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OhLookBirdies's Reviews

Displaying Review 16 - 18 of 18 in total

  • Written by OhLookBirdies on 15.02.2010

    Starship Troopers is an interesting film. It works on several levels, the first being a simple science fiction film with an overabundance of gore and violence, but the second being an interesting and well-thought out criticism of fascism and totalitarian governments. And the great thing is, if you're not into socio-political commentaries, you can just ignore that aspect and watch it for all the flying guts.

    Now, personally, I am interested in socio-political commentaries. I remember reading Animal Farm when I was 11 or so, and being struck by how simply yet powerfully it turned the Soviet Union and Russian communism in a story about talking pigs. Starship Troopers isn't quite so specific, it's no parable for Nazi Germany or anything like that. Instead, it paints a picture of a future where Earth is entirely governed by one government, and the human race is exploring outer space. This goes wrong when we piss off a race of giant intergalactic bugs, who then send an asteroid our way. This asteroid crushes Buenos Aires, killing hundreds of thousands, including the parents of protagonist Johnny Rico. Earth vows to strike back, and the bugs' home planet is invaded, with disastrous results. The few survivors fall back, Earth licks its wounds, and plans for further attacks are crafted.

    As I mentioned earlier, Starship Troopers works very well as a science fiction horror film. The bugs are well-worked out, and incredibly aggressive, meaning there's blood, guts, limbs and other things that work better when attached to a body flying across the screen in alarming quantities. Lots of things explode, including giant bugs, splattering brightly coloured bug juice everywhere. We even get a taste of what's to come before the war even starts, when some of our protagonists are dissecting bugs in school. These particular bugs are beetles the size of cats, which for some reason possess extraordinarily mammal-like organs, causing Johnny's girlfriend to puke up her lunch when he heaps several of these organs in her hands. Like I said, if it's subtlety you want, you're looking in the wrong place.

    But what about that socio-political criticism of totalitarian fascist regimes, I hear you ask? (On a side note, try saying "socio-political criticism of totalitarian fascist regimes" out loud, see how many times you stumble.) Well, the society Paul Verhoeven has painted here can rightly be considered dystopian, even though everybody seems happy. In fact, that is one of the scariest aspects of the entire film. Here you have a society founded on militarism and warfare, there is not a single shred of democracy left, the only way to achieve citizen's rights is by joining the army, and yet, everybody seems completely unconcerned and happy. Sure, there's some people who grumble a bit, but nobody is sufficiently disturbed to actually do anything about their governmental situation. This is a situation that is even scarier than "Nineteen Eighty Four", because here people are so totally and voluntarily oppressed, they don't even require constant policing and terror. In fact, they don't even know they're oppressed.

    Somebody once told me "RoboCop" was meant to be a cutting and witty criticism on contemporary consumer societies, but when the idea was pitched to the studio, Verhoeven was told "We like the bit about the robotic cop, let's use that and chuck the rest." As Starship Troopers clearly shows, if the studio had gone for the consumer society thing instead, few people would have been able to pull off the action/serious critique juxtaposition as well as Paul Verhoeven.

  • Written by OhLookBirdies on 06.03.2010

    I have never been much for playing video games. Sure, I've played a few. I've played the occasional game of Quake at LAN parties hosted by people geekier than me, I've played Need for Speed against people more into cars than me, and I've played Pong with people older than me. However, there has been one video game I have played almost religiously, a game I love as much now as I did 10 years ago. That game is Bubble Bobble, and hasn't got anything to do with this review whatsoever. But go play it anyway. It has gameplay that is simple yet challenging, awesome music, and a moral that doesn't feel like holier-than-thou people telling you off.

    Having said all that, Doom is undoubtedly a good runner-up in my personal list of Games I Enjoyed. For one, it's genuinely scary. The monsters may look like blocky lumps, and the '3D' might be 2½D, but it all works. If you play it by yourself, at midnight, in the dark, and wearing headphones, I promise you'll be jumping at the slightest sound for the rest of the night. This is something the recent Doom 3 lacks, as sadly, the better graphics don't enhance the jump factor, but replace it.

    Another reason I really loved Doom is the simple gameplay. Pick up weapons, shoot monsters, pick up keys, open doors, shoot more monsters. Even I can grasp that.

    So all in all, there is a good reason Doom is considered by many to be the king of the First Person Shooters. And that is why, when I heard a film of it was being made, I was one part happy, one part apprehensive, and three parts certain they'd fuck it up. (At this point, the audience of this review heaves a collective sigh and says "Oh good, the fucker's finally getting to the point. Who gives a toss about some stupid game?" Sadly for them, I plan to refer to the game on several more occasions in the near future.) Unfortunetaly, it turned out the three-fifths majority was right. They fucked it up. I have tried to watch this film from two points of view, one being an avid Doom fan, and the other being an unprejudiced action flick fan. Neither of them ended up being very satisfied. The unprejudiced one did end up slightly more satisfied than the Doom fan, but not by far.

    For starters, the main thing that makes Doom a) interesting and b) scary as fuck is the fact you're all alone in a hell-infested army base. A whole platoon of marines with big guns and radios just doesn't have the same "Oh fuck, I'm toast" vibe to it. Then, there's the fact the entire squad seems to consist of sociopaths, psychopaths, and just your basic weirdoes. Apparently, in the future there is an even less strict control routine to determine if someone is fit to be handed several heavy pieces of weaponry and a license to kill. If one were a pacifist, one might argue that for all we know, these men were all cheery-happy and normal when they joined up, and the Horrors of War have warped their minds. This is a theory that would hold more water if The Kid, whose first mission this is, wasn't a drug-addicted whackjob as well.

    Then, as I was watching, I found myself increasingly disappointed at the hellspawn. Where were my zombies, imps, flying fiery skulls, massive armless (but not 'armless) demons, massive armless invisible demons, and cyber-devils? All we get here is something that conjures up visions of Resident Evil's Nemesis. A comparison that is not far besides the truth, as is soon apparent. As it turns out, these aren't demons. These are infected people, bitten by an experiment to turn people into Übermensches by adding a 24th chromosome. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe we already have a condition where people have an extra chromosome, and we call it "Down's Syndrome". Call me skeptic, but I doubt that adding that one single pair of chromosomes would make people super strong, inhumanly fast, heal like Wolverine (The X-man, not the small furry critter), and at the same time turn some people, whose DNA is slightly different, into super strong, inhumanly fast, healing-like-Wolverine crosses between a zombie and a compost heap.

    So yeah, not only did the director get confused halfway through and start work on "Resident Evil in space" rather than Doom, he also throws in a bunch of personality deficiencies out of nowhere. The Kid turns out to be a drug addict, Goat turns out to be a self-mutilating religious freak, and Sarge turns out to be a homicidal maniac. None of this was even remotely apparent at the start of the film, so you just sit there going "What the fuck?"

    It is possible to make a good film based on a video game. It is rare, but they are out there. The Resident Evil trilogy isn't half bad, Silent Hill was pretty good, Hitman was solid entertainment, and the upcoming Prince of Persia film looks like it might not actually be terrible. However, Doom is not one of these. It was, if you'll excuse the pun, doomed from the get-to.

    Oh, and that Big Fucking Gun was nowhere near as cool as the one in the game.

  • Written by OhLookBirdies on 12.04.2010

    In order to keep up the old English atmosphere, I have written this review as a Shakespearean sonnet. Enjoy!

    In Sherwood forest lived a noble fox,
    Who robbed the rich so he could feed the poor.
    The righteous king was trapped and under locks,
    With burly men to guard his prison door.

    So now the country sighed under Prince John,
    Whose henchmen squeezed the common people out.
    And ‘though the Merry Men were frowned upon,
    They fed the people damaged by this lout.

    But this is still a Disney, as we know,
    So happy endings cannot be escaped.
    Maid Marian is married to her beau,
    The king returns, the country is reshaped.
    And so we end the story of our fox,
    I hope you now remember that it rocks.

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