twists. Also you are allowed to choose your characters reactions which allows a certain freedom in the way the story develops.

But next to those good points there are also some lesser points. First the game is remarkable short. When I blinked my eyes at the end credits I had played less then 30 hours and this includes about 15 hours of the main story with about 15 hours of side missions. The game offers you to do the game on hard and insane levels, but this doesn't offer you new content. So you need to play it twice to get to the insane level.

Second: on higher difficult settings your squad members start to show their failures. When the going is tough you need to constant be alert that you companions are not doing something dumb and placing them on the spot you want to have them is difficult.

Third: while you can choose from several classes, you find that some classes are better suited to the game then others. As an example the 'magic' class is so weak that in fact playing it on normal level gives you an insane experience without having to set the difficulty to insane.

Fourth: you might find the shooter aspect somewhat disappointing as there are only a few categories of weapons, equipment and armor, and only a few classes can use them all. You will find many upgrades and new types, so much that you will be ridiculously rich at the end of the game. In addition some weapons are somewhat disappointing. The sniper rifle for instance allows you to snipe, but as far as I can see there is no such thing as a head shot in the game. The shotgun hardly does more damage up-close compared to the assault rifle.

A last point is that the game uses much of the established features of science fiction. The sand-worms for dune, the Aliens, the Borg, the Daleks, all these appear in the game in one disguise or another.

Yet, all in all the game has kept me entertained for a long time. So I like it.

Queen of the Damned (2002)

A story of a bored vampire and his bad tempered super-vampire girlfriend

[5/10 · 22 June 2008]

Let me state beforehand that I have not read any of Anne Rice's novels nor seen the movie Interview with the Vampire, so I will concentrate on this movie as is. Also you need to be prepared as the movie is a bit confusing as there are no less then three threads woven in the story. I have read that the movie is based on two of the novels of Anne Rice, which the writers then try to work into one movie. This might explain the obvious complexity.

The main thread of the movie tells us of the vampire Lestat who gets involved in awakening Akasha, a god-like vampire, who's first and only thought after rising is to destroy anything in her path. Since us mortals can have a sour mood after one night, this might reflect the hangover an immortal can have after sleeping several thousands of years(and been fed upon by Lestat somewhere along the line). Not an unreasonable sentiment I suppose. This first thread is getting more confused because for some reason Akasha has decided that Lestat will be her consort and therefore is excluded from the list of beings to exterminate. We are not told why. Maybe this is what sucking on super-vampires will do for you.

The second thread of the movie is taken up by the story of the world-weary vampire Lestat in which we are told that his unlife is dull. In fact he is bored from the moment he is turned into a vampire and in the end he is so bored that he exposes himself to the public by becoming a Gothic rock-star(hint: Marilyn Manson) thus invoking the wrath of the other vampires, who don't like to be exposed to the general public. Anything for a little bit of excitement I suppose.

The third thread is the story of a girl named Jesse who's only mission in life seems to be to offer herself as a sacrifice to Lestat. Lestat refuses to do his duty as a vampire and serves anyone else but this girl up to the very end. Maybe not unreasonable in hindsight, as this girl chases away his boredom this way. However this idea is never brought forward in the movie.

But with all this complexity you need to have a good crew to make the movie work and here is where it starts to falter. This movie has an obvious tight budget with it low budget gci graphics and inexpensive movie tricks and works with a unremarkable crew starting from the director down to the screenplay writers and cast. The director might not be bad, but in this movie he is certainly not great. The writers(Anne Rice seems to have declined the honor of participating) have difficulty to work the novels into a proper story line. Not strange since they have no track record to speak off. Unfortunately the movie for a large part is made up out of dialog and while this might sound easy to achieve, it is in fact very difficult to keep an audience captivated with dialog for more then five minutes. And in this movie more then half of the running time is made up out of dialog only. The main cast isn't inspiring. Stuart Townsend I found uninteresting. Aaliyah certainly is interesting and she was around that time a popular singer, but as an actress she had almost no experience and in this movie she moves and speaks in an awkward way as if she is partly a snake. Maybe this was on purpose, but the reason is not explained and to me it just looks likes bad acting. Perez and Moreau are decent actors, but their characters are so locked down that they can't save the movie whatever they do. What I found a bad point for the movie is the fact that it to obvious tries to attract various audiences. Aaliyah is added to attract her admirers, Townsend is a Gothic rock artist to attract the Gothic crowd(and gives away a almost ten minute performance halfway the movie for this end only) and the story itself is set to entice Anne Rice fans. None of these people will watch the movie with satisfaction I think.

My entire point is that the movie could have been better if the team had concentrated on one main thread, added more action and had made more of Aaliyah's other talent: performing. Personally I would have replaced Townsend by Perez. The entire 'Jesse' story was pointless and could have been left out. The look back on Lestats past seems also rather pointless so it could have been left out as well, or maybe only brought up as flashback. The Gothic look of some parts of the movie is so overused that leaving it out would alone have improved it instantly.

All in all the story was to much for the crew and in the end they where overwhelmed by it. So when you go and watch it, don't expect too much as it is a mediocre movie at best.

Screamers (1995)

Nice try: could have been better.

[5/10 · 24 May 2008]

Welcome to my examination of this movie and the short story "second variety" written by Philip K. Dick, upon which the movie is based. Dick's story tells of a surprise attack by communist forces on the west, the communist almost achieving victory until halted by UN killer robots called claws. Those in the west who survived the nuclear wipe-out moved to the moon leaving only soldiers, claws and underground weapon factories behind. The story kicks of when an UN commander receives a message from the enemy begging for a truce. The commander then sets of across no-man's-land to an agreed meeting point. During this trip he picks up a small boy. When the commander reaches then enemy lines two soldiers and a woman pop up and kill the boy. The boy turns out to be new type of advanced killer robot that infiltrates and then kills. The two soldiers survived such an attack because they happened to be enjoying themselves elsewhere in the company of the woman. The commander decides to return to his bunker. The return voyage is cloaked in fear as it becomes clear that new human like robots have been turned out that kill everyone. Since there are two variations known: number one and number three, the paranoia builds. The mood doesn't improve when the commander fails to contact his bunker and one soldier is killed by the other because he suspects him to be the 2nd type. The climax is reached when the group reach the bunker and discover it has been conquered by robots who attack the group. In the attack the 2nd communist soldier is killed and the commander is heavily wounded. The 2nd soldier turns out to be a robot. The commander and woman then try to escape the robots via a rocket that is programmed to fly to the moon. However, since the craft only takes one person the commander allows the woman to escape. When she is gone, he finds out that the second soldier was type four and the woman was type two.

The movie follows the short story closely although details have changed. For example: the action takes place in the future on another planet, with earth taking the role of the moon. The sides are called the called differently.

There are however some real changes that in general improve upon the story: - The movie spreads the action across more time and this makes the story stutter, with the action being broken by dead moments. - The movies takes of quite slow with scenes about the life in the bunker in a very cheap looking setting, especially the sliding doors are unbelievable. It would have been wise if they had just left them out and turned made things darker so it wouldn't be obvious how low budget the movie is. - The movie adds a fifth person to the group via a peculiar space craft crash. My guess this is because the commander can tell him(and thus the viewer) what is going on. Otherwise it is quite a mystery why a space crash occurs in the story. In other words it doesn't help the story along. - In the movies the claws are called screamers. The boy robot screams when it attacks. My guess this is to introduce a shock effect like in the Invasion of the body snatchers(seventies version). Again this doesn't seem to help the story along and the screaming robot boy isn't scary (and believe me: I scare easily). - The end is completely different. In the end the commander isn't heavily wounded and he escapes to the earth. Although it isn't an entire happy end as in the last shot the doll from a boy robot is seen lying(and moving) in his craft. Also the woman robot(who is the love interest in the story) dies fighting another one who tried to kill the commander.

• What really is different is that the movie fails to convey a strong mood one way or another. While the actors are adequate, with Jennifer Rubin and peter Weller being reasonable strange decision are taken at many points. For a paranoid feeling the movie fails to built up the tension. People are killed of to soon for that. Also much of the environment is to well lightened to be a horror. If all else fail one can try sarcasm, but alas this movie is devoid of wit as a desert is of water. When I wonder about this movie I wonder about the movie Stalker by Tarkovsy. I think this story needed a bit of stalker. It is a pity in never came off.

• In addition the movies beset by strange moments that attest to the noting that less is more. Leave this out. An example is that the commander is chased aliens style by the boy robots down a corridor and he has to wait for a slow moving elevator while the robots are smashing in a steel door. Up till then and after that the boys move very slowly(the bunker attack sees them shuffling along). When the robot soldier attacks one of the group he breaks in an unbelievable rant. It would have been better to just leave the babbling out. When the commander is at the escape rocket place there are two fights there, the commander fighting another ranting robot. The woman robot fighting another one. The movie makers apparently had to bent over backwards to introduce some unbelievable moments of affection between Rubin and Weller. It would have been better to be left out.

All in all the movie isn't as bad as it could have been, but it isn't as good as it could have been either. With some better lighting, leaving things out and some more dialog between the prime characters this might have even been a reasonable movie. As it is it isn't worth a second look. Nice try.

Rome: Total War (2004 Video Game)

A superb tactical battle simulator with a rudimentary strategic shell

[8/10 · 9 March 2008]

I bought Rome Total War (short: RTW) because I was interested in the add-on Barbarian Invasions. The add-on promised to invoke the mood of the final days of the empire and the early middle ages, the period that is the subject of Gibbons book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This period holds my special interest because I am fascinated in last days and falls of anything. However I never got around to buying the add-on since I was disappointed in the way Rome Total War worked on a strategic level. Let's get around to RTW main failings before getting to the good bits. This way we can end in a happier mood.

RTW's primary failings are on a strategic level. Politics, broken down into internal and external relations, are usually based on marriages, the key component in the power-games that surrounded the rise of the roman empire. However in RTW internal relations, while being represented in the game, are beyond the influence of the player. External relationships are better represented, but in RTW you can't arrange a marriage with representant of another nation and an alliance is as easily broken as it is agreed upon by the AI, which doesn't represent reality and for game purposes it means it is useless. In fact with the exception of bribing most instruments of the diplomat in this game are either not effective or useless.

Strangely, while in politics there is not enough control, there is to much control on the economic level. You can develop every town in any way you see fit, while in reality and of necessity the ancient period lacked a tight centralized control. Only the roman emperors could, because of their vast wealth and power, slightly influence economics, but even when they applied drastic policies these would general fail or backfire.

There are more strange things in this game. For instance, populous cities always get inflicted with rebellion regardless of how many guards or pacifying buildings you assign to them, so you need to exterminate the population of all large cities you conquer. This extreme measure seems to have no influence on the opinion of the rest of the world as far as I know. A bit strange. Another strange thing is that when you are roman, the senate will give you quests that half the time simply undo-able(conquer a city in the middle of enemy territory within 10 turns, even if the trip will take 10 turns). There are many more examples, but let's leave it with these two examples.

Now after all this negativity, let's have a look at the positive sides. The best way to do it is to forget that the game tries to accurate depict historic realities of ancient roman times. If you look at the game from the bottom-up: that it is battle generator in which the battles are given a context by having a rudimentary, but easily manageable, strategic shell, the this game is superb.

The battles are stunningly well done. There is a wide selection of troops available who's composition is dependent on the nation you play. Play the Greeks and you get a hoplite army, play the Parthians and you get a horse army, play the Romans and you get a heavy infantry army. Each nation is well represented with their own troop types which allows for much replay-ability and sheer enjoyment when watched on the battlefield. The AI in combat is adequate(compare it with the AI from Mark of Chaos, which is two years younger and performs worse) although it is unable to learn from failures, so once you find the key to defeat a specific army composition(horse archers vs infantry) then the AI will not adapt his army to the new challenge. The developers have put in every effort to make sure the battles are pleasant experience by easy control, speed of pace and free range of the camera. There is little to more to require. A special remark I want to make for the sounds. The developers have chosen good sounds in the battle and for each of the nations you can play. This is well done and enhances the mood of the game.

So here is it, a weak strategic shell but a hell of a good battle generator. With these limitations it is recommended to anyone interested in tactical games. Hopefully the add-ons will be available in one big bundle in the near future.

Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006 Video Game)

Decent game but hampered by unconvincing characters and plot developments.

[7/10 · 30 December 2007]

(remark: this reviews has as it's subject the single player game not the multi-payer feature and the construction set).

"Can you honestly expect him to feel involved with you characters and are the developments in the plot convincing and either exciting or interesting?"

It is almost impossible to discuss Neverwinter Nights 2(short: NWN 2) without mentioning other games. Impossible because NWN 2 is a sequel. And impossible because Obsidian, the developer, has created Knights Of The Old Republic II, another AD&D game.

NWN 1 was a clean break from the Baldur's Gate dominated AD&D RPG world because it focused on the construction set and multi-player feature. The game itself felt more like a demo to show off the construction set then a full featured storyline. NWN 1 game was a single character game and to play in NWN 1 as a party one needed to turn to the multi-player feature.

With NWN 2 Obsidian has changed course again and reintroduced some BG features like a more developed story-line and a party centered game. In addition Obsidian seems to have been pleased with it's KOTOR II crafting mechanism, so crafting is part of NWN 2 as well. In all other respects Obsidian choose to keep things as they where in NWN 1 and stay true to the AD&D established features.

To mix tested features from other games into one packet seems a sane course but with NWN 2 this did not go without problems. An example of such a problem is that every conversation will be handled by main player character even if the conversation was started with another character. This has three effects: conversations are always tested against the player characters abilities, it is no-use developing the conversational skills of others and any conversation that results in combat(and there are lot of those) put's the player character in the front line, which is bad if you happen to have a vulnerable character like a wizard.

More can be said, but out of space consideration I'll focus on the story and how it's handled. It, the story, is broken down in three acts and an introduction. The introduction get's you familiarized with the AD&D rule-set and your home village just prior before it's being overrun. The three act's tell the story of a being created to defend a long lost civilization who turns up as a evil world conqueror/destroyer and who is thwarted by the player.

Attacking the home of the player is one of the most overused starts ever, invoking a feeling of dread about what the writers will serve us next. And indeed the game is full of overused features. As said before, the three acts turn around a being created to defend a long lost civilization who turns into an evil world conqueror. And again all the bad guys will join him on basis of the weakest excuses: they want power. For some depressing reason these bad guys are better organized and have more resources at their disposal than the good and neutral one's, despite the fact that all the leaders are homicidal psychopaths and the rank and file are more busy with in-fighting then overrunning the world. More overused features are dark priests creating undead armies, tribes of orcs assaulting civilization and convents of evil wizards abusing their evil magics. We have seen this all many times before.

Furthermore the story bristles with odd turns. Just to name a few. In act I the githyanki, a people from another world, turn up to pester the main player and then disappear in act II without a proper explanation. In act II a new person is introduced and he will be you adversary up to act III at which point he will join your side in one of the most unbelievable changes of opinion one can think of. In Act I you are given some options to (mal)treat some lizards, in act III lizards will appear again to be recruited as potential allies. At this point you expect there to be some link, but there is none. In act II you will be able to wipe out the better part of the teenage offspring of the Neverwinter's well-to-do without any repercussions. In the same vein, you can choose in Act II to side with the criminals in a war for control over the docks of Neverwinter, killing scores of law-enforcers and yet a little later on you are awarded with a title and a keep by the ruler of the city.

Now all of the above might have been neutralized if the happenings had been give some deeper layer, where presented with a twist or brought to us in a unique way. The central theme that of a former guardian who turns into an evil conqueror has some merit, but this is hardly used in any good fashion. The characters are just not shown(main bad guy), unbelievable, overused and presented in a boring way(most of the cast). Interesting dialogue can only be found far and in between.

But the game has some very redeeming qualities. First and foremost are the other party members. They have all different personalities and some have their own quests. It is fun how some of the battle cry's invoke a smile. In addition there are some gems. One fine piece is the trial halfway in the game that suddenly brings into focus what impact your treatment of others can cause.

To turn back to the question at the beginning of this review. Most characters you won't feel involved with, most developments are unconvincing and only the endless score of battles, character interactions and the occasional story gem keeps things interesting. Because of this it is impossible to give anything more than a 7.5.

Underworld (2003)

Almost campy were it not for the lack of campy dialog

[6/10 · 22 December 2007]

(This is a reevaluation of this movie: my revious review was more positive and gave 7 out of 10.)

Underworld was doomed never to be a 'good' movie. What was to be expected? A well written plot? Superb acting? Great dialog? It is simply not that kind of movie. After seeing it more than once I found that this movie get's dull quickly. It is simply a movie that has nothing to special to offer(besides kate that is) and re-uses things we have seen before(and better)in blade and the matrix. You should understand that the problem with this is not re-using things, because few movies actually invent new things. But this movie is beset by continuous re-using things that have been used before. It is like replaying a song over and over again until you get sick and tired of it. The style of this movies is at no point innovative. For sure a nice dark brooding mood pervades everywhere but is ruined most of the time by overusing items of just using strange items. When it is raining everyone unfolds the same black umbrella. Every vampire and werewolf is dressed in the same leather trenchoat. All use the same weapons(G38K) and use the same dumb tactics(running at the enemy firing their weapons). Especially bad is the music. Which yet again use no

Le met tell you first that I found none of the cast really bad except for Bill Nighy. Kate Beckinsale is the corner piece of the movie. She is an attractive woman who does a reasonable job in portraying Selene, a battle-hardened killer vampire driven by her hatred for werewolves. She seems to thaw somewhat when she meets the human Michael(Speedman), but not much, for you can't expect to much from someone who spends the better part of a millennium hunting ferocious monsters to extinction. At no point Selene turns into a steamy lover mainly because that would out of character. I stress this as many critics comment on the bad chemistry between Selene and Michael. But I found Michale Sheen(lucian) and Shane Brolly(craven) much more interesting. In fact probably Brolly is playing the most interesting character of all.

The battle scenes are acceptable. Those with kate are nice because they late her jump and run all over the place. They are well done and varied ranging of every method of 'interaction' one can think of and allowed by the tight budget. In fact is is surprising how much has been accomplished.

While i found underwold a nice movie to watch once, it also saddens me that so much is missing. The movie really suffers from stale dialog and music. The plot has some interesting views on the vampiric and werewolf state but fails to miss the point that vampires and werewolves are predators using humans for subsistence. As far as the movies goes, Selene is only a sexy looking lady with some interesting teeth and eyes, a fling for tight-fitting dark leather clothing, fast cars and the nightlife. In fact the only time we actually see a vampire bite someone is when Selene needs to to safe speedman(you understand when you have seen the movie). The nail on the coffin is however the lack of any spicy dialog and good music. Don't expect any memorably conversation or one liners: there is none, nothing, nada, zipp. And music. It is another soulless mix of heavy metal and eletronics. This is really bad as we all know that you can have a crappy plot and have mediocre acting, but to become camp you absolutely need to have a campy dialog and campy music.

I hope that the third underworld installment scheduled in 2009 will give us the proper dialog and music. Speedman should die horrible in the first scene, making Selene into an bad-dude wise cracking lady who exacts revenge on anyone crossing her path in a bloody horrible way. No further plot needed. Oh and throw in some Nietzsche: he mixes so well with vampires.

Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000 Video Game)

One of the best rpg's of all times, even to date

[10/10 · 15 December 2007]

Summary Writing in the closing days of 2007 one can only say that this game is still one of the best rpg's ever and still can be used to benchmark other games in this genre.

Main

The BG line was on rudely broken by the NWN series and in that period you had to find your party-rpg needs in games like KOTOR and Jade Empire. Not that NWN 1 was bad, mind you, but it was just not a BG kind of game. With the creation of NWN 2 the AD&D series is progressing back to the BG branch with notably a better storyline and the ability to control a party of individuals with their own stories to tell. 'Re-inventing the wheel' is the phrase the dutch use.

Of course modern hardware and software has enabled better graphics, camera handling and many more things and in this respect BG is dated. But modern hardware can't provide us with a well told story. Or to put it in another vein: it can't make up for the lack of it. There are many developers who use the better performance of modern system to make up for the lack of a good tale. Usually in time these games disappear after a while because newer game that perform even better surpass the. Stories however are of all times and in this they are timeless and it is a well told story which is the cornerstone of BG 2 which makes the game last so long.

A big contribution is made by David Warner as the voice of Jon Irenicus. While the lines are probably written by others, it is Warner who uses his voice to add that extra layer of evilness which make Irenicus one of the outstanding bad guys of all games, a quality he shares with Vlad Lem from Max Payne 2. It shows that Warner has played Evil in the movies time bandit's and it is that same acting he uses to portray Jon and it works very well. A good antagonist is very important, but Warner takes it one step further and this is one of the many factors which makes the game shine.

But many other factors contribute to the game. There is much in this game but in an incredible refined mix. Just not to much to bore and enough of it to keep things interesting. An example is the way in which a quadruple betrayal is used in the dark-elf(aka drow) city with one faction using the players to set up an other faction and a third drow requests to player to betray the first faction too and finally the player betraying them all(well so to speak). It's a well thought plot that sounds preposterous when written here, but actually very well illustrates how that dark-elf society is portrayed in fantasy writing.

The main plot is at thankfully different from those overused bad-guy-plotting-to-subject-the-world and has a note of sadness in it. I would like to add more, but the space is limited here and I can only point you to other reviews to see what is in this game.

Well written, well voiced and developed with much fun the game still overshadows many of it's successors. A must for anyone who loves the rpg genre and can live with the now dated graphics. My hopes is that new software and hardware will not put an end to this game.

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (2005 Video Game)

A silly game

[6/10 · 7 July 2007]

Summary

Brothers in Arms mixes a squad based tactical game with a first person shooter aspect. The game let's you smartly control up to three teams, a team being a tank or a group of men. The movies, cut-scenes and conversations are excellent. The game is however hampered by a dumb AI, stale tactics, misrepresentation (again) of the Germans and their equipment and weak implementation of the first person shooter aspect. The game offers entertainment for the undemanding gamer, it certainly isn't a representation of world war II combat.

It was inevitably that Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers would see it's way into a video game. Granted, Medal of Honor and especially Call of Duty already translated these new world war II realism into a game, but both of these where first person shooters. There was an obvious demand for a squad based game. Brothers in Arms(short BIA) seems a logical implementation. It is the same setting as the first person shooters, but now you can control a given crew of AI soldiers.

BIA uses an easy point and click system to control the teams. The teams consists of up to three soldiers or a tank. But don't think that it is breaking ground in this aspect. In fact it looks much like the mechanism used in Republic Commando. Although RC uses soldiers instead of teams.

BIAs implementation of the squad based battles are at times silly. It is typical for a first person shooter to present itself as a corridor along which you are forced to travel with little possibility to approach an object differently. BIA has the same system but the corridors are broadened so you can now "work around the flank".

When you reach a piece of terrain you see conspicuously objects scattered about which have the name cover written all over it. Teams of 1 to 4 Germans will show up and take position behind the cover. Sometimes machine gun nests or gun position are already set up and will fire on you when you come in view. You order your teams to take up position behind the nearest cover and a exchange fire will start. If you do nothing this combat will last forever because the AI doesn't run out of ammo and the combatants can't hurt each other when standing behind cover. You can have breakfast and come back and note that nothing has changed.

The working principle in the game is that you have to flank a German position, pinning the Germans with one team and then using another to flank it. For this purpose obvious approach routes have been created. Whenever you try to outflank Germans at position A, new Germans will show up at position B, thwarting the flanking maneuver. But don't worry: you can flank them too. And if more Germans show up at C, you can flank them too. In the end you will be able to flank the Germans and then roll up the entire defense. Of course new Germans will show up at a second line so you will be redoing the flanking maneuver again in a short while.

This silly feature is compounded by other silliness. For instance, you can suppress the Germans, but they can't suppress your teams. Another thing is that when you flank the Germans they will shout that they are being flanked in German, showing they are aware of what you are doing but they won't do a thing about it and they simple ignore you!

More silliness: the German AI never makes a counter attack or flank your position unless it is scripted in the game to do so. When it is scripted the AI uses just one tactic: a full frontal assault totally ignoring loses, common sense or tactics. Indeed in one instance the German attacked first, then the mortars started to fire. Thus making a joke of the concept of proper infantry tactics. Or to quote from Max Payne 2: how stupid can you be?

Also silly is the German equipment. MG positions are always fixed and the arc of fire is limited and positions won't overlap. Apparently Germans in Normandy only use the 37 mm PAK, in reality an obsolete gun. A strange piece of equipment was the short barreled stug III shown in the game without camouflage in a earth brown overtones. A sitting duck for any fighter bomber. But most silly is that the German infantry have no light machine guns: historically each 10 man squad had one 3 man light machine gun team.

Another silly aspect is that they made your weapons laughable weak. With astonishment you discover that grenades do nothing. When you fire at a German you need to offload dozens of bullets just to down one guy standing maybe 15 meters from you. No game has every had such a weak interpretation of the MP 40 or Garand.

All Germans in the game are inhumanly determined. As noted before, they have no qualms about frontal assaulting machine gun position across open terrain. When you pop up behind Germans, they hardily bat an eye and turn around and start firing at you.Even if you riddle them with bullets. And they aren't in pot hole's or entrenched, no they are standing right up in open view without cover. Such audacity is also shown when you throw grenades at them. They even pick them up and throw them back at you. The Germans in this game never ever surrender. Instead the have to be killed one and all. And this even for second or third rate troops!!!

All in all BIA is a game that should be taken as being a silly. If you expect a realistic feeling game in a world war II setting you better look elsewhere.

Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003 Video Game)

Reasonable game failing to be cyberpunk and with a contrived ending

[7/10 · 7 July 2007]

Summary of article.

Invisible War is set in the near future. It is a role-play game with a first person shooter aspect. It has a reasonable story, with several options to solve an issue and no less then five endings. Yet it lacks in-depth character development, a fitting music score, the feeling of really being in a near-future earth and has an odd weapon system. The plot development is reasonable up to a point but the ending is to contrived.

Plot of the game: a contrived story.

You play Alex D. in the game, a member of an elite school. When the game starts the school is under attack(actually twice!). You escape to freedom and then start on a journey to find out what is going on. It is the future of humanity that is at stake here and no less then five parties are involved in the struggle.

In theory the complexities of all these parties working to their own ends should make for a good story. In practice it results in oddities. For instance: you can actually defer the choice of where to put your final loyalty up to the end and join a side even despite the fact that you have massacred dozens of their members and destroyed their assets.

Another weakness of the plot is the contrived ending. I find it ludicrous to suppose that one choice by one person at one given moment in time determines the course of humanity. Nevertheless the game works towards this end, actually pressuring you in making one particular choice in preference over others.

Setting of the game: cyberpunk.

Invisible War is supposed to be a cyberpunk game. Cyberpunk revolves around the idea that the state fails it's primary function, which is to dispense good to all. It either is powerless, being eclipsed by non-democratic organizations. Or it is powerful but has become undemocratic. The drive behind this development is supposed to lie with the multinational organization and their supposed use of dehumanizing technology.

One essence of cyberpunk is that the main character, although capable in their specific field are basically small fry. But Alex D doesn't fall into that category. Alex D is from a elite school, being family to that other famous D guy and the high and mighty crave her loyalty even forgiving wholesale slaughter of their members. Alex D isn't the Chase from Neuromancer.

The world of Invisible War, although visually drawn in dark overtones, hardly gives you the feeling of a world dehumanized by technology. The cities don't give you the idea that they are ant heap like urban sprawls. There are no masses milling about: the few streets lined with small buildings are sparsely populated. There are no different types of transports buzzing to and fro to give you a frantic bee hive feeling. The music is adequate but hardly supports the cyberpunk mood, it is just the wrong category.

The game is supposed to play a rough 70 years in the future, apparently the only noticeable changes between the now and then are the robots used to patrol some of the streets, the availability of biomods to improve yourself and life-size holograms. There is no cyberspace and what hacking can be done is useful but hardly gives you the feel of virtual world that coexist next to the real one. Of course there is one party which clearly shows what the extreme use of biomods will do to you but only at the end the dehumanizing nature of radical adherence to technology is shown.

The game-play: a mixed bag.

Before you start the game, you can select to play a man or a woman and then slightly adjust the way your character looks. Not that it matters to the game, because people react the same to you. One thing you can't choose is your name: Alex D. You apparently don't know you surname and this feels like a cheap trick to hide something important and indeed it is. Players from the first game will have guessed it at once what the D stands for. It spoils the game somehow.

The first thing you notice is that there is little character development. There is no experience and you can't buff stats. The only way to actually improve you character survivability is by biomods. While the proper use of biomods can give you an edge, they are balanced in such a way that are limited in how long they work and what they can do.

The oddest implementation of a weapon system is made in this game. While you can have different weapons, they all share the same rather limited ammo supply. Ammo is hard to find and what you can carry is not much. The effect is that, while you can use a machine pistol or flamethrower, you think thrice in using them as the expend precious ammo at a rapid rate. You can by the way modify you weapons so they expend less ammo, which is a nice and welcome feature.

The conclusion: reasonable game with weak points.

Beside the hefty dose of criticism above I think there are many redeeming qualities in this game. The most interesting is the different ways you can handle a situation. You can use sneaking, shooting, hacking or pick locking to get around an obstacle. Although not always are all options available, in general at least two are. Conversations are a strong point in this game and these are interesting and to the point. The fact that there are no clear right choices in this game is interesting although probably somewhat unnerving.

The game is a reasonable good game, but it just has to many weak points to make it remarkable.

SWAT 4 (2005 Video Game)

Swat 4 is a good game with some minor prolems: highly recommended

[9/10 · 4 July 2007]

Summary Swat 4 is one of the best team based tactical games I have ever played. It is one of the few games that awards you for capturing culprit's alive. However on higher difficulty levels you feel the lack of refined control. I wonder if anyone has ever finished the final levels on elite level. It seems impossible to me.

Swat 4 is a game in which you are the team leader of a special police team. Your task is to bring a hostile situation to a good end: to capture the criminals and to rescue the civilians. For this you are in command of a team of four man called a segment, divided in two man sub-teams, called elements. If you do it perfectly you get a maximum of 100 points. Points are subtracted when you kill felons, allow criminals or civilians or team-members to be injured. fail to report in and leave weapons lying about. If a civilian or hostage is killed the game has failed although you are allowed to finish the mission. If you are killed the game ends.

At the start of a mission you are given detailed information about the situation. However this is not like Rainbow Six in that you get an accurate description of everything. Sometimes you get a proper plan of the premises, sometimes this is lacking and you have nothing but a vague sketch to go on. Usually you get an idea of the opposition, but not always precise information at the numbers and their equipment.

After you have studied the background information you can choose your gear. You have a wide set to choose from: lethal weapons, like shotguns or non-lethal weapons like a teargas dispenser. As sidearm you can choose a proper pistol or a tacer, which is a pistol that fires an electrical charge. This very useful in disabling people for a short while or prodding them into surrender. Then you can choose stuff like wedge's to block doors, c2 or breaching gun to burst them open and several types of grenades to disable people. You can only equip so much, so you have to choose wisely. Whatever you choose always take the spy tool with you, because that allows you to look under doors and around corners.

Once you have chosen you gear you go in. The situations are sometimes tense. You are not allowed to just bang away at people. You have to properly warn them or can only return fire if they start combat first. Otherwise you are penalized for using excessive force or even using unauthorized deadly force. This is totally new as in most games, like Rainbow Six, you just kill the bogeys and nobody cares. This is particular difficult when hostages or civilians are involved. You have to take out terrorists prepared to shoot victims on first sight. You can of course neglect this, but to advance to the next mission you need minimal amount of points.

Swat offers a lot of diverse situations with different settings. In general it get's more difficult as the game progresses. There is however no connection between the missions. This was once criticism on the game. Rainbow Six had a story connecting the situations, swat 4 has none. I don't mind though, as it doesn't make the experience any less.

Swat also offers nice visuals and proper support of sound(if you listen carefully you can note enemy movements by their footsteps) and music. Although sometimes the mood enhancing music is annoying because it throws a lot of noise at you when the situation develops into a fight.

While I like swat very much, on higher difficulty small problems become big problems. First the handling of grenades are problematic. Particular in L-shaped room gas fails to affect people at the other end. The solution is to drop the grenade somewhat further in the room. Alas you have no way to order that, the only way is to do this is to do it yourself. In addition your team-members can't throw a grenade down or up or around corners. Also when they are ordered to drop it into a room they move up at both side of a door. The effect is sometimes that they are seen by bogey when the doors is opened and shot. Instead you would like to open the door and then throw the grenade through it from a distance. Again you can only do it yourself.

One other thing is that your team-members are at times difficult to control. At the sight of someone they will start shouting that they should put up their hands warning everyone around them that the police has arrived. Sometimes you just want to make a quiet entry to take up tactical positions or block doors before ordering people to surrender. In addition when a bad guy is moving in sight the team-members have a tendency to pursue them even into an uncleared rooms sometimes getting themselves killed. Also while there is an option to control each element via remote commands, it is a hell of a job to synchronize the attack of both elements. Sometimes you want to take out a room from two directions. Also you can't order to drop two grenades in a room at the same time: mixing gas with a flashbang.

Despite these problems I like swat very much and still enjoy it. Swat is a good game.

Addendum In an expansion of Swat 4 the stretchkov syndicate there have been added some things to the game. Three things are noticeable. A grenade launcher allowing you have a huge amount of grenades. A tacer containing two loads. Bogeys that sometimes could become hostile after they have surrendered so you must tie them down to prevent this.(in the normal game they stayed put after surrender even when you left them sitting untied with their weapons on the floor.

The Thing (2002 Video Game)

Mixed: Good start bad finish, good points, bad points

[5/10 · 4 July 2007]

Summary The Thing is potentially a game that has some strong points going for it, like the feeling of being isolated, by the Antarctic conditions from the world and from your fellow teammates because any of them could turn into a thing at any moment. Yet the entire game struggles to a bad end, with annoying boss battles, bad visuals, mediocre music and bad implemented game features.

This game is set after the happenings in the movie The Thing from John Carpenter and you play the commander in charge of a team sent to find out what had happened. This first part is really great, while you work your way through the partly destroyed bases in search for clues and missing team members.

Then of course the s*** hit's the fan and the things turn up, first in the single spider form, then in waves, and later on as the more robust humanoids. In the meantime your companions change into things themselves at the most inconvenient moments. At the end you find yourself not only up against things but also against soldiers protecting a secret base.

But the game kicks the bottom out of the horror part. Horror in general takes common persons who, with meager resources, are at the mercy of a unknown powerful threat. When they are armed, the weapons in general are ineffective(pistols won't hurt ghosts). Through luck or quick thinking some survive the ordeal, but most of the time it is just an temporary escape because more often then not the monsters will be back.

The first thing the game does is end the common person bit as you realize that everybody is turning into monsters except for you. The danger should be that you can get infected by the thing and then become one yourself, like zombies or vampires. It is therefore important not get infected, hence not get wounded by things. But you are not infected whatever happens. At first you think it's a game bug but then halfway through the game an explanation is given. But the explanation given hurts the horror part even more. You are no common person: you are a bio-engineered soldier.

The second way the game hurt's the horror theme is by giving the player a huge amount of weapons. You will soon find that the Antarctic is apparently a weapon dump of sorts bursting with shot guns, automatic rifles and flamethrowers. So the game become's an extermination game instead of an horror in which you fight of hordes of monsters with a large supply of weaponry.

The game is weakened even further by the ridiculous boss battles. I don't like them in general, but in this game they are even worse than normal. Boss battles general put the player in a small enclosed space against a incredible powerful enemy that takes a lot of hurt to stop. In this game it's the same and sometimes taken to extreme. In one battle you have to stand on one particular spot, otherwise you get killed. There is no hint where you have to stand, so it can take a lot of trial and error to win that one. This is not counting for the fact that standing on the spot will not make you win this battle: you have to stand there not to lose it. And that is not even the end boss battle!

The story sinks even further halfway through the game as you discover that there is a bio-engineering project that wants to create super soldiers by mixing humans with things. Apparently between the movie and the game so much time has progressed that a complete project has been launched and executed. Alternatively: apparently someone has spent a huge amount of money on a project on the Artic without having a clue about the progress of the project. And why the antarctic? Why not take samples of thing-specimen to a place elsewhere where it is cheaper to built a base and maintain it? You don't have to conduct experiments with specimens on the place where you found them.

Finally the horror genre somehow should have a mystery. The less is explained the more scary things are. But this game is crystal clear after you have been informed by the bad guy. No odd encounters here, no strange conversation or partly destroyed papers. After being explained what is going on, the game turns into an amusing chaotic situation as soldiers from that secret base battle it out with you and the things. By this time the entire horror thing has gone out of the window. It's has become a shooter.

The last thing that makes the game weak is that no effort has been made to make it visually or musically attractive. Proper sound and vision make half a movie and this is up to a point also true for a game. It would have been unnerving if for instance in the deserted base a radio is still playing and you hear it's sound get stronger and weaker while you work your way through the rooms. No such mood enhancement has been done.

The game is but half a game and weak at many moments. By taking out the fear of the unknown and the mystery it has become a dumb shooter. It's a pity because it started so promising.

Jade Empire (2005 Video Game)

Good short game with great ambiance but weak points

[8/10 · 4 July 2007]

Summary Jade Empire is a beautiful looking game with a proper plot with twists supported by good sounds and visuals. The mood is great, the supporting cast is diverse and interesting. The combat is basic, maybe to simple for experienced gamers. Replayability is low, despite the option to choose from several starting characters and the option to play a new level of difficulty. No new content is opened up and you are forced to the same combat options regardless of the character chosen.

I bought this game in the first half of 2007. After I installed the game and started it I was struck by the atmosphere. It breathed the ambiance of an ancient Asiatic empire. I was especially impressed by the way the music changes with the setting while keeping the music in Asiatic style. (Spooky in graveyards, impressive in the imperial city, dreamy when walking through the grasslands.)The visuals are also beautiful with for instance grass and flowers moving with the wind and water running down the side of a mountain into a small lake.

The way the story evolves is interesting, it's has some nasty twists. While the main story follows a single path with no options to choose from, you are allowed to choose between two or even three options in side quests. These side quests are varied in content.

The supporting cast of characters is varied and interesting. Many of them have interesting tales to tell and you can even have a romantic affair.

The good thing is that Jade Empire sets down a very good stage for the player to act upon. But balanced by this are some lesser aspects to the game.

For one thing: it has a feeling of being unbalanced. Most of the talking happens in the first chapters of the game. In fact I guess that two thirds is concentrated in the Imperial City and Tien's Landing, with the imperial city easily taking half of all non-violent interaction. After leaving the imperial city the story is just a single path of combat to the end, before Tien's Landing it has the feel of an introduction.

That the game is actually longer than it has content is partly because there is much repeated. Especially this is true for Tien's Landing. Everybody tells you about disaster the town experiences: the same line's are used over and over. Another annoying feature is that while movies are made to skip, cut-scene's are not. This is aggravating when the cut-scene directly results in a difficult combat scene. When you die you have to view the cut-scene again. This is especially true for battles against the powerful monsters like Death's Hand or the final battle in the arena in the imperial city. Indeed it looks like the more difficult a battle is the longer the cut scene is.

A second thing is the combat. On the face of it the combat offers enough different options, amongst it something called styles. But many styles are superfluous.

The first reason being that most styles are only obtainable when you progress through the game and some come late in the game. Since you need to spent skill points to develop styles to more effectiveness you find out you only have enough to develop the styles you got early in the game. Besides it is a guess each and every time how effective a new style is and you can't reuse skill points already spent.

The options are even reduced because monsters are immune to some styles. In fact the basic style you start out with affect the most monsters. In addition the effectiveness of styles are reduced because the more advanced ones cost magic points(called chi) while the basic one's are free to use. Especially powerful styles are an enormous drain on your chi and can only be used for short while. The options are strange: advanced styles cost chi to work and affect less targets and sometimes don't do much more damage.

The most disappointment I felt with the weapons styles. I created a character which mainly used weapon styles. But I found out I got stuck after a while. The reason was that you need to buff both chi and focus when using such a character. This is because chi is used for healing next to powering style's, so you need to have chi regardless of the style chosen. So when using weapons you need to buff two stats while if you use basic and magic styles you can concentrate on one stat. In addition you can actually choose a style that regenerates chi, but there is no style that does the same for focus. And finally weapons styles don't affect ghosts and, because of the plot, there are a lot of ghosts in this game.

In other words, while there is potentially a lot to choose from in reality your options are limited to a small set of well developed styles and some you choose for fun or spent points by accident.

There is one other weak feature, that is the unlock-able Jade Master difficulty. When you have gone through the game you can replay it in Jade Master difficulty with the stats and styles you ended the first game with. There is however no new content or new things to find or develop. What changes is that the monsters have way more hit points and hit harder. What not happens: you don't hit harder and all the magic and support style's you and your enemies do the same damage as in the basic game. Since there isn't a way to improve the skills beyond the basic set you find that the battle's just take longer to complete. These battle don't get interesting alas, they tend to bore.

Nevertheless besides these weak point it is an entertaining game that, when due time has passed can be replayed.

24 (2001–2010)

Mediocre series with weak plot

[5/10 · 3 July 2007]

Summary

Again a series based on the same old premises. Bad guys have all the cards. Good guys are to inept to do anything about it. A single hero saves the day by slowly taking the cards away until the plan of the bad guys fall apart. The law enforcement agencies are only useful in cleaning up the mess. They might as well be replaced by cleaners.

Some years ago colleagues of mine where quite enthusiastic about 24 when it game out. They clung to this series, trying to figure out who was doing what to whom and why. I never felt enticed to watch the series. The more the praise and humbug around it, the more it would be likely it would fall through on close scrutiny.

Some time ago I was in the position to watch two episodes of the series. A band of armed men from one of the former Soviet Republics had occupied an airport and taken hostages. They threatened to kill the hostages if the Russian and US president, who where just in a meeting, signed an anti-terrorist pact. Among the hostages were the Jack Bauers son and his mother(who was not Jacks wife: probably divorced). Jack Bauer was hiding around in the airport passing information to the outside.

While this was happening, inside the us government there was a person who was callous enough to feed the leader of the terrorist with information. His motive being something like that either he didn't like the president or didn't like the proposed pact although in it wasn't clear to me.

In the meanwhile the president tried to make up his mind to give in or to sign the pact in discussions with his wife and one or two others. It is strange that the president was only surrounded by his wife and two or so advisor's and one of these was(as far as i can remember) the inside bad guy and the other the head of the CIA(or something).

It all got a little more complex as what looked to be a big shot of the CIA took on the task of situation control and called the head of terrorist with the ominous words: I am the head of the anti-terrorist team. So much for using professional hostage negotiators.

It got even more complex when Jack Bauer was captured by the terrorists. The anti-terrorist team didn't know of course so the terrorist leader then ordered Jack to pretend that he was still free and lure the swat-team into a trap. But Jack, being the smart guy he is, used some CIA phrases to warn the anti-terrorist guys, who at first didn't get the hint. But then some guy(deus ex machina) comes in from nowhere who hears what Jack has said and reasons: look he was with the CIA some months ago, so he is using old code words and actually he has been captured.

So the swat team, being tipped of that Jack has been captured then makes a different entry and the entire hostage situation is solved.

Are you still there? I am asking for you might have been lost by now.

What is wrong with all of the above? It isn't the complex plot. No, the problem is that it is a typical standard bad plot. Each and every time it is the same, the bad guys have all the resources even when confronted by the might of the us state. The only one that stands between them and their goal is the single hero and some inept swat team who need to be taken by the hand by the hero.

The swat team is of worst of all. It is displayed as a bunch of morons. They seem to be dependent on Jack Bauer's information about the terrorist, while the entire group of terrorists and hostages are in plain open view for all to see through the glass wands of the airport. Nobody seems to have put up camera's, snipers or observation teams. Or at least they don't tell us, because they are there as we witness later-on.

When the mother of Jacks son is released the swat team is so dumb to let her hang around the tactical command center with displays showing her what is going on, with the predictable result that she gets hysterical when she sees her son about to be killed by the terrorists. By the way, nobody of swat did put in any effort to interrogate the woman about the hostage situation? Huh? And then when the swat team finally makes it's entry they forget to use stuff like flashbangs and teargas so they have shoot it out. That is a really bad score: dead men don't talk and firefights just turn up dead bystanders. The swat people know the phone-number of the bad guy. Why wasn't it tapped(so call could be traced to the inside agent in the government?) or isolated to prevent others contacting him? And then they commit the final sin by not arresting everyone in sight. No they let people happily walk off without them being cleared, with the result that one sleeper(an terrorist pretending to be a hostage) walks away. But even more. Personally I would suggest to have the swat team replaced by the female cast of Baywatch: they are as inept but at least nice to look at.

Again we witness a series that can make stories by making a joke of everything except the hero. This makes it a mediocre series at best.

I, Claudius (1976)

One of the better roman series

[9/10 · 3 July 2007]

I am a graduated historian with a special interest both in warfare and the roman empire. In particular I wrote my graduation paper on the changes the senate experienced in the early days of the Principat: the period of more or less stable rule starting with Augustus that marked the definite end of the Republic and which witnessed the decline of the senate from the sole governing body to become the extension of government by a sole ruler. It is this period up to Claudius which is also the subject period of the series I Claudius. Some years ago I bought the series on tape and watched it.

Without doubt the most important writer on this period is a man called Tactitus. Of interest in this regard are the books which cover the reign of Augustus up to Nero. Tacitus main focus was actually the senate and what the rule of a single man did to them. His works has a rather grim nature. It goes from bad to worse with most rulers. Tacitus is also important because he lived so close to time when the events occurred and was able with people who actually lived in that day and age.

There is still a debate about how opposed he was to the rule of a single man. I can't give you the answer to this. I think he was a believer of that the rule of one man was a necessity, a given. He was forced to accept the rule of an emperor and tried to show them and others what tyranny could cause.

The second ancient writer of note regarding this period and from which we still have books is a man called Suetonius. He wrote a series of lives of each ruler. It has a rather tabloid nature about it which makes it more filled with mirth then Tacitus. Suetonius more or less has the feeling of an courtier was is telling us all the inside gossip.

There are also some other writers like Cassius Dio. However their influence isn't on par with both Suetonius and Tacitus in this series. There is however one note to this. What is told about Judea(One of the closest friends of Claudius was Herod Agrippa; he was a ruler of one of the subjected kingdoms in Judea) seems to stem from Flavius Jospehus, a Romanized inhabitant of Judea.

The series most of the time follow the narrative of Tacitus. However we miss a large chunk of his the reign of Caligula and Tiberius and where Tacitus drops away Suetonius steps in. Sometimes when Tacitus is ambiguous Suetonious more spicy interpretation is taken. And sometimes the story is embellished. (That Augustus was poisoned by the Augusta is not a proved fact and even Suetonius shirked away from saying so).

Most of the times the cast is reasonable good. John Hurt as Caligula might be a bit to old, but his acting is topnotch. Brian Blessed is somewhat awkward as Augustus, being mostly to big and having to harsh a voice. But this is just bickering.

I must disagree with someone who wrote that the guy playing Tiberius was wrongly chosen. As far as we have description of Tiberius it is fitting: he was a tall man, walking slightly bent forward. He seems to have had a brooding nature and was insecure about himself. At times he was given to despair making statements that he would retire, at other times he saw plots everywhere allowing full lease to prosecutors and slanderers. He seems to have felt slighted by Augustus who gave preference to his own flesh and blood(Tiberius was an adopted son) and overawed by his mother, the Augusta. He seems to have had little joy from his reign and probably felt trapped and manipulated into it. In latter live he withdrew into a sort of semi-exile. He was not loved, although respected, making him state that he didn't care if he was feared as long as he was respected.(Caligula is rumored to have said later on of himself: he didn't care if he was respected, as long as he was feared). This all is attested in both Tacitus and Suetonius and played very well by the actor in question.

My impression is that the series is a remarkable and skillful adaption on what is written in evidence. It is well acted and true to the fact in as far as such a series can be. This by far outstrips any given modern series, like Rome.

However I can't give it that one point to make it a full ten, because the series is simply dated. There is little action, it is to slow for modern day audiences and the fact that there are no outside scenes give it to much the feeling of a soap like As The World Turns(which it is in one way). I simply don't like soaps. If it where possible I would give it a 9.5 out of 10.

NCIS (2003– )

Mediocre show

[5/10 · 3 July 2007]

I am amazed that this show gets such high figures. I watched it on and off through the last couple of years, each time expecting it to life up to it's fame, but it's is just a mediocre show with a weak script, only saved by the good cast, even though they play predictable characters. To illustrate this I give you an example of the episode I saw yesterday. Which is a showcase example of the ramshackle plot.

Basically the story is this: two coffin's supposed to contain the bodies of two major's are brought back to the USA to be given proper burial. However one of the wife's claims that she has been phoned by her late husband a couple of days ago while she was told he died two weeks ago. The team then investigates this mystery and discovers that the two guys where working undercover in Columbia, where they where taken hostage. A ransom of 2 million was demanded, but the CIA guy who acted as the go between palmed it off. When he discovers that NCIS get's involved he tries to do something about it. After some issues NCIS finally are just in time to save one of the supposed-to-be-dead majors from a gruesome death and do the bad guys in.

Now what is wrong with this?

First of, the NCIS can't get into records of these guys. There is actually no reason why they can't because they would get this authority through a judicial injunction, just like the police get's a warrant to do a house search. Instead they use the pay checks to trace where these guys have been. So far for security.

In the mean time the CIA bad guy does all sorts of unexplainable things. First he pretends to be the co in charge of the two major's trying to put of Gibbs. Then the CIA dude pretends to be one of the NCIS agents and goes to talk to the wife of one of the majors. What was he asking her? And how come he did know one of the name's of the NCIS investigators he had never met? How come he was so dumb to actually use the name of one, unless it was to draw them into a trap. But then it was a poor trap because he started running the moment Gibbs showed up. It's only purpose seems to be is to allow Gibbs to chase him and discover that he drive's off in a CIA car so he can make the connection with the CIA? And the way the connection is made with the CIA. It was because the CIA drove in an armored car!

Then NCIS discovers one of the major's isn't in the coffin, so he might still be alive somewhere. Nobody in the army seems to even have checked that there where dead bodies in there until NCIS game along. How gullible everybody is according to the writers.

Then there is the thing with the dead major being embalmed alive and so perfectly embalmed they can't establish the cause and moment of death at first. Why does it matter he was still alive unless to show how totally weird the embalmer(and CIA man?) must have been or to put the pressure on the team after they discover the other major was probably still alive? Besides how can someone be perfectly embalmed while trashing about in pain and without any sign of stress on his body(the second major was about to undergo the same treatment when NCIS burst in: he was very much alive).

And why, after the investigation of the body, does the NCIS claim that the body was supposed to be investigated, while the CIA bad guy was so desperately trying to prevent them from investigating further?

And why was the second major kept alive while the bad guy had already got the two million and both major's where accepted for being dead? Either both majors where captured someone other than the CIA man, or on behalf of the CIA man. If it was a band or gang then they where on holiday when the NCIS burst in as there was only the embalmer and the CIA man on the premises. It stands more to reason the CIA man hijacked the two on his own with the assistance of the embalmer(?). What use was the major to him after he got the money?

And why, when NCIS discovers the major must be somewhere in Columbia, do they go of head over heels in a plane only armed with pistols, while the major might, for all they know, have been guarded by heavily armed gangsters. And who gave them the authority to operate in such a way on foreign soil without assistance of the local authorities or at least some local American commander. Off they rush with pistols on their own authority, because the NCIS will not be delayed by such things as international relationships and legal necessities.

And then finally the major is liberated. Again this is a laugh. A second CIA is added to the crew and immediately you know it. It is as in star trek: he will buy it. They add one temporary guy who's only role is to be bumped off. And so he is.

All in all the plot is much the same as a plot of the A team. While the A team is totally nuts without any pretense to seriousness, NCIS pretends to be a realistic series but actually hides the same sort of ridiculous nonsense. The only saving grace is the cast.

Father Dowling Mysteries (1989–1991)

While better than Murder, She Wrote, it is still a unbelievable series

[6/10 · 1 July 2007]

Summary The Father Dawling series, while more realistic than Murder, She Wrote it is still an unbelievable series in which a catholic priest with the assistance of a Nun solves murder cases. Yet it is less aggravating to watch as compared to that Jessica Fletcher thing.

I remember this series from my youth. I watched it for a few episodes at intervals. Nowaday reruns of are sometimes shown in the early afternoon. It is the fate of that type of series.

I somehow associated the father with that "Fletcher-woman" from Murder, She wrote. Like Jessica Fletcher feels like a translation of Miss Marple, so Father Dowling looks much like an American implementation of Father Brown. Like Jessica Fletcher the good brother is there to solve the Murder and leaves us to sleep at peace.

Yet while saying this there are some differences with Murder, She Wrote. First and foremost the Dowling series seems to posses more realism and more grey shades. The world is less popcile and apple-pie. Less preposterous. While Jessica Fletcher seems mostly to be busy in small towns(the kind that so often the stage of Stephen King's stories) Father Dowling seems to be more operating in cities. Unlike the Fletcher series the people are less halfwit and Dowling's sidekick the nun is actually a capable attractive woman. Which is a change since with the Murder, she wrote series, the main cast seems to consist of elderly people most of the time. An interesting aside is that the good Father is a catholic.

Another different thing is the method the perpetrator is caught. In Father Dowling it seems to be more a case of catching him/her red-handed. In Murder, She Wrote it is more that the felon admits after being confronted with the truth.

But on the downside, the method with which are solved are also often more ridiculous. Since both Dowling and his trusty sidekick are people of the cloth, they need to disguise themselves a lot during their investigations. This results is the use of the most weakest set of disguises one can encounter. Wear a set of dark glasses and a suit and voilà Dowling is bad dud gangster. The nun takes of her gown and put some cushions underneath her clothes and she is a pregnant mum.

All in all, while this series is not as bad as Murder, She Wrote, this series is hardly worth the trouble watching considering that there are a lot of better series like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Law & Order for that matter. But it probably will appeal to an audience that can only sleep when the murderer is safely locked away in a world that is less disturbing than shown in those other series.

Owen

Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996)

The world of Jessica Fletcher.: dullness

[4/10 · 1 July 2007]

Years ago this series was popular enough to be broad-casted in the Netherlands(with subtitles). I watched it with my family for a while, but after a short time I got bored with it. I think my mother sometimes still watches the reruns.

Murder, She Wrote is a make-believe world that is safely, ordered, predictable, organized and nice. This is not the world of the A Team, Miami Vice or Hill Street Blues. And, for that matter, a very anglo-saxon world, with very few children. When this world is endangered the champion of this world, Jessica Fletcher, will turn up, intervene and in due time set things strait. A shiny knight hidden in the guise of an elderly woman.

The series is also an elaboration of the detective, like the Europeans had Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot so America got Jessica Fletcher, next to Columbo(and later-on Father Dowling). In fact Jessica Fletcher is an translation of Miss Marple. As Father Dowling is a translation of the Father Brown. Jessica is remarkable because in everything she is the epitome of plainness. She is a single, sexless, old woman(stress woman: she has nothing of the grandeur of being a lady). She has apparently no obvious weaknesses, no remarkable traits, no violent emotions: she is just plain dull.

This is partly to enhance the surprise effect, because underneath this plainness hides a skilled dedicated hunter of murderers. Like spiderman the normal person changes to become something else entirely. Surprise! Like a spider envelops her prey with strands of her web, so Jessica watches her environments for clues which will be the downfall of her victim, the murderer. It is interesting that Jessica Fletcher shares this chameleon aspect with Columbo(a shabby confused mind turns out to be a sharp detective) and Father Dowling(an innocent looking simple pastor is in fact a skilled investigator).

But another part of this surprise effect is to introduce an innovation in the overused detective genre. The presented stories hardly show Jessica's has a sharp mind. In this series most of the time the plot and clues are so obvious that only a halfwit would miss them. Therefore instead of making Jessica inhumanly smart, the series surrounds her with fools. The great point of it all being that average audience of the series can follow what is occurring and revel in the feeling that you don't need to be a Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Columbo, you can be an average (elderly) John Doe and be a detective.

However all of this pervades the series with a aura of dullness. It is like eating plain white-bread: tasteless. To make sure the intended audience can follow what is going on the series progresses at a snails pace. The level of violence is so low that it is surprising it's about murders. There is no blood, no messiness, no sloppiness, no dirt, no shouting, no fighting and no expression of high emotion. The humor witless and is mostly to show what a dumb guy the stool pigeon or side kick of the moment is. It is a tidy neat world in which the flowerbeds are mirrored by the flower-patterns on the dress of Jessica and the curtains of hotel she is staying in. A world of apple-pie and white sheets waving in the wind in the sunny garden, freshly mown.

This dullness finds it's logical conclusion when the perpetrator is caught, the clues presented, the mask is dropped, the criminal confesses the deed, and then is safely escorted away to jail, to trouble this world no more. We are never ever given a clue if the evidence will stand up in court. Instead we are made to believe that the confession is enough. The coming clean is to allow the audience to go safely to bed. It will also absolve the lawbreaker and the victim(s) of the violence. Order is restored. Be at peace, restless spirits.

The series ran a long time because by it's dullness, snails-pace, predictable clues and plot, invisibility of the main character,the inevitability to be caught on the flimsies of evidence(I know because the flowers where no lotus-blossoms, but begonia's), the confession gave the audience the feel of a safe stable world. By all means it is a dull world to.