Entry 122: "The X from Outer Space" (1967)

Dear Internet,

                For starters, I have to clear up a mistake first.  I did not watch and will not review "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit."  Now, before you start to jump on me and begin to start throwing mud at me, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.  One of the rules of this experiment is that I must have viewed previous works that come before anything I review.  This means that before I could have watched "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit," I must have watched "The X from Outer Space" first.  I have not seen the first film before, so I changed up the film for the day to fix this.  Tomorrow I will follow up with the sequel.  

                "The X from Outer Space" is another one of those giant monster films from across the sea in Japan.  There are miniatures, a guy in a rubber suit, and a horrible English dub that only ended up highlighting the film's flaws than convey the story.  The film begins with a space expedition to Mars, via the Moon, to determine what forced five other crews to end transmissions and go missing.  As they travel into the void of space, the crew find themselves held captive by a magnetic interference by a UFO.  After being held in place for some time, the UFO departs.  The crew finds some unknown compound affixed to the tail of their spaceship.  Cleaning off the material yields a small circular object that the crew brings back to Earth for examination.  In the wee hours of the night, the object disappears with a strange footprint found nearby.  Later, a building tall creature begins to wreak havoc upon the Japanese mainland as it feeds on electricity and radiation.  The only hope lies upon re-creating the compound that will cause the creature to revert to an egg state.

                This might not seem like such a bad premise if it was not for everything that I left out.  The film revolves heavily around the crew more than the monster.  This is not a bad thing upon itself.  The original "Godzilla" remembered to center its story on a cast that pushed the story along more than the monster.  The problem here is that the cast of characters are unbelievable to the point that their behavior breaks the storyline.  There is a four man crew that pilots the spaceship AAB Gamma.  I remember the name of the ship because it is repeated throughout the film whenever a radio call goes out from the ship, Earth, or the Moon base, usually three times in one breath whenever it is mentioned.  The crew of the ship often disregards the orders of the captain, trying to do what they think is best instead of doing what they are told.  Take for example the replacement doctor that has to replace the first doctor who turns ill when traveling in space.  The replacement is reluctant to go on the mission to the point that he might have been considered to be insubordinate already.  When he travels with them in space, the ship gets caught in the magnetic beam, making the ship stay still despite the efforts of the ship's rockets.  The captain decides to not use the rockets because they are ineffective and the use thereof will eat up vital fuel.  The replacement doctor decides that this is not the best idea, runs to the ship's controls, and burns through the rest of the ship's fuel.  Or how about we take the ship's biologist.

                The ship's biologist, named Lisa, is the most memorable character.  This has less to do with her influence on the story and more to do with the fact that she is the token white blond character who sticks out like a sore thumb in a cast of Japanese actors and one or two other white guys.  I do not mind that she is a Western character in a cast of Eastern actors. Making a film about space travel would, and does, require an international level of communication and cooperation to create a sense of believability.   I do not mind that she is one of only two women in the cast.  What I mind is that she is one of the most stereotypical lady-scientists that I have come across.  When the crew is told of how they are going on a mission to determine what caused five other crews to go missing and that they have a high chance of following suite if they are not careful, the film quickly switches gears to one or two of the rest of the space crew swooning over her.  They were just told that there is a good chance of them all dying, but the film wants to interject some comical romantic banter that shows the entirety of the pervious discussion did not sink into their heads.  When they are in space, she does not like to take orders from the captain, wanting to treat the sick doctor instead of rushing him to the base like the captain wants.  When they want to go outside the ship to investigate the goop, she refuses to stay behind like instructed and goes out to examine the material.  Eventually, another woman appears that has some interest in the ship captain.  The female jealousy meter goes off more than the Geiger counters in this film before the final conclusion.  Then there is the whole incident where her leg gets pinned under some fallen debris.  Less than five minutes after a team of people get her out from under, she is walking around pretty comfortably for what had appeared as a broken leg.  She makes a few advances in the plot by actually analyzing the various compounds, but those moments are glossed over more for the scenes that highlight her femininity rather than her intelligence.

                The film's special effects are a big problem.  The miniatures are done well enough that you will "Ooo" and "Ah" at seeing a mountain explode and get excited when seeing the tanks roll in. The rest of the sets are enough to make you laugh at the film rather than with it.  In numerous spots in the film, there are computer consoles that operate machinery.  They all are a maze of unlabeled buttons, glowing lights, and knobs.  Nothing seems to have any sort of real purpose other than to give the impression that the workers know what everything does.  The only identifiable item on any console was on the spaceship.  There was a gauge that appeared similar to a turn and balance indicator or a gyro horizon on a plane.  It showed the amount of rocking that was occurring on the ship at any one time.  This leads to one of the most notable problems with the film.  Every time the ship is traveling in space, it rocks back and forth as if it were on the ocean.  The camera tilts back and forth to drive home this point to the point that I began to feel seasick at one point.  The characters even stumble a bit from this swaying motion.  Maybe it is a side effect from having artificial gravity in the ship, but it is hardly better than when there is no gravity and objects "float" around like being held on fishing wire.  

It was probably next to the cup holder.

                The film's monster is not much better.  In fact it is probably one of the worst looking Kaiju I have seen.  It has the head of a tropical parrot, arms that look like they are made from a flat worm, antennae from a bug, and is pudgy in the limbs.  The final effect is a laughable monster that at least is able to destroy the various tanks and airplanes that came after it.  That is not much of a compliment considering that every other Kaiju can do that as well.  Occasionally, we see the monster Guilala attacking people in the same screen.  At that point you can cue the off scale hand or foot that reaches in from off camera, sometimes at the wrong angle from where the limb would have been located for that shot.  Guilala at least has a large enough amount of abilities to make it feel unique at first.  It absorbs a number of different energy forms to power itself, has a fireball breath, and is neigh invulnerable short of one Achilles heel chemical.  Other than the one unique weakness, it feels too much like the Godzilla of later films that feeds off nuclear energy to heal itself.  This might have more to do with the time placement of when this film was made, so I will not discount this against the lumbering beast.

Our lumbering behemoth chasing a car.

                The film's music is always out of place whenever the spaceship is showcased.  There is some ska/lounge music/easy listening song that plays during these moments that completely subtracts away from the space age theme that the film is trying to go for.  This rolls into the scenes that the characters are lounging around or attending celebratory parties.  These scenes are dated straight to the time that the film was in production as a showcase of the fads of that time.  Retrospectively, they make the film show its age.  Looking at the film even within the context of a space film makes it seem out of place because there is no indication that the timeframe of the story is thrown into the future.  It is like assuming that ladder sunglasses are still a thriving trend forty years from now.  

                "The X from Outer Space" should have stayed there.  It is a laughable film that is not notable for anything but its faults.  The film fails in everything it tries to do and forgets to entertain.  I found myself bored and hoping that the monster would stampede over everyone.  I do not think anyone even died, short of those five unnamed crews before the film began.  Worse than that, the film completely ignores the UFO that repeatedly interfered with the spaceships.  Was it some sort of alien bouncer keeping the humans from getting into Club Mars?  We will never know, nor does the film even acknowledge their presence at the close.  The film mutely says, "Just ignore it," something that I would exactly say about this film.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 108: "Sonic and the Secret Rings" Pt. 2

I had the chance of choosing to go back, but I screwed that up.

Dear Internet,

                Time for "Sonic and the Secret Rings" part two.  Since I already covered the controls and how they are as responsive as a potato, I guess I can talk about some of the other aspects.  How about the skill ring thing?  At the beginning of the game, Sonic receives a ring from Sharha.  It is used to allocate  points into a variety of skills that the player unlocks as they progress through the game.  These skills are unlocked mostly by leveling up, which occurs when the player is awarded experience points depending on the score obtained after every level.  Get enough experience points and you level up.  The higher level you are, the more skill points that you can allocate.  The game lets the player configure up to four different combinations, but I never used more than one.  Eventually if I got enough skill points, I would use them on the skills I got.  This is a rather interesting mechanic that I really want to praise if it were not for the fact that it all felt rather useless.  By the time I ended playing, I had never got to the point where I was organizing the skills to maximize my ability to fit the situation.  I never rearranged my allocated skills to fit a race mission, an enemy fighting mission, or anything else.  There was no need to do this because the skills that the game threw at me were either essential to equip to try and get through the mashed up experience or were so non-essential that I could easily do without.  I can think of a game like "Trine 2' that also had skill points that could be reassigned at will, even on the fly while playing.  If you did not have many skill points, you could dump them all into exploratory skills when facing a puzzle or all into fighting skills when fighting enemies.  "Secret Rings" never gets to this point where one has to think critically of Sonic's abilities.  You can just keep treating all your problems like nails as you hammer through it.

                The menu is not something bad, but I feel like I have to mention it since it plays so big a role in the game.  Instead of navigating an overworld like in "Sonic Adventure," Secret Rings" unapologetically organizes all the missions into the perspective chapter.  You select the level, then the mission, your skills, and are asked if you are ready.  This is all well and good.  There is nothing wrong with this, short of the fact that the game will unlock missions and not tell you sometimes which one will progress the story, but that is done to encourage the player to play out the various missions in the same hide-and-seek way that the characters are looking for the plot items.  The one bad thing is the theme song.  Every time that the player is thrown back to the main menu, the same grating theme song plays.  I am not even sure if the game has more than one song at this point.  It is an earworm of a rock song with lyrics that might as well be nonsense words.  I still do not know what the singer was saying beyond "SEVEN RINGS IN HAND!"  Menu music should not get me more pumped up than the game does, but that is probably more because of how little the game gets me excited than the upbeat nature of the song.  All it ended up doing was making me speed through the menu system in hopes of listing to anything else besides that one song.

                The story is not bad, nor is it going to win any honors any time soon.  It is a simple Saturday morning cartoon plot.  It should not be anything more considering that whenever Sonic tries to delve into the emotional spectrum it hits angst and edge first and foremost.  Take Sonic's final form in this game for instance.  While the game does take a large chunk out of the "Arabian Nights" for the use of the aesthetics, do not expect any sort of adaptation of the book and stories here.  The game makes its own story to the point that it is a wonder as to why they even bothered to use the fantastical Middle East setting.  It feels shoehorned in at times.  Some "Sonic" regular cast members fill the roles of Sinbad, Ali Baba, and King Shahryar--who is referred to as the main character of the "Arabian Nights," which is erroneous considering the work rests heavily upon Scheherazade and her attempt to stop Shahryar's daily killing of his wives at the risk of her own life.  Then again, I guess you cannot put that in a kid's game without raising a number of questions.  However, what in the world made the developer think that there should be a dinosaur level in the game is beyond me.  It just shows that the game uses leftover ideas from early development that were too far developed to scrap when they finally got around to making a plot for the game.

A quick search of "Arabian Nights dinosaurs" leads to ONLY this game.

                Beyond those gripes are a few other things that I found annoying.  The game requires fine tuned movement that the controls do not lend easily towards.  A stick based movement that does not make Sonic run by default would have been much better.  The game makes use of collecting pearls to power up a special move bar.  You can either speed things up or slow them down using a filled bar.  For the first two levels, you do not have the special bar, but the pearls are everywhere.  What happens is a questioning period where the game has pearls thrown about the level but has not told you why they are there to begin with.  Numerous times in the game, it boiled down into a game of memorization because of how quickly the game threw obstacles at the player.  This is partially because of the unresponsive controls but also because the game's camera is ridiculously close to Sonic rather than being pulled out to showcase the world.  I do not remember the "Sonic Adventure" games having poor cameras, but that might have to do with being able to actually control the camera in those cases.

On the plus side, the game does offer hints if you die too many times at a certain section.

                "Sonic and the Secret Rings" is not a good game.  It was not fun.  It bored me and frustrated me to no nearly no ends.  I would have quit playing it yesterday but gave it a little more of a try because of the Backlog.  I sort of wish I did not considering that it did not get any better.  Even after somewhat getting used to the controls, I still cannot recommend this game except to those who want to punish themselves.  It is a hair-pulling fiasco that only goes to prove how not to make a game around motion controls.  Maybe if the game had better controls I could have like it, but that is like saying if I could see over a brick fence I would enjoy the scenery.  You do not know that until it actually happens, and you could be staring point blank at a landfill.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is the "Battle Royale" film.

Entry 102: "Brick" (2005)

This is less a title and more the description of the emotional depth of the characters.

Dear Internet,

                "Brick" is a 2005 noir thriller mystery film set in the suburbs.  More specifically, the film is set in a suburban high school and the surrounding area.  We follow around Brian, a take no nonsense hard boiled guy that does not play by the rules.  He receives a message from his ex lover, Emily.  The girl asks for his help over a pay phone before hanging up abruptly for mysterious reasons.  Brian tracks her down and finds a coded message on her person.  He eventually figures out the code and goes to meet her at a hidden location.  When he gets there, he finds her cold corpse in a storm gutter.  Afterwards, Brian sets out to find out who killed her, for what reason, and why she called him for help.  He will have to dive deep into the underbelly of the suburban jungle and come against some of its deadly vices.

                With that I can stop trying to keep a straight face.  For the most part, "Brick" does try to keep to this plotline, even if it seems to go nowhere for the longest time.  The heaviest part of that brief description is in the noir part.  The film draws heavily upon a genre that rarely is brought up now-a-days.  Specifically, the story plays out like a super cliché detective story where there is a PI who is out to find the murderer of his old flame.  He is not doing it for a client but because it is personal.  There is the smart sidekick, nicknamed Brain, who helps the protagonist on his self appointed mission.  There is a femme fatale, a drug lord kingpin, and a muscle character.  Everything feels so directly drawn out from another noir work that the film struggles to make something new.  It feels less like an homage and more like a display of a bag of tricks, the kind that other films have done before and much better.

                The first thing that struck me as annoying was the dialog.  For at least the first half of the film, the bulk of what people say is a convoluted mass of unbelievable dialog that makes the characters even less believable than they already were.   No one, for the longest time, speaks in a manner that reflects the reality of who they are.  None of them sound like 18-21 year olds.  Instead, they sound like disgruntled old men and jaded women in their mid thirties.  It is again pulled from the noir films and books that "Brink" stems from.  While it is understandable for the characters in those works to rattle off dialog like "Throw one at me if you want, hash-head.  I got all five senses, and I slept last night.  That puts me six up on the lot of you," it feels painfully out of place when an 18 year old says it.  Maybe if the film was not taking itself so serious it could be chocked up to being willfully hammy, but I doubt this is the case because of how the film treats itself.

                The film is sadly not a parody.  It should be.  Noir films are so heavy and depressing that they are easy to parody, but "Brick" tries to do the same thing that those films do.  There are moments when the film breaks from the uber-dramatic plot, like when the protagonist talks face to face with the drug lord while the drug lord's mother prepares a meal for Brian, wondering if she has apple juice in the fridge.  The film pokes fun at itself from time to time, but it does so sparingly.  When it does poke fun, the film shifts so quickly from one mood to the next that it does not act as the comical relief that it is trying to accomplish.  Take for example when Brian is picked up in the drug lord's van.  The guy sits there with a living room lamp besides him, inside the car.  Besides being a tacky piece of furniture, it shows the mindset of the character, that he makes use of such props to make himself into a character from out of a book.  While at first it seems like a comical placement of furniture inside a van, the scene continues to be a serious one because of the topic being discussed and the manner that the characters talk.  A talk still filled with dialog that fits characters twice their age.

                Then there is the problem with the film's ability to render an emotional connection with the characters and the situations that are present within the narrative.  By this I mean the film could not get me to care about the cast.  Let me describe one character: he/she is a manipulative, depressing, pseudo-intellectual who has a chip on their shoulder and does not let anyone close to them.  If you have seen the film, you might have an idea about which character I am talking about.  If you have not, I will tell you.  There at least five that fit that description and another three who can fit if you chop off one part of the description.  The problem is that the film makes nearly everyone unlikable.  Perhaps this is supposed to be a reflection of how noir stories have an anti-hero who acts not for or because of some greater good but for his own shallow intentions, but this creates an inherent problem quickly.  In "Brick," I could not make myself care about the safety of Brian.  He was so unlikable that if he died while trying to uncover the truth about Emily's death, I would not care.  Worse yet, Emily was given next to no character presentation that by the time she was found face-down dead I had no interest to find out the details of her death.  The rest of the film was hoping that I cared enough about her that I wanted to know the answers that I ended up finding the story rather boring because it was resting on a point that it failed to deliver.  This mostly is because Emily is just as unlikable as everyone else.

The best acting in the whole film.

                The noir genre, and "Brick" as a part of it, seems to take the opposite track that most stories do when creating a protagonist.  Most stories will take a character, imbue them with heroic qualities, and then throw in a few faults that make him either more believable as an individual or help him to be even more heroic.  Take Indiana Jones for example.  He hates snakes and is afraid of them, but that only makes his bravery against them all that more impressive.  Odysseus's promiscuity while lost at sea shows his hypocritical attitude that he takes with his wife.  These faults and vices are meant to illustrate a point.  In noir, it seems to be the case where a protagonist is made by imbuing a character with vices and then adding just a few virtues to make them a technical hero.  It is supposed to make the character and those near him to be shades of grey rather than clearly defined black and white.  Instead, it makes everyone shades of black with nothing of interest to say.

                "Brick" is a bad film that masquerades as a deconstruction of the noir genre.  Sure placing a murder mystery in a suburban setting with high school setting points out some of the absurdities of the genre, but if the film plays these quirky spoofs as straight, it only makes itself absurd first.  If I want to watch a noir deconstruction I would watch the "Fillmore!" TV series.  At least that show knew how to entertain while poking fun at noir.  "Brick" forgets to entertain while it tries to be a "Hardy Boys" meet "The Maltese Falcon."  The characters are not individuals but character types with clichés piled on top.  The fact that the whole story boils down to a drug deal and a murder being solved and acted by kids make the film feel like it is trying to tell a story that it quite frankly cannot.  The plot does not correlate to the setting or the characters.  Maybe the creator wanted to portray an "adult" mystery and show how children have to rise to the occasion, but it feels more like that if it was not a murder mystery it would have become an after school movie about who stole the fundraiser money.  I would have preferred nearly any other kind of mystery story to this because "Brick" treats murder and everything else so lightly, and not in a satirical manner or with black humor.  It is just so underwhelming that even when the big reveal occurs, I find myself not even caring about the plot twist.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "Singin' in the Rain" (1952).

Entry 077: "Revelations: Persona" Pt. 7 End

Emphasis is on the "fin" part.  And that is supposed to be "cogito ergo sum."  Three words not two.

Dear Internet,

                I am finally done with this pile of broken mechanics and out dated game structure.  "Revelations: Persona" is a bad game.  It is the kind of bad game that decides to rip apart your curtains while you were away at work, so you make it sleep outside that night except it decides to get into your garbage cans and throw everything all over your driveway.  Then you have to clean up the entire mess and wash it down in a bath, but it then gets free and leaves a soapy slathering all over the walls where it chose to shake dry.  In the end, you spent a good deal amount of time fixing a bunch of problems that the game creates only for the game to then turn to you and say, "You now have new curtains, a cleaned driveway, and washed walls.  Look at what you accomplished."  It wants you to be impressed about the fact that it can now speak your language and how you are now better off than before, but it ignores the fact that it made a whole bunch of problems instead of helping to fix them in the first place.  That is what "Persona" is, a talking dog that has read a little philosophy but is still a dog at the end of the day.

                To the bitter end, "Persona" is about pointless grinding that is not in the least fun.  I was able to get to the final boss with my team being at an average of level 50.  The monsters that I was encountering were in the 70's easily.  The final boss was at level 99.  I am still trying to figure out how in the world I was able to get so far to the boss with neither dying nor leveling up accordingly.  Even when I tried to raise the level of my weakest member by only letting him attack, the game was still frugal with how the experience was being handed out.  It would have taken me a good 2 hours to get everyone at the same level as my best character.  Why is it that if I go through a dungeon and battle every enemy that comes across my way, that I am not sufficiently able to go toe to toe level wise against the dudgeon boss?  It would make sense that if I ran away from those battles that I would be too low a level to go against the boss, but "Persona" does nothing akin to this at all.  It makes grinding for experience a mandatory chore rather than an alternative to strategy.  

Even when facing high level monsters, the EXP payout can be less than substantial.

                The "strategy" in "Persona" comes in two halves.  There is the strategy when fighting common monsters and the kind when facing the dungeon boss.  When fighting common grunts, one has to try and minimize possible reflection attack, since numerous enemies near the end have abilities to send back certain types of attacks back at the player.  You need to do low damage the first time, and once the data on the monster is collected, the player can act accordingly.  When going against the bosses, the only viable way to inject strategy into the game at that point is to fight the boss with the intention of losing.  Then the player can get a grasp of how the boss is going to fight.  This is the only viable reason because trying to figure out a strategy in the middle of a boss fight, even the reserved firepower kind when fighting grunts, will end with the boss going full out while the player is collecting information about the boss.  This is made exponentially worse by the game's lack of a competent save system.

                I have said time and time again how the save system of "Persona" is pretty much broken.  There is no possible reason for making save spots an hour or two apart in games.  It just does not make sense and is plain nonsensical.  To make a game have such long stretches between saves is like saying that this game is meant to have a day dedicated to it.  You have to set everything aside to be able to play this game.  You got to clear your whole schedule for the day to be able to play a game like this because otherwise you can end up losing an hour or more worth of work.  If something comes up, someone calls you on the phone, or you need to leave the house, you will have to second guess your priorities because that hour or more of work is going down the drain.  This is not a game to be played in your free time.  It is something that takes dedication that borders on a job.  And it is work in my mind, not a game because a game would not be as tedious as this without some sort of reward.  If you want proof at how broken this game is, look at the untranslated Snow Queen quest, which has save points even farther apart from what I can gather.  It all comes together to question what exactly the developers thought was going to happen by putting save points so far apart.  Did they want their customers to sit for hours on end glued to a game because otherwise they would lose so much effort, or was the audience actually asking for games to last hours on end to begin with?  

                The story is now finished up and was nothing all that amazing in my opinion.  The big reveal in the latter parts was going for existentialism but came across as trying too hard.  A story with just some guy trying to create his Xanadu palace was good enough for me until the game thought he should have a personal crisis right before the party wanted to fight him.  After that, the plot switched to one character manifesting their emotional problems into reality that felt more teen angst than anything else.  The only thing it had going for itself is the art style which liked to delve into a little symbolism a little too much.  But all of this never got me to care much about playing the game to find out about what happens next.  Instead, I just wanted the ride to be over.

                "Revelations: Persona" is not a game that can be played in most formats.  I understand that the remake for the PSP included a bunch of new save spots to solve some of these problems, but I suspect a bit this was more due to the game being put on a portable device rather than trying to fix the game.  There were a few other changes here and there to fix the game, but the Playstation version stands as a testament of how bad a game can be.  It got to the point where the only way to even complete the game sanely was to use cheat codes at the very end rather than spend another countless amount hours of doing the same thing over and over with next to no variety to level up my party.  In the end, "Persona" should be avoided because of its perpetual cycle of grinding from one section to the next rather than rewarding strategy.

This is the point where I just stopped caring and wanted it to be over.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is "Godzilla Destroy All Monsters" (1968).