Bert Vandecasteele

Month: July 2010

  • Inception

    Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder whether Christopher Nolan will ever make a bad movie. It’s only been a month since I first heard about Inception, but when reading through the list of people involved with it, it had me psyched from that day until I saw it. Inception is a return to the roots, to Memento-style storytelling (very much so, in fact) – but the “hey-look-at-me-I’m-crashing-an-IMAX-cam-into-a-car” Nolan seems to have tagged along.

    A Concept

    The concept is deviously easy, but incredibly smart: dreams. And not just dreams, but dreams within dreams. Within dreams. Within dreams. Right off the bat, you’re dropped into a insane, multilayered world existing solely in someone’s mind. You’re given a complicated set of rules in a very short time, and how well you understand them will enhance the movie. If you understand nothing, at least the characters will be cool; if you understand it all (highly unlikely on your first viewing, I think), then… just get out.

    The story clearly shows the amount of polish and creativity involved in the project. A normal author would be telling the following: a man learns how to enter people’s dreams, then finds out you can make a dream within a dream. Something along those lines. In Inception, this is backstory. It doesn’t matter. What you get is what the third part of the trilogy would bring. The third part which is bound to fail because the first and second already established everything there is to know, making the third part just silly (Back to the future? The Matrix?). Because everything what happened before Inception (the development of entering dreams, for example) is unknown to us… the silliness is not silliness it all – it’s unbelievable.

    An Execution

    But that’s not all. It has to be said: a lot of it is in the execution. Stuff moves: explosions, people getting shot at, cities crumbling… Inception is a roller coaster ride: it clocks at 148 minutes, yet I didn’t discover a single boring or empty moment. Something is happening at all times – even if it’s only a van falling off a bridge and taking 20 minutes to reach the water.

    But there’s not just moving stuff. Marion Cautillard is in there somewhere too. That’s pretty much enough said: on an emotional level, Inception keeps it simple and clean. Nolan borrowed heavily from Memento here, using the concept of inception like he used Insulin: to explain the concept he wants to talk about (memory loss versus, well, inception), and then to explain the hero’s backstory wound. One of them, at least. It’s pretty simple, and I saw it coming, but if you say you’re watching this movie for the character drama, you’re in the wrong film.

    In All…

    These are the movies I like. I don’t care about whether or not stuff moves. I just want to see interesting characters in an unbelievable world where the sky (aka our imagination) is the limit. Inception is oozing with mathematical creativity. Everything’s been polished to a high degree and there’s a lot of food left for a second viewing. The characters might be pretty bland, but the great performances make them memorable nonetheless. And hey, surely you don’t want the characters taking precious time away from your splosions, right?

  • Super Mario Galaxy 2

    I still remember my praise for Super Mario Galaxy when I first played it back in 2007. It was winter, we didn’t want to go out, so we cuddled on the couch wile playing the fat plumber’s latest installment. I was Mario, she was collecting star bits. I called it “the perfect multiplayer experience”. Now, I’m in a bit of a sticky situation now. Is there a word called “perfecter”?

    Little Orange Big Bum Star

    It’s like they took the concept of the first game and upped the ante. The levels are better, the level select is slicker, the music is crazier, the game is longer, the awesome moments are more epic and the multiplayer is… well, I’ll use the word perfecter just because I want to.

    I’m now entirely sure that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a game best enjoyed with two people – the second player will want to keep on playing the game as bad as you. Now, he or she has an avatar (an orange star following Mario around) and can not only collect star bits, but coins, lives, upgrades… as well as kill baddies. If that makes you think of game balance, you’re antisocial and need to live a little. The excrutiatingly frustrating game (well, later on) becomes tension relieving when someone sits next to you. Because you need him or her, and he or she needs you. Multiplayer at its finest, and I’m not sure why it took twenty years of trying around to come up with this.

    Bigger, badder, bester

    As I already said, the levels are breathtaking. Obviously, we’re used to that: this is a Mario game after all. But I was amazed at the tricks Nintendo still had up their sleeves. In the last game, the whole gravity concept was being introduced – in this game, they just go all-out, saying that if you don’t know this shit by now, this will not be a game for you. Galaxy 2 is certainly harder than the first one, but its creativity makes it a lot more fun.

    Remember in Mario Galaxy, how you could replay the game as Luigi after getting 120 stars? Forget that stuff. Luigi is available starting about midway through the first playthrough. There’s no second playthrough – instead, green stars have been hidden throughout the levels. There’s no time limit, no pressure, you can search for hours on end if you want. But finding these stars will force you to think outside the box, to do things that even look like they are breaking the game. So great.

    In all…

    Hey, if you haven’t played Galaxy, don’t bother with the second one yet. Better take your time and get introduced to the gravity concept, then switch to number two. You’ll enjoy all those nifty features they threw in there a lot more.

    People who want to be cynical criticize it and call it an expansion pack – and it is. It expands upon the concept. It’s not just new levels. It’s a lot more. Fun.

  • Bioshock 2

    Now there’s a job I would not have wanted: creating Bioshock 2. The first installment of the game was nothing short of revolutionary – toying with us the way only an interactive form of medium can do – so, even with the lead design and gaming’s biggest asshole leaving the project, expectations were… astronomal. I guess that’s why I waited about six months to finally write something about this game. The first playthrough was awesome, but second, a half a year later… was breathtaking.

    A breath of fresh air

    It was obvious, right off the bat, that the second Bioshock installment could never live up to the first one – the twist was just too much, too defining – so they don’t even try to do that. Instead, what they offer you is this: a small scale story with a deviously closed narration.

    The entire thing features around the little sister – big daddy connection, and tries to get as much symbolism in the plot as possible. In doing this, it becomes a Freudian homage to the Oedipus complex, in which little boys kill their fathers to be with their mothers. The game does the exact opposite and in doing so, it doesn’t try to copy the analogy but just comments it.

    Drill!

    To do this, the game drops you in the suit of a Big Daddy – drill inclusive. It boils down to this: you’re trying to find your little sister, who’s been captured by her real, biological mother. This leads to a small, emotional story, in which Sophia Lamb – the child’s mother – plays an unbelievably satisfying role, only helped by the fact that she’s a psychoanalyst.

    The Big Daddy controls just like you would think it would – huge and massive, but still quick and nimble. This means no more wrench. Instead, you get the drill, which – when pimped to the max using the tonics and weapon stations – is simply breathtaking to use. It makes the game less a shooter and more of a first person adventure game. Which I simply love.

    In all…

    Everything that made the first game great is still in place in the sequel: a gripping story, the Rapture atmosphere, a history of audio diaries and moral choices that affect the outcome of the game (which, in my opinion, is handled a lot better in this one). Sure, storywise, it can never overshadow the first game. But they’re humble and down to earth: they don’t try, and were only mildly damned by the almighty internet.

    Everyone can see that Bioshock 2, as a game, is better than the first. There’s so many more things to do (protecting Little Sisters! Killing Big Sisters! Traps! Underwater sequences!). So please, play the first one before you play the second. Because it’ll be pretty hard to go back.