My obligatory tie in to Alien Romulus: Rome total war

 

I made actual notes for this review, are you proud? No, me neither, basic due diligence is an alien language to me. I want to take you back, deep down to the front line: the year is 230bc, and shit is kicking off.

On a boring out of the way peninsular of Europe, a bunch of really aggy dudes are about to smear their shitty attitudes into the collective imagination of the known world for the next two millennium. In the east twinkius Maximus: Alex the gr8 has gotten too crunk and passed out for the finial time: his empire fractures between his generals. Everywhere else people are fine actually, thanks for asking; things are chill and will remain so indefinitely, or so they believe (foreshadowing notice).

 This is world of Rome: total war: the jeopardy answer to, ‘what was the equivalent of fentanyl prior to the 2010’s.’

I haven’t played this game since I was sixteen or so. How old am I now? Fuck off. Needless to say I might be a little rusty (editor’s note: this sentence refers to itself as needless, and undermines your gripping- hand of the reader’s junk - style of hard hitting journalism. reword or remove!) So I went back to my old reliable the Julii.

They start the game in north Italy which put them right next to the uncultured and aggressive Gauls, a rap battle quick ensued: trans or cis alpine we don’t discriminate, against their hostile acts, I will recriminate, their armies large and keen to charge, but they’re about to be wacked, so who will have the gall to get territorial? Better to be the Caesar, than the seized, I'll drop those fr*nch bastards to their knees.

And with that rap battle over and done with I swiftly conquered the region, depopulating it, and enslaving its people in a campaign devoid of any historical parallels.

It all seemed good, but what I glossed over, like a fine layer of varnish onto a rough grain wooden deck, was the problems with my economy. I let the computer run the show, and by the gods they were inept. Settlements revolting, the people didn’t smell great either. They were building catapult ranges by the dozen. This was rampant corruption. Money that should have gone into public purse instead was shed out to an entrenched class of consultancy parasites that made their living shepherding meek and feeble projects through a labyrinth of bureaucratic swill, whilst draining them dry. A campaign of fiscal mismanagement devoid of any historical parallels.

Despite this a slow lumbering rhyme-less campaign in spai… Iberia followed. Much like unbuttered bread I remorselessly chewed with mechanical persistence into Pyrenees, i took little joy in it. From there I cross the straits of Gibraltar, into North Africa and all the way to Carthage. I strolled into the senate head held high and said proudly “Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” and they said in reply I was using the wrong tense, which sparked and all out civil war.

Due to my chronic mismanagement my territory couldn’t stand up the might of the other roman powers, the hitherto unnamed Brutii and Scipii. I ended up being the jam in a roman sandwich. All was lost I gave up and went on with my life.

That was until election night, a friend was distracting themselves from Peter Mandelson’s dulcet tones using the might of roman arms: he was fighting the civil war and was winning.

My imagination sparked. I had learnt so much the first time around, surely I could take another crack at it, and this time WIN!

Once again I chose the Julii but instead of the verse about the Gaul’s I ignored them, turned south and chose the true path to empire building. I named my save file ‘greek_fucker’

You see dear reader I am a master of history, no I don’t have a masters in history- or even a GCSE. But. I have Wikipedia articles, and the will to read them. Instead of trailing in the shadow of Caesar I followed the path of the true masters of empire: the east India Company. Not literally, but in principle. I waded into war torn Greece, where a three way struggle was on going, instead of playing the peace maker I turned that shit up to eleven! Played the sides against each other and took their territory whilst making one-sided peace deals.

You see, I had previously thought of empire as simply land holding by force to monopolise the agrarian surplus. How wrong I was. The truest meaning of empire is about forcing people to grow opium so you can trade it for bits and bobs. I built sea ports, and traded hard with everyone I could find.

Ancient Greece was in the money, they had the swag and now they were in my bag. Next up was Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Byzantium. Next I noticed the Pontic faction in Anatolia was running low on troops in a long war with Egypt so I scooped them up into the imperial fold. Gold flowed in like raw sewage in the streets: which I could now afford to fix, so I did.

Spending big on public works and turning all of my warlord generals into urban planners. Not out of a sense of love for my people, but to reduce the force needed to occupy them. Plus more people makes for a bigger tax base! Stocks in Jullii.corp were looking bullish.

My next move was simple; I launched a decapitation strike on the Egyptian Nile. This is a move attempted four times during the crusades in the twelfth century. Though unlike them, I won.

Now my empire went from expansive to bloated. There is no ghoulish word for peace, they had been hammering on northern Italy the entire game. They were starting to get a proverbial concussion from smashing their head into my proverbial wall. It only took a half-hearted effort to roll into their lands and seize their centres of commerce. I also swallowed the entire Middle East, partitioning it in a campaign devoid of any historical parallels.

In a parallel thread of this story, I had spent the entire game assassinating every Brutii I could get my hands on; it was causing a slight animosity between our factions, for some reason. This all came to a boil triggering an early civil war. The scippii had fucked off to west Africa. They wanted no part in the brutii’s temper tantrum; whereas I now faced down a greatly weakened faction, inexplicably lacking leaders, having been undermined at every turn.

My mistake the first time around was not treating a civil war as inevitable; today’s allies are tomorrow’s enemies, I knew that now: I had become truly Roman. So my muscular hands closed around the Brutii throat, killing my twin faction.

Accompanied by my armies I cross the Rubicon and visited the senate in Rome, to discuss the events so far with them. My speech was recorded as such.

“Their attempt on my life has left me scarred and deformed, but I assure you my resolve has never been stronger! In order to ensure the security and continuing stability, the republic would be reorganised in the first Galactic! I mean *cough* roman! Empire. For a safe and secure society.”

They would have applauded, had I not already slit their throats. So I logged off and went outside, the end.

Game is good btw!!!

Napoleon: blown apart by my scathing review

 

I have a soft spot for strange, awkward, not quite Italians that yearn to be dictator of France. My interest in Bonaparte is less grounded in historical fanboying, and more a way to use an impossibly lofty aspiration to beat myself over the head: until my self esteem is as lively as so many protesters after so much canister shot. Why am I not supplanting the directory? Why have I not pushed the Austrians out of Italy with an army that lacks for footwear? Oh woe Ect ect.

 

I watched the film Napoleon with a modest understanding of the events, and spent much of my time working out who was being depicted before the film name dropped them, and from that game I got a fair bit of enjoyment. In that regard the film is fine, stop reading now.

 

The film has two threads, one is that Napoleonic warfare looks fucking sick, and the other is that he really liked his hot poshGF. Somewhere in this mix, the myth of ‘master of Europe’ gets lost. The film is taking liberties with its depiction of events, I know I was there. Which is ‘fine’ each scene could be a film unto itself, some short hand there can be forgiven.

 

Though it commits the cardinal sin of making Boney boring. You don’t try to take over the world without a pretty messed up sense of self-worth, and ego. Write a megalomaniacal bratty sub and have it come out dull, how? His historical one liners are bitchy as hell. At a time of fervent nationalism this chucklefuck took the cake left to him by Marie Antoinette, and carried it to Moscow and back. Humanizing such a figure is of course an interesting endeavour, but making him feel like a sales director at a stapler company is certainly a choice.

 

I am a bit of a josey-stan, admitted. Aren’t we all? Josephine is, in my unqualified speculation, more influential in events than historical accounts imply. As good as Boney was in reading the battlefield, she was at reading people and the Parisian scene. The film is interested in her, but only insofar as it relates to her romance with napoleon, apart from her fucking; which the film even down plays. The fixation ends up flattening her interesting and complex personal character (the being limited scope, not the fucking)

 

The thing that I feel makes Napoleon interesting is his Rizz. Boy had no game, and had the diplomatic skills of a fermented herring. Though he was hugely popular both with the French people in general and his troops in particular. It’s hard to imagine exactly how a person must have acted in their day to day life, and to the film's credit, it doesn’t really try. I feel like they nailed the bully boy bluster, but not the personal magnetism, or headline grabbing fabrications he spun. The film knows these qualities exist, but tells not shows them. It is unable to reconcile them into its narrative.

 

The film's overarching conclusion is that Josephine was the beauty and he the beast, which does them both a disservice, and is more reductionist than the British tabloids of the day, at least they were humorous. It’s the lack of mannerisms that I found to be the lost eagle standards. Whether it was Boney rubbing his painful stomach, or Josephine covering her awful teeth these little character details are strikingly absent. In trying to ‘humanize’ these painfully flawed people they made them into other people. The only time he really felt like Napoleon was when he was going out his way to be a dick to other emperors.

 

A lot is done to create a man behind the myth, but I'd argue that the myth is an intrinsic element of the man. Imagine dear scholars A, D.J. Khaled: Beyond the hype.

 

So my question is why bother? A deconstruction is normally used to lay things bare, though this isn’t quite that. If we’re going to slot any-old awkward romance in there, rather than one plausibly theirs, we could have instead watched a two and half hour recreation of waterloo (i know it exists), or austerlitz or jena or leipzig. They’re all bangers, apart from borodino. Much as I long for big cannons, frontal assaults and total encircling’s of the left flank; I’m certainly not against cringe romance, in principle, and I’m not an expert (yeah, i know you knew that you smug pricks) but it feels like they read the letters but didn’t really understand them. Which I also didn’t, but I also don’t make films about the dude you ‘know.

 

Despite having warped the history to make these two threads complimentary, they end up being anathema. Each disrupts detracts and contorts the other. Though I have to give the film credit for its achievement, I never thought I'd find Napoleonic history lacklustre.

 

Okay, so that’s actually a lie, SHOCKER I know. The book that turned me onto reading about the period was called “Napoleon and the awakening of Europe,” published in 1954 and bought for a fifty pence in a second hand bookshop that used to be a public toilet: the book is weirdly paced and assumes, at least of the bits of it I read, a fair heft of background knowledge. So maybe out of the clear and chasmous gaps in the narrative of the film, other people will be inspired to learn more.

 

There’s a 2002 miniseries on Napoleon which is worth watching, it’s about six hours long and ends up being far more emotionally compelling, even if the budget is noticeably lacking.

Dynamite this film was not, get it? napoleon dynamite? Urghh. Not cool you guys.  

 

 

Thopa gunner: maverick, bitch

Thopa gunner: maverick, bitch

 

Bear with me a moment, I swear this tangent is going somewhere. So, there’s this Simpsons gag about military recruitment. Where the recruiter explains they use subliminal, liminal and super liminal messaging. When asked to explain what super liminal messaging involves, he leans out a window and screams at a passer by telling them to sign up. Ha. Ha.

 

If I was to try and slot top gun maverick into one of those categories, it’s got to be super liminal.  If only because everyone already is well aware the original was also a recruitment tool for the navy. 36 years down the line, the cat has had kittens and those kittens have had kittens, and the proverbial bag was recycled into a coke bottle that was then used as a gravity bong before being discarded into landfill. Yet Top gun refuses to move on, so much so the film’s theme (join the navy) was about how little anyone in top gun had actually moved on… from the navy, which they joined…

 

I appreciate the mental gymnastics a screenwriter today would have to go through to write anything as corny and un-ironic as a top gun film. Though in that regard I feel they fall a bit short in places. The film has more cheese than the US food stamp program in 1986. While I'm down for an 80’s cheese fest, my lactose intolerant friends will attest there is such a thing as too much cheese. So let’s examine the post pizza depression of Maverick.

 

Much as the film tries to convince that there are actual narrative stakes at play you can feel the kid gloves of the soft writing underneath. I’m not saying someone has to die a sudden dramatic death, but the film telegraphs itself as too much of a feel-good flick to really do that. The only death in the film, join the navy, is forewarned and the most respectful adoring funeral one could hope for.

 

The messaging across the film is not only can you return to the past, but it’s as vibrant and good as you remember it. Nothing exists there to fundamentally challenge you, your sweet heart is still waiting, and you can comfortably be a big fish in a small pond, sticking it to your old man (Jon Hamm) by joining up, shipping out and flying boats at mack too. Needless of me to point out, that isn’t how the 80’s was: I know I was there. Like a lot of media, it’s riding nostalgia for a time that never was, which isn’t what the nostalgia of my childhood used to be, it used to be good, you’know, it was a purer kinder nostalgia, people nowadays use it as an escape but.

 

 A good portion of the film is characters lining up to metaphorically jerk Thomas Cruisé off with flattery and praise. Which I’m chalking up to the military recruiters knowing that no one under the age of thirty five was ever led to believe that they were good enough. If anyone can be used to symbolize a black hole of praise seeking insecurity, it would be the now 61 year old Tobias Cruz.

 

Paradoxically, the sheer volume of affirmation that Tommy Crush, maverick, is in fact the best fighter pilot of all time forever and ever left me with lasting imposter syndrome. I am now resigned to never being a top of the line fighter ace. The worst part of that is I've never even flown and have a totally unrelated fear of heights. Though that might speak to the boat having sailed on my own sense of self-worth.

 

Speaking of, Tumnus Crash does have a boat sailing scene. Where it is revealed that he doesn’t know how to sail, so that his new old girlfriend can girl-mansplain the basics to him. Doesn’t learning to sail boats sound like a great idea for a date? A good way to learn those skills would be to join the US navy.

 

It has occurred to me that pointing out the film as propaganda isn’t particularly clever. Critics like to think of themselves as clever people, because they’re people and everyone does that. The sheer obviousness of it goes some way to neutralizing the criticism of it being propaganda. Hence making it more effective propaganda: this is a super liminal thing I was talking about; awareness of advertisement doesn’t neutralize the effectiveness when it’s not trying to be subtle. If anything the knowledge goes some way to encouraging the same complacent mindset that made the original so effective.

 

If we’re on the subject of criticism, and this being a review; I think we are, blowing your nostalgia song on the opening sequence is crumby as hell. I’m fairly sure, based on nothing other than my own notional sense of entitlement; that if danger zone started blasting during the maverick dog fight sequence, it would be incredibly cringe, over the top, and quintessentially 80’s nostalgia perfection.

 

The other easy angle with Cruise is his cult affiliation, which I'm sure I could be scathing about, but I'm not putting in the research (reading wikipedia) to get enough material for a paragraph on the subject. I can stomach reading about the US navy, but thinking about that other aquatic organization gives me the ick.

 

I’m fairly sure Maverick won’t have the same lasting impression as the original, but I also know it’s not trying to. A sequel in the narrative sense moves the story on; keeping some underlying themes and concepts, whilst developing them. Ultimately they aim to supplant the original, successful or not. Tenga Topa gun maverick isn’t interested in moving forwards, it and a lot of modern sequels to 80’s classics have got more in common with a prequel if anything, ticking off a set of references and nods to the status quo. This is how modern ‘generative AI’ works; a scatter shot approximation of what it was fed. If the machines were trained on our cultural, no wonder they’re not creative.

 

Tron legacy was more forward looking. Yikes.

Stick fight: the games

 

Stick fight: the games

I invite you, slovenly constituted reader, to invoke powers hence untapped. Imagine with me; if only for a fleeting moment. Set the scene in hues of deepest black and orange, no wait - noir and ochre, add strings and flutes and drums: their pace quickening. Garnish the moment with the brutal glare of the sun’s gaze, the sink of sulphur and knowledge that only one man may live.

 

We stand equidistant, hands at our hips, four desperados, blue, red, yellow and green, for whom words have failed, and all that remains is the cradle of our heritage. 3,2,1 lunge. Hands run along the grain of the oak grips, we squeeze off wild shots, snapping the air with their howls. Screams shatter the tension like glass. Falling into cover, our hearts pound, sweat pours as every sinew strains to cling to life.

 

Red and yellow, rising like the dawn, turn their guns on each other. Hammers fall and blood sprays. Yellow takes a shot to the shoulder: their arm flies out wildly, hosepipe in its movement. It sends him off balance. The revolver races from his hand. Red’s head is whiplashed, lashing the air with yet more red. He’s dead.

 

Before he can hit the ground green is up, sparks fly from the barrel of his gun, nailing yellow in the side again. Green is seizing the moment by the throat; he jumps over cover, gun arcing down to lay the deathblow on yellow. He chokes. Yellow's foot, in a flurry of movement plants itself in his chest, his limbs shoot out spasmodically. The gun fires, nailing the already dead red. No redemption to be found.

 

Yellow is on him now, fists like a torrent of hail, he wails, wailing on green too stunted to process this reversal until finally he slumps down, and quietly expires.

 

Blue, the bastard, the dalliance dilettante, waits behind cover. Cradling his firearm, watching coldly while all but the pigs fly. Yellow, holding his claret soaked side, snatches a gun off the floor, and takes aim.

 

When blue doesn’t move, yellow inches closer, and closer. Until at last, blue doesn’t move just one too many fucking times, yellow screams,

”Shit on it!”

He fires wildly, leaps and spins and comes down with all the unfettered malice of a Valkyrie. There is an exchange. Here’s what’s traded: blows, bullets, insults, and a life. Yellow stands with a golden crown resting on their head. Blue lays with a glassy expression, laid out to rest.

 

Then the scene changes, the items swap around, but the ordeal repeats.

 

This is stick fight’s joy, sudden focused bouts of hyper violence, done to stick figures of course. While subjected to increasingly chaotic level designs and to the fickle whims of anyone wielding a snake based weapon, I'm not talking metal gear here.

 

We as people have a fascination with violence, one might suggest some evolutionary or cultural benefit of such, but really that’s beside the point. We have the horny now, and it needs indulging, or at least we like to think it does. The problem is, hurting people actually fucking sucks; or at least that’s what I keep insisting to myself: my experiments with flies and small rodents supports a different conclusion.

 

Movies are nice, but they lack the agency of games. While many games are starting to feel too realistic to depict hyper violence with all its kinetic rapture intact. Violence, like sex, largely lies in our own fantasies, hence why its depictions are best served stylized. Stick fight then is fun abstracted violence, caffeine free Pepsi max. Its lobbying system is really straightforward; taking place inside the game itself to do away with any menus, and it’s a fun way to kill a while on the sofa or over the interwebs.

 

As well as being violent, each round is an exercise in game theory; but that’s just a pretentious way of saying be careful not to be beaten while you beat others. Don’t let your own shotgun knockback send you flying into lava. Avoid snakes, no really, they’re hateful fuckers. And if ever you see a laser beam on a pivot: get to cover without hesitation.

 

I don’t think there’s much more to be said about it than that. It’s a very simple game that feels a bit like the web flash games of fifteen ago, but is much more polished in its design. So I won’t waste any more of your time gushing about it, unless you kept reading past that last comma, at which point you’re just reading another dollop of endless word salad that isn’t furthering any particular point other than to call attention to its own redundancy and lack of context, and so by your very reading it you become part of a vacuous moment that just doesn’t seem to have 

What is Oppenheimer's Lol Elo? who does he main?

 

I’ve been trying to decide how to feel about Oppenheimer. Deciding how you feel isn’t simply a process of deciding how you feel internally, but how that feeling relates to external social structures. It’s a question of how one wishes to present themselves to history, to your friends and loved ones. The boundary of self, the shield of absolute terror, is powerful yet illusory, unlike the power of the atomic bomb, which feels illusory but is, in the final instance, wack!

I was distracted by too many ‘big’ actors, I don't mean Andre the giant, I mean that films are often coded in such a way as to target our attention onto key characters because they are played by the tent pole figures. The film is packed with very recognizable faces with only faintly recognizable names and personalities. As such I understand the film entirely as x’s character talking to y. With the exception of Albert Einstein, who for once isn’t talking about saving energy on a smart meter I don't have.

Perhaps neoliberalism wears the guise of history like a triumphal roman general wears the guise of Jupiter for a day. Perhaps? But to say such a thing falls far short of the pretentious level Oppenheimer aspires to.

‘Quantum physics is unintuitive’ is a platitude often mentioned in the film, probably because it’s a recurring meme in introduction to quantum physics talks. It’s the speaker's way of saying, “please don’t switch off then this doesn't make sense, it won’t for a while, you’re not expected to grasp it right away.” which is predicated on an assumption that there is something to be gasped.

I feel it was a bold directorial decision to import this unintuitive dynamic into the film itself, while also inverting it; using the mystical hand wavy language that usually side-lines a talk about complex mathematical topics, to side-line the structural elements of storytelling.

It’s 22nd July 2023, this scene is in black and white, though it only exists as a text exchange on a messenger app. A friend explains why we shouldn’t necessarily bother with Oppenheimer. He is played by, (Googles actor) Oscar Isaac, but will only appear in this one scene. His testimony in this closed session left Christopher Nolan reeling from the psychic shock: when Nolan really wanted a public battering to martyr himself to.

 

“Hard truths but I'm giving Oppenheimer a 3/10”

 

Vine Boom Sound Effect.mp3

 

“Someone needed to tell Nolan to shut up”

 

Vine Boom Sound Effect.mp3

 

“Westworld season 3 energy”

 

Vine Boom Sound Effect.exe

 

“Also I thought he was going to ride the bomb and go yee haw but he didn't do that wtf”

 

Vine Boom Sound Effect.mp3

 

The only time I truly felt like I got a vivid feeling for the characters were during the more surreal scenes. They’re very evocative and great ways to communicate strong emotion. I walked away (closed the tab I was watching it on) wishing there had been more of that, but upon reflection I'm glad they were used sparingly and to great effect.

Sparingly and to great effect the dialogue was not. The dialogue largely functions to insist on a level of cohesion that simply does not exist, forcibly stitching one scene to a previous and future scene. The idea of an overarching plot is illusory, like red string between desperate newspaper clippings, the ideas I mentioned in the first paragraph, which the term illusory anchors to this one, is about deciding how I felt about something, but call-backs are not the same thing as cohesion, because this paragraph/scene doesn’t exist in its own right but as a crossroads tying other crossroads together: which as I’ve just demonstrated isn’t that complex or difficult, but it is obtuse.

I just remembered there’s a bunch of black and white scenes, again, which are all from Robert Downey jr.’s perspective. I’ve looked up some film interviews where the cast explain why it’s in black and white, just so there’s no ambiguity in your reading of the subtext. We wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong answer. We wouldn’t want anyone to think about it too hard. Doesn’t Cillian Murphy look pretty when he’s angsty, love it!

My thoughts deep coming back to David Lynch and twin peaks: large casts, long stories that don’t always lead anywhere, surreal scenes, interconnectedness and symbolism, and an interrogation of the American perspective. In the return there is even a scene with the trinity bomb test. There are a lot of parallels here, but they are parallels never intersecting or coming any closer to make a meaningful connection along any axis. I’m going to repeat this point in the next paragraph, and build on it a little.

I wanted to draw my conclusion by comparing the two, but they aren't in conversation with one another, just like Robert Downey jr.’s and Cillian Murphy's characters. In an attempt to structure the piece I felt the need to invent an antagonist for the film, to give it a sense of final conflict, but as with a fair few Christopher Nolan films these days, the real antagonistic force in the story was Oppenheimer all along.

Vine Boom Sound Effect.mp3

Fade to black.