Posts by Puddy

  • Battlefield 3

    Quote from Vilham

    You do realise that BF3 premium doesn't give you any expansion other than Return to Karkand right? You still have to buy the other expansions, you just get early access. It's total bullshit.

    No.

  • DayZ Mod for ARMA II

    Quote from Chimeray

    I found an AK once, died before I was able to use it. If you find something cool, just use it It's the best advice I can give! Throw that grenade somewhere, see what happens!

    The chances of encountering a situation where it's useful (guy stuck in a corner of a room or something) are pretty slim! + someone is likely to kill you before that happens anyways

    Word. It's a bit like IRL, you shouldn't just stockpile stuff. You gotta live a little.

  • Prometheus

    SPOILERIFIC PUDDY RANT INCOMING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

    Let me start off by saying that I actually consider Prometheus to be a pretty bad film. It wasn't dreadful, but the film had such untapped potential and it is, after all, an off-shoot to one of the best sci-fi films in history. Can we ignore such legacy when judging the film? I simply can't. And in order to fully process the film, I have to do a bit of ranting.

    Let's start of with what I consider the main focus of the film; the grandiose theme of creation, creaters, origins and so on. Did the film ever properly handle these subjects? The "Engineer"-fueled story of creation didn't really catch my interest at all and it was never fully explored and it was never given some sort of climax or closure. They came to earth, created building blocks for life, then gave humans a star-map to a weapons facility which purpose is to destroy humans - hmm, okay? Did I miss something? There were too many gaps in the film for the audience to see some purpose or reason for the actions the engineers took. All the answers can't be left for a may-or-may-not-be sequel. For example, the film could've explaind why the engineers created humans, but at the same time not revealing why the engineers decided against our existence at a later point. You have to give the viewers something in my opinion. Unless of course these kind of questions AREN'T the focus of the film, which was the case in the original Alien (the origin/nature of the creature was never explained and it was okay).

    Parallell to this "seed of life"-tale of creation, we follow the quest for answers by, primarily, Holloway, Shaw and Weyland. The main thing I can remember in this part of the story is that they played up tensions between science and faith in a very un-subtle and uninteresting way. The "big" questions which the film was supposed to dissect were also poorly treated. Let me quote the film: "THE BIG QUESTIONS, WHERE DO WE COME FROM, WHAT CREATED US, WHY ARE WE HERE... HEY AUDIENCE, LISTEN UP, THIS IS FUCKING DEEP SHIT!!!". The questions were repeated in various forms by different characters, like a mantra almost. The interesting answers, or inquiries, were nowhere to be seen. And since part of the puzzle involves the uninteresting engineer story arc, the big questions lose part of their weight.

    The characters were pretty bland, with a few exceptions. They were, in order of quality; David, Shaw, Vickers. Fassbender was magnificient as David. I'll leave the elegant descriptions of why he did such a good job to professional movie reviewers, but if you've seen the film such descriptions aren't really necessary; Fassbender's performance is captivating and the character is interesting. It's that simple. Noomi Rapace does a good job portraying Shaw, but she isn't as consistent as Fassbender and since the sub-par treatment of the "big questions" is a big part of her character, there's a limit to how interesting she can be. Vickers wasn't that great, but compared to the remaining cast she stands out with a few good moments and Theron manages to portray her as authoritative and assertive, without making Vickers feel robotic or two-dimensional. Fifield was actually pretty okay too when I come to think of it. But the rest of crew were either not fully introduced, uninteresting or plain bad. Cringe-worthy dialogue was provided by almost everyone.

    Anyway, let us turn to the actual events in the film, as in the journey of Prometheus and it's crew. The premise was setup pretty okay, with a nice build-up that made it clear that this was no ordinary mission and that Shaw and Holloway's discovery had a lot of gravity. Anticipation was definitely building up as they discussed what they may find on that moon. The fact that they were discussing the seeded creation of life on earth, ancient civilizations and so forth painfully reminded me of "Mission to Mars". Still, it wasn't a deal breaker. Instead, it is some time after their arrival on the moon that things began to fall apart for me. I mean, do you remember Alien? Remember the pacing? The signal. Some sort of ship. A dead pilot. Leathery eggs. The way the audience was invited to try and understand the creature attached to that poor man's face. Ash's fascination with it. Marvellous stuff. And nothing like the pacing in Prometheus, which just flatlined the moment they entered that facility after landing. There were hints of tension, small peaks of suspense that lasted very briefly. There were a lot of details, minor twists and events that tried to gain the viewer's attention. I won't even bother commenting them. "Blablabla...... father" etc. Yuck. As the story progressed, it became increasingly clear that this trend of having no true thrills or any form of apex would maintain. And a lot of it can be traced to the lack of a well-defined, interesting antagonist. As I mentioned earlier, the engineers storyline is underdeveloped and their motives are too unexplored for them to constitute an interesting adversary. As for the various creature variations, well, they were all over the place and they never became this lurking menace in the dark which the original alien truly was. They were just goo-spawned randomness, basically. In any case, the crew realizes the nature of the place, gets killed off one by one by various mutants/the engineer and Shaw ultimately survives the whole ordeal and just hijacks an alien ship together with a decapitated David to ride off into the sunset in the search of insterstellar voldemorts which she hopes can provide her with "answers". Yeah, sounds fucking great.

    Meh.

  • Prometheus

    Just watched it. I'd give it a 2 out of 5. It just wasn't something special unfortunately.

    I'm too tired to go into detail right now, but the film's main problem is that it's a bit all over the place - atleast in my opinion. Characters and monster variations are thrown at the viewer in a heavy-handed manner and at the same time the film doesn't really know what kind of genre it will land in or what the focus of the film is. Are you guys with me on this one?

  • Hitman: Absolution

    Quote from PaulH

    It's possible the trailer was a marketing ploy to get people talking about the game, in which case it's certainly worked

    Yesh, that angle is ever-present in the minds of marketers, like an inoperable cancer.