Alien: Romulus Is More Than We Deserve

Ever since I watched Aliens and collected the Kenner action figures as a kid, the Alien series has stood firmly as the bedrock upon which my love for science fiction, movies and games is built upon. While the franchise is fully fleshed out by now with novels, comics, games (especially the magnificent Alien: Isolation), tabletop games, short films, crossovers, and even an audio play, the film series has seen uneven output since 1986. ALIEN³ and Resurrection were generally disliked because of studio meddling with the former and an ill-suited director with the latter. Then came Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which were much better received but got plenty of flak over a number of questionable narrative choices, such as the flat-out imbecilic decision making of characters who should have known better (ie the biologist who tries to pet the hammerpede). After Covenant underperformed financially and the Great Satan, sometimes known as Disney, purchased 20th Century Fox, Alienites such as myself were worried that the film franchise would be no more. Thankfully, Alien: Romulus shows us that its sometimes great to be proven wrong.

Considering the gap between Aliens and Romulus was literally my entire life so far, my expectations were measured. When I read the early press description, it seemed like it would be a standalone story with a small scope and small cast; essentially the equivalent of the most recent Predator movie, Prey. The writer and director, Fede Álvarez, made the excellent Don’t Breathe, and interviews he gave showed that he wasn’t just a studio-mandated hired gun, but a die-hard Alien fan who read the comics, played Isolation and consulted with both Ridley Scott and James Cameron. In short, I had plenty of reason to believe that this would be a competently made movie that would nevertheless be a side story to the greater Alien film narrative.

It turns out that Romulus is way more than what I expected. Way, way more. Not only is it very well made, with an excellent cast, creative set pieces, loads of suspense and eye-gluing special effects, it narratively bridges the gap between the prequels and the first two movies and expands on the overall story arc in ways that exceeded my expectations. This it not a standalone side story, but a full-blown chapter of the Alien saga that stands shoulder to shoulder with Alien and Aliens.

No movie can succeed without a strong cast, and Romulus easily boasts the most compelling cast of characters since Aliens thanks to the way the script establishes their backstories. I was initially skeptical when I saw that the cast would be entirely young adults barely out of their teens, as it gave the impression of a slasher flick filled with dumb, obnoxious kids who would bumble their way into a facehugger’s embrace. However, after Álvarez explained how he was inspired by a deleted scene from Aliens that showed children playing on Hadley’s Hope, it made total sense to explore a story that would show how the harsh world of Alien had robbed new generations of humanity of everything we take for granted today. The characters of Romulus are easy to sympathize with as a result, having grown up on a Weyland-Yutani mining planet that never sees sunlight and is so harsh that all their parents have died from working in the mines. In particular, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her artificial brother Andy (David Jonsson), are characters you can root for thanks to their plausible and relatable characterization. Rain, for instance, is a warm and mild-mannered person, which stands in sharp contrast to her cynical shipmates and her brutal living conditions. This is subtly explained to be the result of her father, who was so kindhearted that he adopted the unwanted and discarded Andy and reprogrammed him to be a member of the family. Throughout her ordeal onboard the Romulus, she serves as an anchor point for the audience, reacting to each situation realistically and in line with her characterization. Unlike recent franchise blockbusters like Terminator: Dark Fate or anything by JJ Abrams, she doesn’t start spouting improbably witty one liners, boss the men around, or magically become a xeno-stomping ultimate badass. During the final sequence, I was genuinely rooting for her while being concerned for her safety. The last time I felt that strongly about a protagonist was Top Gun: Maverick. The fact that Rain’s actress, Cailee Spaeny, is a mere five feet tall heightens her physical vulnerability against the overwhelming threat facing her. Thanks to Fede Álvarez’s understanding of the source material, her ability to push forward for the sake of her brother Andy draws inspiration from Ellen Ripley, whose determination to rescue Newt allows her to overcome the odds despite not being a soldier.

And speaking of Andy, Romulus successfully continues the Alien film tradition of the android being the most interesting character. While Ash and David were evil and Bishop, Walter and Call were good, Andy is one or the other, depending on which chip is installed in him. This is such an obvious yet never-before-utilized plot point that highlights how androids, no matter how human they seem, are only a directive change away from being either undyingly loyal or utterly amoral. Actor David Jonsson is exceptional at portraying both the subtle and extreme differences between Andy’s two personalities with machine-like precision. It makes Andy Serkis’s portrayal of Gollum look overblown. He and Rain form an effective dynamic that carries the movie’s emotional weight throughout its two hour runtime, and it made me care for them during their many perilous moments.

By far my favorite thing about Romulus is that it finally gives legitimacy to the prequels. In the years since Prometheus and Alien: Covenant came out, fans have speculated and argued about the new revelations they presented, such as whether or not the xenomorphs really did originate from the black liquid. I myself felt that the huge time gap between Covenant and Alien, along with the many unanswered questions about how the story elements from the prequels factored into the classics, made the two groups feel like very, very distant cousins. Romulus, by virtue of several critical plot points that draw elements from Prometheus and inject them into the Alien time period, makes these movies feel less like distant cousins and more like brothers. Considering that I walked into the theater thinking it would be little more than teens getting murdered by xenos on a ship, I was pleasantly surprised that Romulus went above and beyond by bringing a better sense of cohesion between all the good Alien movies.

Is Alien Romulus as good as Alien and Aliens? It comes very close, although I will say it could have used longer and more gratuitous death scenes. Yes, I know I sound like a sick bastard for saying that, but with a cast of only six characters and more creative room to showcase the magnificence of the iconic titular creature, Romulus had the opportunity to show a fresher and more gruesome perspective to being slaughtered by a xenomorph. Instead, the deaths are depicted with the same economy as the classic movies. I understand the rationale of going back to the style of the originals, but considering how familiar the alien is to filmgoers by now, I think this is one area where Álvarez could have taken it further to unveil a new level of horror with this creature. The movie also takes the fanservice a little too far with the characters quoting a few classic lines from Alien and Aliens word for word. The sentiment is appreciated, but the visual, aural and narrative design in Romulus are so good that they’re all the service the fans need. Instead, that kind of distraction is best left to trash like Aliens vs Predator and its sequel.

Still, Romulus is a hell of a good time and packed with so many things diehard fans like myself have been dying to see for almost forty frickin’ years in a full scale theatrical release: an expansion of the alien story, the classic xenomorph in action, the 70s style clunky junky sci-fi aesthetic, and very importantly, a pulse rifle going full auto. It is very obvious after watching Romulus that Fede Álvarez is one of us: an Alien nerd who obsesses over the first two movies and the surrounding expanded universe and desperately wanted to see a return to that world. Considering how impossibly complex it is to navigate the Hollywood maze of financing, bigwig studio execs and overbearing producers, it’s a miracle that this movie actually got made at all by someone with that kind of passion. Anyone who has so much as a passing interest in Alien should now go see this so that it’ll be successful and warrant a sequel.

On a final note, since Alien: Romulus takes place in between Alien and Aliens, does that mean we can now consider Aliens to be Alien 3 and just forget about ALIEN³ and Resurrection?

LA vs SG: Being a Musician in Los Angeles vs Singapore

The year is 2015 and I’m back in Singapore. Throughout my last nine years studying in the sprawling urban hellscape known as Los Angeles, I’ve honed my skills at slappin’ the bass, joined three different bands, performed on the Sunset Strip, and released my first solo album. With that chapter of life done and dusted, I’m eager to explore the music scene in my hometown. After poking around a bit, I discover a regular blues jam at my local community center. It’s the pilot episode of the second season of My Musical Life, with an entirely new cast.

The year is now 2024 and I’ve just performed at Beerfest Asia with a group of musicians I’ve met over the last nine years. With two seasons of My Musical Life completed, its impossible to not reflect on the vast differences between Los Angeles’s and Singapore’s music scene and what those differences say about the two cultures. After all, many musicians in this day and age come from diverse backgrounds, both personal and professional; a vertical slice of the society they live in.

The most immediate contrast between LA and Singaporean musicians is what the term “Jamming” means to these people. In LA, when we got together to jam, we improvized together. We either started with a series of chords or a song we all knew and went from there, or we simply picked a key, had one of us start things off, and made things up as we went along. Typically, by the time we got to the end of a 15-minute jam, we’d traversed at least three different key and tempo changes. In some cases, there’d material in there to write a song with. This is how my college friends taught me to play music shortly after I purchased my first bass guitar, and jamming like this was the way you got to know another musician and proved your worth.

Back home, jamming means playing well-known tunes like Pride and Joy, Creep, Crossroads, I Shot the Sherriff, and so on. In many cases, trying to get too clever with the song in the spirit of improvization will get you concerned stares. Jamming, then, is not so much an act of creation as it is an act of regurgitation. My attempts at leading my fellow musicians with an improvized jam were initially met with confusion; what is this guy doing? What song is this? Four minutes into the jam, the drummer stopped playing and straight up told me he didn’t know what we were doing. It was quite a culture shock for me but in retrospect shouldn’t have been that surprising, given how Singaporeans are generally raised to color within the lines and follow instructions to the letter.

Fast forward nine years later, and the small but dedicated circle of musicians I know here have a better idea of what it means to do an improvized jam, but it’s apparent that even among the most technically skilled players, there’s an inability to come up with interesting riffs and rhythms on the fly. Everything sounds like mush as people play around the same scale, and my attempts at evolving the jam in a different direction by playing a different riff, as my friends and I always did back in LA, fall on deaf ears because no one is listening to each other.

In LA, nearly all the musicians I played with, regardless of their skill and background, wanted to write songs and put an album together. Jamming was one way of generating ideas. There was a genuine hunger among my musical peers to make a name for themselves by flexing their creativity, and that hunger inspired me to do the same for myself with, to date, three original albums and a fourth on the way. Meanwhile, after nine years of jamming in Singapore, I’ve met only a handful of musicians with more than a passing interest in creating their own music.

It all points to what I see as a difference in what musicians in these two cities want to get out of their favorite pastime. For the LA musicians I’ve played with, music was a means to imprint their creative identity and very possibly take it further as a professional endeavor. It wasn’t hard to feel that temptation; LA, after all, has a reputation as the Mecca for actors and musicians, where the right amount of creativity, dedication and luck could propel you into stardom. The reality was not quite true, but more on that later.

Singapore musicians, on the other hand, have a very clear idea of what their passion is and isn’t. It’s a fun activity and the best way to spend time after work, but it will never be more than that. Because of that, there isn’t much of a mental predisposition to create or innovate; playing music is more about the joy of jamming familiar tunes on stage to a captive audience and less about carving out an identity.

The irony about this contrast is that Singaporean musicians are much more mentally equipped to be serious artists than the average LA musician. I could write a book on the endless torrent of horrors I had to deal with during my time there, from the seasonally suicidal drummer with a baby mama from hell who would randomly not turn up at practice and not answer his phone, to the drug-addled guitarist who couldn’t resist jerking himself off in the presence of women, to the vocalist whose volatile family and financial situation interfered with his ability to write new music, to the keyboardist who was too high to learn any of the songs, to the band leader who was perpetually blasted out of his mind and would insist to the point of shouting that a song he wrote in 9/4 was actually in 4/4. When the stars aligned and everyone showed up sober and prepared, the musical chemistry was absolutely on point, more so than most of my experiences in Singapore. It’s just that there were so many obstacles that stood in the way that were the result of individuals who couldn’t get their personal lives in order. When chatting with other musicians at gigs I played, I learned that many of them had foregone more financially stable careers in hopes of making it big in LA, electing to instead work menial jobs that would give them more time to play music. Unfortunately, I often saw this life choice become a catch-22, where the high cost of living in LA, coupled with a lack of gainful employment, interfered with one’s ability to commit to music in a city where competition is fierce and new bands often have to pay USD1,000 to play at venues like The Roxy and Whisky A-Go-Go, who do zero marketing for your band.

Likely as a result of our culture of discipline, education and orderliness, the Singaporean musicians I know are typically working professionals who in some cases have also done their national service. They show up to practice, they leave their personal issues at home, and they learn the songs ahead of time. What they lack in imagination, they make up for as reliable musicians who know their craft and approach it with the same professionalism as their day jobs. They have a disciplined attitude and the financial and personal stability that any serious musician needs to go far, but in many cases, it doesn’t go much further than playing Sweet Child O’ Mine at a bar. As highlighted in a recent Facebook post by local jazz pianist Jeremy Monteiro, the life of a full-time musician who mixes gigging with teaching rarely gets you more than SGD2000-SGD5,000 a month. This isn’t much worse than what an LA musician makes a month, but in a culture where people are judged by their salary, it might as well be.

Compounding this frustrating juxtaposition is the fact that the logistics of playing music in Singapore are infinitely better than in LA. The main advantage is how clustered together our population of 6 million is, on a 31-mile long island where you can travel from the furthest end to the other in less than an hour using public transportation. Compare that to LA, where you could spend up to USD7,000 a year on your car (gas, maintenance, insurance, registration) along with the fact that it’s not uncommon to join a band with people who live two to three hours apart when you factor in the city’s legendary traffic jams and lack of public transportation.

Many smaller venues also don’t provide backline equipment, unlike Singapore, where even the Irish pub next to my home is fully furnished with amps, a drum set, keyboard, monitors and PA system. There’s also the fact that audiences in LA have become jaded to the myriad of bands vying for their adoration. After all, in a city that is home to the likes of Michael Jackson, Dave Grohl, David Crosby, Kanye West and Trent Reznor, the general public is far less inclined to care about your Led Zeppelin tribute band. Conversely, post-COVID Singapore is proving to be fertile soil for local music, with venues like Timbre+ seeing an uptick in sales and other FnB outlets upgrading to accommodate live music. It might not be the best place to be a full-time musician now, but there’s an argument to be made that the ingredients for some kind of musical renaissance are slowly coming together.

At a bandmate’s house party in downtown LA back in 2013, I was speaking to a man who was enthusing about how he felt like his musical career was finally taking off now that he managed to get Darryl Jones, the Rolling Stones’ touring bassist, to play on his record. After congratulating him, I asked him how long he had been playing music. “35 years” he said. He wasn’t the first guy I spoke to who took this long to make that kind of meaningful progress, and it might have been the final nudge I needed to come home and start a new career.

LA has far too many visionaries of varying ability who hang their hopes on musical success. It’s a great place to find inspiration, but is ultimately oversaturated with aspirants destined for disappointment in a city of broken dreams. Singapore has no shortage of reliable and skilled musicians in Singapore who nevertheless have little desire to create and will not take their talents beyond playing classic tunes on stage. Is there a third option besides choosing between being a starving musician who gets paid $100 a gig, or the drudgery of playing “It’s My Life” and “I Want to Break Free” over and over? Perhaps. The path that shows promise straddles the line between the other two, essentially drawing on the most valuable takeaways of my time in LA and leveraging the best qualities of Singapore’s music scene. It turns out that many of the musicians I know here are perfectly capable and more than willing to play music, both originals and covers, that are outside what is normally heard in the SG live music scene. Unlike the LA scene, which is prone to clashing egos, the Singaporean musicians I know are quite happy to have a singular visionary take command and leverage their abilities to produce something special. It’s a dynamic that’s taken me a while to realize and am only recently taking advantage of. With these learnings in mind, let’s see how season 3 of My Musical Life goes.

Mad God – The Most Brutal Stop Motion Fever Dream Ever Made

Every so often, a movie comes along that kicks you in the ass to remind you that the old masters are still the most powerful creative forces in film. One such movie was last May’s Top Gun: Maverick, which featured practical filmmaking, a big heart, and universally agreeable themes. On the flip side of that is another movie with practical effects and unbridled creativity: Phil Tippett’s Mad God. The special effects guru behind the original Star Wars movies, Jurassic Park, and Robocop has been making this movie in his spare time over the course of 30 years, and the result is an uncommonly violent stop motion nightmare that inhabits its director’s fractured psyche to a mind-bending degree.

With CGI being the dominant special effects technique of today, Mad God’s stop-motion puppetry hypnotizes in ways that the biggest CGI studios in the industry cannot ever hope to achieve. The myriad of mangled creatures move with unsettling cadence in a nightmarish landscape littered with wires, skulls, shit, and twisted metal. The grotesqueness and bleakness of these designs go hand in hand with the jerky stop motion animation to create an experience that is so captivating in its eeriness that you have to wonder why there aren’t more atmospherically dark stop motion films like this.

And good lord is Mad God dark. You really have to wonder if Phil Tippett is okay once you witness the unrelenting joylessness of the whole experience. Not one of the inhabitants of the Mad God world has it easy, and in place of a conventional narrative, much of the movie’s runtime is essentially a montage of various stop motion creatures being tortured, crushed, dismembered, and vivisected. Armies of mindless slaves, their lives so pitifully meaningless, shamble about in a hellish industrial apocalypse that spews smoke and flame, with most of them getting pulverized by the machinery or committing suicide via incineration. In the distance, the inhabitants of an apartment block are seen laughing maniacally while stabbing each other. There’s also a curious abundance of moments where different little creatures get squashed when the movie’s main character (I use this term very loosely) unknowingly steps on them. The total lack of spoken dialogue also contributes to the brutality; there’s no explanation for why this world exists or why everyone is so cruel to each other, and the lack of any expository scenes means you spend the entirety of Mad God absorbing its disturbing imagery and a soundscape filled with screams, moans, squelching and baby babbling (?!). Definitely not a movie experience for the faint of heart.

Mad God was made without a conventional script or overarching vision, and it definitely shows in it’s latter half which, ironically, tries to be more narratively driven. While the first half uses a very simple story of a saboteur on a mission to blow up the Mad God city as a vehicle through which the movie depicts its horrific world, the second half gradually steers things into serious WTF territory as the plot becomes more complex and disjointed, fracturing into several head-scratching sequences before culminating in a finale that, frankly, I have trouble describing to others.

It’s best to think of Mad God as a collection of short stories glued together at the hip that, as the title suggests, showcases a world that has been manipulated into unending evil by, well, a mad god. It’s as if this god somehow extracted the essence of every atrocity humans have inflicted on themselves and mother nature throughout history, and then infused that essence into this world and its fantastical inhabitants. This is arguably one of the bleakest works of science fiction horror ever put to film, and its darkness is only matched by its technical achievements. So exhausting was the work put into this movie that it sent Phil Tippett to the psych ward about a year before its release. It’s rare to find movies with this much craft and complexity, so if you’re feeling brave enough to stomach Mad God, please go for it, because we won’t be seeing anything like it again for the foreseeable future.

The Terminal List Is A Navy SEAL Disguised As A TV Show

The Terminal List, a new Amazon series storied by a retired Navy SEAL commander, is a rare example of a show with such a distinct narrative style that it takes on the qualities of its vengeful protagonist, James Reece (Chris Pratt). After his platoon of frogmen is wiped out in an ambush in Syria, Reece embarks on a journey to find and kill the people responsible. It’s a pretty straightforward story, but where The Terminal List deviates from other revenge thrillers is how uncompromising and unmerciful it is, and how it shows Reece using realistic military tactics to overcome near-impossible odds and deliver a spectacle that embodies both the bombast of the 80s and the gritty realism of today.

The guy who wrote the book the show is based on, Jack Carr, is a bona fide SEAL who has seen plenty of action in his 20-year career. As such, many elements of The Terminal List carry an air of authenticity, with numerous uncommon details permeating the dialogue and action sequences. Chris Pratt does a frightfully good job with his portrayal of James Reece, a man who seems to be the love child of the Punisher and Chris Kyle. Like the late real-life SEAL, Reece carries himself with confidence and operates with machine-like precision, rarely ever breaking stride or slowing down when new problems and surprises come his way. Little details, like him insisting on sitting at a particular spot in a restaurant so he can spot potential threats, or safe-checking his rifle before he hands it to someone, really help to infuse the show with SEAL culture. Like the Punisher, Reece abides by an uncompromising code of zero mercy to those who have wronged him, regardless of any moral ambiguities that would make anyone else reconsider. He does not care about how heavily the odds are stacked against him, how many bodyguards stand in his way, how tactically risky his plan is, or how high his target ranks on the social ladder; he wants them dead. Yet, Reece is not a Rambo-type character who can saunter out in the open and mow down scores of incompetent hip-firing goons. His enemies include Mexican Sicarios, private security contractors, FBI agents, and even other Navy SEALs, all of whom are portrayed as consummate professionals who are a far cry from the usual Hollywood cannon fodder. Watching Reece put his training to use against such formidable opposition and claw his way (sometimes literally) out of one impossible predicament after the other is one of the great joys of watching the show.

That said, the show spends just as much time showing the more tender side of being a special force operator, namely what it’s like to have a family. As his private war grows more brutal, Reece spends time in between the violence to reflect. “War is simple. Coming home, that’s what’s hard,” he tells an FBI agent during one of the more emotional scenes in the show, “Being a good father, being a good husband…way harder than being a good SEAL.” You don’t have to be a spec-ops person to feel those words deep inside you, and it’s just more evidence that much of James Reece’s characterization is informed by Carr’s real-life experience.

Any good conspiracy thriller needs a character closer to the audience who can untangle the web of lies along while the Navy SEAL handles the brute force. This is where investigative journalist Katie Buranek, played by Crazy Rich Asians alum Constance Wu, comes in. Buranek could have very easily become an annoyance who simply existed to move the plot along, but both the showrunners and Wong do an excellent job at fleshing out her so that she can give the viewer a more grounded perspective on the grander conspiracy and contextualize Reece’s vendetta. Buranek and Reece have surprisingly good chemistry, which is helped by the fact that, despite her diminutive stature, she knows how to handle a gun and has an iron will to tell the truth (something she inherited from her father, who spoke out against the Chinese Communist Party). Thanks to a careful balance of sympathizing with Reece’s mission and questioning him when he goes too far without excessive moral proselytizing, Buranek is effective as someone a general audience can latch onto when the story veers deep into its militaristic weeds.

Where The Terminal List differentiates itself the most is that it disregards what I call the karmic rule that exists in the vast majority of movies. At its most fundamental, bad guys get their comeuppance while the righteous triumph. When a righteous character stumbles along the path to justice, they must pay for it somehow, even after they beat the bad guys. If you’ve seen enough revenge thrillers, you’ve probably seen a bunch of them in which the hero starts out on a noble quest, has to dip his toe in somewhat evil acts as a means to an end, and suffers some kind of consequence later on after stopping the great evil. Like a Navy SEAL who has surpassed the average person’s mindset and capabilities, The Terminal List looks upon these civilian rules and goes “fuck that”. Time and time again, Reece pushes the boundaries of morality as he goes along his warpath in ways that would make Jack Bauer squirm. He detonates bombs in the presence of civilians. He almost kills a squad of FBI agents. He shoots a man who surrenders to him right away. He threatens to kill a child in front of his mother. Reece’s moral absolutism never falters, and there are so many moments where I genuinely thought he would be taken to task for his actions or surrender to the authorities. Yet, constantly reminded of the horrific atrocity that was done to those close to him, he refuses to give up and soldiers on, defying the kind of mental and emotional pressure that would drive anyone else insane. Perhaps this is why many professional film critics have slammed The Terminal List; they expect the story to go a certain way once specific moral lines are crossed, but it instead trucks along its merry way undeterred, well past the point where other shows would have said “enough”. To say any more would be heavily spoilerific, but what makes this relentlessness captivating versus something as ridiculous as 1985’s Commando is the phenomenal work Pratt, Carr and the showrunners have put into making James Reece a true flesh and blood character, and not necessarily a larger than life one like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s John Matrix. Even the villains (well, most of them) are portrayed with a degree of humanity as people who have their own families and aspirations, elevating the show into something more nuanced.

Being a Navy SEAL is about never quitting, being uncompromising with your principles, and overcoming the impossible through sheer willpower. The Terminal List makes great efforts to embody those ideals with its relentless pace and unforgiving morality. Driven by the atrocity that happens to Reece in the first episode, the story doesn’t slow down to pontificate on what’s right or wrong and stays on target as conspirator after conspirator, no matter how well protected or what their reasons are, is neutralized. If there is one complaint I’d make, it’s that its revenge/conspiracy plot gets a little too deranged, much like its protagonist, and strays into 24 territory, becoming somewhat improbable towards the end. A couple of times I found myself thinking “Really, that person was in on it too?”, but ultimately I saw it as a means to challenge Reece’s commitment to his principles, as if the story is asking, “How far would you stick to your guns if you knew this is what you’d have to do?” Because of that, The Terminal List goes where few other shows like it have gone before, and I certainly hope Amazon greenlights a second season.

Top Gun: Maverick Is A Love Letter To Those Who Remember When Blockbusters Were Great

The original Top Gun, for all its 80s cheese, holds a very special place in my heart because it was perhaps the first time a movie inspired awe in me. As was the case for many who saw it back then, it inspired my enthusiasm for military aviation, embodied by the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, and set the standard for the kind of bold, muscular Hollywood spectacles that bring people out to the cinema on the weekend. Over 30 years later, Top Gun: Maverick has landed in a cinematic landscape awash with superhero fakery, vomitous CGI, and narrative blandness, and in a death-defying act of filmic acrobatics, launched 2020s movie standards into the stratosphere.

The level of filmmaking in Maverick is so beyond anything that’s ever been seen before that it’s hard to put into words. Filming an action movie with 2020s standards revolving around arguably the fastest vehicles in the world, fighter jets, is an impossible task for almost any movie studio to pull off realistically. It’s incredibly dangerous, training actors to be fighter pilots is a tall order, and the logistics of accessing United States military jets and aircraft carriers is a nightmare. Just about no one can pull this together…unless, of course, you have Tom Cruise on your side. With the release of Maverick, it’s safe to say that the man is singlehandedly carrying the torch for good-old-fashioned, highly entertaining blockbusters that are not superhero movies. He is a certified pilot for a variety of aircraft. He does his own stunts, including those that take place in aircraft. He is very likeable, despite the Scientology stuff. He is also hugely invested in any movie he makes and carries the kind of star power that few actors today possess; the kind that, paired with a producer like Jerry Bruckheimer, can get the US Navy to loan you their F-18 jets and aircraft carrier. Cruise’s signature branding as a bona fide movie star manifests itself in every movie he makes with varying degrees, most prominently in the recent Mission Impossible entries, but here it is firing on all cylinders well beyond anything seen in his entire career.

The amount of thought and work that has gone into crafting a bar-setting blockbuster that embarrasses everything that has come before is obvious. The aerial scenes are astonishingly well done, with an abundance of in-cockpit shots that show both the strain in the pilots’ faces as they are pummeled by G-forces and the landscape outside rushing past them. One clever thing the movie does to keep you glued to the action is that Maverick’s training regime for his students revolves entirely around a specific “Death Star Trench Run”, if you will, in which they must fly within a treacherously narrow path before climbing over a canyon, bombing a target, and then flying out of it while being subject to G-forces so powerful that even their own planes can barely withstand them. All of it taking place low to the ground so that the cinematography really captures the speed these planes are flying at. Each section of this flight path challenges a different skill: reflexes (flying through the trench), accuracy (bombing the target), and endurance (flying out of the canyon). This distinct pattern is drilled repeatedly into both the pilots and audience, making the flight sequences progressively easier to follow. When the actual mission takes place, Maverick succeeds at putting you on edge; you know exactly what the pilots need to do and how insane the odds are stacked against their survival. The story does a great job at making you feel like none of the characters, even Maverick himself, have plot armor, thanks to effective characterization that demonstrates their humanity and flaws despite being the best of the best. It’s the perfect combination of ingredients for one of the finest final acts of any big-budget movie I’ve ever seen.

Speaking of characterization, Tom Cruise’s portrayal of a wiser but no less dangerous Maverick is among his best performances. Age and the burden of his best friend Goose’s death have blunted his wild “I feel the need for speed!” persona. He has made it a personal mission of his to ensure that Goose’s son, Rooster, does not suffer his father’s fate, even if it means stymying the young man’s career. With this vulnerability and the fact that he’s despised by the top brass and (initially) disregarded by the current generation of top guns, Maverick starts the movie off as surprisingly vulnerable and a bit of an underdog. His heart-to-heart with Iceman (Val Kilmer) also ranks as one of the most emotional moments you’ll ever see Tom Cruise in. All this serves to make you root for him when he finally gets into the cockpit of an F-18 and silences everyone with his immense skill. Maverick is a testament to the distinctly American concept that an individual of immeasurable ability (and often one who breaks the rules and pisses everyone off) is what truly inspires the best in others. The tension between him and Rooster (who blames Maverick for both his father’s death and his own career troubles) serves as the movie’s dramatic heart, and when Maverick’s protectiveness over Rooster grows, it’s hard not to get the sense that he will sacrifice his life to protect his best friend’s son.

After a decade of beloved film franchises killing off their heroes (Star Wars, 007, Terminator), I was worried that Top Gun: Maverick would follow the same route as the tear-inducing buildup to the climactic mission began. Instead, it gave me what I truly wanted to see, but never imagined I would actually see in a movie today: a rousing finale in which Maverick and Rooster pilot an F-14 Tomcat and do battle with a pair of 5th generation Russian Sukhois. Just a few months ago I had visited the USS Midway in San Diego and laid hands on an actual F-14, even sitting inside the cockpit. To see this iconic jet that was a big part of my childhood on the big screen after over a quarter of a century felt like spiritual euphoria. Of all the cleverly engineered crowd-pleasing moments in all the blockbusters I’ve seen, this has to rank at the very top, and it was strangely refreshing to experience it in a theater chock-full of people.

Once the credits rolled, I realized what Top Gun: Maverick really is: a joy-inspiring movie for people who have grown increasingly weary of today’s movies. It does not need to get too clever with the plot because it doesn’t have to; its wholesome characters, unprecedented action and big heart do not call for subversive plot devices. There are certainly movies where that sort of thing works well; Maverick is an uncommon example of one where it wouldn’t. It’s the kind of movie that you can watch with just about anyone. It’s the kind of movie that will inspire awe in new generations of filmgoers while joining 2020’s Tenet and 2021’s Dune to form a trio of COVID-era movies that will help preserve the value of the cinematic experience.

There Are No Heroes or Villains in American Crime Story: Impeachment

For most people old enough to remember where they were when the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal froze the world, all that remains of the incident today is the memory of a media circus filled with absurdities and public mockery. The third season of America Crime Story is an attempt at humanizing the scandal, showing how the ambitions and passions of the involved persons intersected and, like random chemicals being added to a volatile mixture, exploded in the biggest cultural clusterfuck of the 90s.

Impeachment differs greatly from its two American Crime Story predecessors in that the crime in question had no victims in the conventional sense. The consequences of that are most apparent in the first few episodes, which plod along at a languid pace and are at times difficult to commit to because of their heavy focus on Linda Tripp. Sarah Paulson’s portrayal of the real-life whistleblower is shockingly well done, ironically to such an extent that it’s hard to stomach her as the focal character during the first half of the season. Tripp is what you might call the original “Karen”; a curmudgeonly middle-aged lady who has terrible fashion, a sneering nasally voice, and a soul-destroying office job at the Pentagon. The show makes it all too clear that her desire for attention and revenge against Clinton for her “demotion” from the White House to the Pentagon is the engine that bring the story into fruition. Again, it’s tough to stick with a story in which the plot is driven by the selfish ambitions of an unlikable main character, but as a show invested in telling the truth as much as possible, Impeachment beckons you to stick with it as things build to its much more exciting second half. As she’s confronted with the consequences of her actions, Tripp continues to claim she did it to “save” Monica from being exploited by the POTUS, but in the end it all comes down to simple revenge from a grumpy woman who was deprived of one of few things in life that she was happy with.

Tripp’s journey into infamy is surrounded by the similarly selfish ambitions of just about everyone involved in the scandal, and Impeachment makes admirable efforts to not paint any of them as being particularly villainous in their pursuits (although the showrunners’ left wing leanings do creep in every so often, especially with the somewhat gushing portrayal of Hillary Clinton). In one corner are the women who started it all: Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Paula Jones. All three are guilty of their own self interests amid the scandal: Monica for her love of Clinton and a cushy job, Tripp for her vengeance, and Jones for wanting to push her case beyond reasonable limits. In the second corner is the White House, with Clive Owen in an excellently nuanced portrayal of Bill Clinton. A clever and charismatic leader undermined by his own impulses, the POTUS is well-meaning at first, but happily throws Monica to the wolves in an effort to save his presidency. In the final corner is the Office of Independent Council led by Ken Starr, and conservative media embodied by Matt Drudge, Susan Carpenter-McMillan and Ann Coulter (played by Cobie Smulders, who captures her voice and mannerisms with photocopy-like accuracy). They are the wolves banging on Clinton’s door, using both Tripp, Lewinsky and Jones as assets in their campaign to take down the president.

All these parties engage in a constant push and pull with each other to further their own agendas with little consideration of collateral damage, and the show would have become a tiring exercise in loathsome selfishness were it not for its most important character, Monica Lewinsky. As the one person whose path intersects with the most characters, her emotional turmoil from being exploited by just about everyone she comes across outside her family and friends is what keeps the audience invested. It’s impossible not to feel at least a bit sad when she’s surrounded by giant-like FBI agents, the result of her one friend in the Pentagon betraying her in truly stomach-turning fashion. Impeachment presents a multi-faceted view of the woman who started it all, and although she spends much of the time being shell-shocked by everything that’s happening, Monica manages at several critical moments to stand up for herself (most notably when she resists a squad of FBI agents intent on forcing her cooperation by insisting on calling her mother for help), making her the closest thing the show has to a protagonist we can root for.

In the end, the whole scandal turned out to generally be a waste of time, with no net benefit for most of the involved. Bill Clinton was not impeached, Ken Starr’s entire effort was unsuccessful, Paula Jones demeaned herself in an adult magazine to pay her legal fees, Linda Tripp became a social pariah, and of course Monica would forever bear the stigma of the woman who gave the most powerful man in the world a blowjob. However, the most important moment for her occurs at the very end, when she ducks away from the clamor of the book signing to calm her nerves, repeatedly saying, “I’ll be okay” as she steps into the next phase of her life. She’s been through hell and was dragged from one emotional breakdown to another, with the rest of her life likely to continue being a struggle, but at the end of the day she will survive. Impeachment’s tale of scandal does its utmost to be truthful to history, and the end result is rife with the moral greyness of real life and a lack of definitive resolution. But where the show truly succeeds is portraying the survival of Monica Lewinsky from a crisis that would have forever destroyed many other women, taking her from a simple pop culture figure of the 90s into someone we can continue rooting for in real life long after the dust has settled.

Black Powder Red Earth: Awbari 2 Creeps Toward An Explosive Climax

Black Powder Red Earth: Awbari returns with its second chapter, and it might not be what you’re expecting if you’ve followed past BPRE stories. Instead of the usual blend of backdoor politics, mission briefings and tactical violence, Awbari Book 2 takes place almost entirely on the Cold Harbor base and features a surprising amount of insight into the contractors and their preparatory methods in the slow build-up to their next operation.

After an opening act that sees Cold Harbor neutralizing a squad of Chinese mercenaries working for the insurgency, the rest of the chapter is spent on the base as we continue to follow the three main contractors: Kino, Cobol and Pro. The next target in their campaign to take down the Aayari insurgency is Naji El Taib, a UK-born terrorist recruiter, key figure in funneling foreign fighters into Awbari, and overall just a very nasty guy. Awbari Book 2 is about all that happens in the lead-up to the raid, and to that end we are treated to an incredibly nuanced look at the Cold Harbor operators and their intelligence gathering techniques.

BPRE’s minimalist storytelling style is out in full force here, treating the reader as a fly on the wall without spelling out plot details within the sometimes inscrutable shop talk. In one of the chapter’s more memorable moments, Kino carefully studies surveillance imagery in the quiet of his room. The scene is portrayed in more detail than you would expect, and that is when one realizes that Awbari Book 2, despite having minimal action or significant plot movement, shows how intelligence gathering is just as critical as the boots-on-the-ground carnage most people expect. Again, there’s absolutely zero handholding to help you understand what exactly they’re doing, and in more than a few instances I found myself having to carefully scrutinize the information a character was reading on a monitor or tablet.

After spending much time in the backrooms of these ice-cold killers, the story doesn’t forget to remind us that there still is a moral element to all this. After a mission briefing, Cobol explains to Kino that Naji El-Taib was formerly an ISIS sex trafficker, and that every Iraqi town Cobol and his comrades liberated bore the gruesome scars of his atrocities. Cobol not-too-subtly implies that he and his Iraqi compatriots want Naji dead, but Kino reminds him that they’re being paid to make every effort to bring him in alive to further develop intelligence on the Aayari network. The Cold Harbor operators may be ruthlessly professional and willing to manipulate and deceive anyone who can lead them to their target, but in a region soaked in centuries of tribal warfare, one could consider their methods to be mild in the face of the enemy’s depravity.

Of course, being a PMC isn’t just about the bloodbaths, but about the bling, too. The contractors are rewarded for their work not just in payment, but in glorious Rolex Pro-Hunters; a striking reminder of the contrasts that define private military work. On one hand, the people operate with the kind of extreme precision and lethality you would only find in the highest tiers of military special operations, while on the other, they shower themselves in rewards like Wall Street bankers.

Visually, Awbari 2 is rich in a much different color palette than its predecessor. While Book 1 was often drenched in orange and red hues, this chapter is overwhelmingly painted in an ice cold blue and gray. We’re knee deep in the secretive backrooms, bearing witness to the Machiavellian machinations that culminate in Cold Harbor’s red-eyed assassins slaughtering Islamic extremists and Chinese mercenaries with terrifying precision. To even further drive home the slower and more introspective pace, the book devotes significant space to showing characters’ nonverbal reactions to each other. The amount of dialogue continues to be relatively minimal, leaving you to fill in the spaces of silence with your own careful study of the plot.

If there’s one moment that sums up Book 2 in a nutshell, it’s during a curiously lengthy section in which the characters share their preferred ways of making coffee. Pro, arguably the most crass and outspoken of the three who loves custom cars as much as Rolexes, uses a coffee maker for its speed. Kino, on the other hand, prefers to French press his coffee. It’s a slower and more complex process, but yields better tasting coffee. Actual execution must be preceded with meticulous planning. It’s a microcosm of the chapter in general: slow and complex, all in service to what is surely going to be a thunderous climax in the next chapter. If the previous series, Yemen, is anything to go by, we’re likely to see unexpected twists, plans going awry, and copious gratuitous violence. Here’s to Awbari Book 3.

Learn more about Black Powder Red Earth and purchase at the official website

Black Powder Red Earth Awbari 1: Of Drones, Anime, and Fake News

The world of mercenaries is getting more dangerous and the competition is growing fiercer, and for the men that live and breathe this world, that means the paychecks never stop. This seems to be the central message so far in Book 1 of Echelon Software’s Black Powder Red Earth: Awbari, the latest of the BPRE graphic novels originally created by Jon Chang and Kane Smith. Awbari is the follow-up to Black Powder Red Earth: Yemen, and follows a unit of private military contractors called Scorch.

The general flow of the story will be familiar to anyone who has read previous BPRE installments: a lengthy and rather violent combat sequence followed up with post-mission shop talk at the base, friendly banter between the mercenaries, and a gradual setup for the next book. It’s a very systematic approach that eschews conventional storytelling, but as explained in my review of Yemen, it’s all in service of portraying the cold, calculating game of chess played by the series’ central PMC, Cold Harbor. This time, however, Awbari expands on things in a number of ways. Right off the bat, the artwork is astonishingly vivid and brought to greater detail thanks to the book’s larger size compared to other graphic novels. A great level of attention has been paid to depicting the operators’ gear and combat tactics with maximum accuracy, which should come as no surprise given the fact that BPRE’s unique brand of storytelling is informed by real-life accounts from special forces veterans. The use of colors deserves mention, too: instead of the deliberately limited palette in Yemen, Awbari is in full color and bathes its scenes in different hues depending on the setting, thus achieving a perfect balance between the grittiness of Yemen and the wider range of colors from an earlier series, Syria. For readers like myself who sometimes found it a bit hard to tell what was going on in Yemen because everything was depicted in varying shades of gray and red, this is a most welcome change.

On the storytelling front, Awbari expands on the tried-and-true BPRE formula in a couple of very interesting ways. During the opening raid sequence, Scorch cuts through the usual AK-47 wielding jihadi fodder with satisfying ease, but they subsequently encounter professional opposition wielding body armor and tricked-out modern AK variants. This necessitates the use of drones, but these aren’t your daddy’s Reaper drones. No, in the world of BPRE Awbari, drones have reached the next terrifying stage: instead of a lone missile-toting drone flying overhead, it’s now a swarm of smaller, explosive laden drones crashing into their targets like kamikaze fighters. In Yemen, the Cold Harbor contractors had to bail themselves out of sticky situations with the aid of QRF (Quick Reaction Force); soldiers and Little Bird choppers flying in at a moment’s notice. Now all it takes is a guy sitting in front of a computer and his army of suicide drones.

Technology is what drives change in the PMC world, and the point is made all the more clear when the protagonists learn that the jihadis are growing more sophisticated thanks to the arrival of cheap but effective signal jamming technology supplied by the 21st century’s evil empire, China. Instead of reacting with worry, the Scorch agents are delighted, as a more advanced opposition equates to more demand for their superior services, thus guaranteeing fatter paychecks down the road. In one particularly striking scene, the operators watch as an ISIS stronghold bursts into flames as a jet flies over it, bombarding the town not with explosive ordinance, but with all kinds of radio signals designed to detonate IEDs being stored in buildings. This is what the book’s glossary calls a Courtesy Burn, and it’s yet another fascinating display of BPRE’s brand of near-future military fiction that is rarely seen in other similar works.

Despite the dazzling tech display, Awbari spends more time humanizing its characters compared to previous series. Contrasting the faceless, red-eyed killers that move and kill with inhuman precision, the Scorch operators are shown in a much different light during their down time, after they’ve set down their weapons and washed the blood off their bodies. They are shown watching anime, assembling Gundam-like action figures, ordering customized rims for their cars, and enjoying a meal together filled with friendly banter. Nothing seems to faze the Scorch guys; these are veterans with a wealth of experience and are operating with a bigger budget, fewer restraints, and much higher salaries compared to when they were in the military. Of particular note is a moment when they watch a cable news report of their raid, which is falsely reported by the curiously named ANN (Asshole News Network?) as a “campaign of terror” in which Scorch apparently massacred children in their homes. The Scorch guys aren’t the least bit outraged and react with cynicism, because after all, they’re private contractors operating at the behest of their client, the Awbari government. It’s a rare moment when BPRE reaches outside of the bubble of clandestine operations, backroom deals and gear galore to show how the ordinary world sees and completely misunderstands them.

The incorporation of media malpractice, which has been happening with outrageous frequency over the past few years, along with the specter of China making inroads into a world formerly the exclusive hunting ground of the West, is yet another way this latest installment of BPRE reflects the world today. It’s remarkable that just in its first volume, BPRE Awbari manages to capture so many aspects of the private military world of the 2020s – the combat, the technology, the personal habits of its characters, and the media aspect. Although Scorch is off to a good start in this book, there’s no doubt that subsequent volumes of this amazing series will take them down an even deadlier path.

Visit the Black Powder Red Earth website for more info and to purchase.

RPGs Are Getting Boring. Here’s How We Fix That

With the release of arguably the most anticipated thing, let alone game, in human history, Cyberpunk 2077, the Role Playing Game continues to be a dominant genre in gaming. It’s not hard to see why; with a combination of long-form storytelling, character customization and complex open worlds, RPGs allow gamers to invest themselves in the experience far deeper than a disposable 10-15 hour campaign or repetitive multiplayer. From a publisher’s standpoint, that player investment translates to more monetization opportunities that grow the game world with more activities and customization options. It’s the perfect genre for both creator and consumer, but lately the genre has been showing signs of age, with more and more publishers churning out impressive looking titles that nevertheless rehash the same design principles. The same quest giving, the same distributing of stat and skill points, and the same boring fetching and killing in worlds that do nothing but sit around and await your arrival. The situation is particularly egregious in the East, with an endless parade of indistinguishable MMORPGs filled with brainless grinding and impractically armored women. Even more straightforward genres are expected to incorporate RPG elements, such as dialogue and leveling options. With an increasingly saturated market that borrows from the same cache of design conventions, creative stagnation in RPGs is real, and the circumstances couldn’t be more ripe for some new thinking. Here are some ideas that would make for a genuinely groundbreaking RPG that pushes the genre into the next realm of creativity.

A WORLD THAT CHANGES…WITH OR WITHOUT YOUR INPUT

Many RPGs advertise vast open worlds bristling with life (or death) that you alone can change. This sounds good on paper; after all, games are at their best when they grant players the agency to have profound effects on the game world. In 2021, the novelty has worn off and many of these open worlds are little more than glorified theme parks with animatronics that re-enact the same routine day after day. Nothing will ever change. The town with the ghoul problem will never do anything about it until you decide to, and even if you don’t, said ghoul problem will ever manifest into something serious until, perhaps, the “where they are now” sequence once you complete the game.

Here’s an idea: how about an open world that can change independent of your actions? What if the town with the ghoul problem hired an NPC mercenary to deal with it should you choose to ignore it after a certain amount of time, closing off the quest permanently? What if through an RNG roll, said NPC mercenary was killed in the process, inadvertently provoking the ghouls to swarm the town and massacre everyone, opening up a new series of quests that you wouldn’t have access to had you dealt with the ghoul problem?

A truly immersive game world is one that feels alive, and not one that only comes to life when you insert coins into it. This means that, while you might be spending time in one part of the world, events would be taking place in other parts of it that you have no control over. NPCs might migrate to new towns or even get killed. Towns might undergo changes in leadership, build new structures, and stores might flourish or go out of business. All without your input. Feeling a sense of smallness in a vast world isn’t just about size, but control as well, and ironically by removing some control over the game world, the actions you take that can in fact alter the game world feel much more meaningful as a result and not just an obligatory part of the game.

RETHINKING QUESTS

Nothing screams glorified theme park with animatronics like an NPC whose sole purpose is to stand around all day and bestows upon you a quest to fetch his prized family heirloom, the location of which he conveniently marks on your map. You proceed to the location and find the heirloom, returning it to the owner who rewards you. This is an archaic method of giving players things to do. What if, instead of having blips on the map that indicate a quest giver, the very act of getting the quest was itself a quest that players had to discover by paying attention to the world around them? What if you had to gain a character’s trust or build some rapport with them before they trusted you with such assignments?

Another aspect of quest giving that needs to go away immediately are “Activities”; essentially copy/paste quests of varying categories that are scattered across the world. Go here for an assassination mission. Go there for a racing mission. The biggest offender of this is Ubisoft, who for over a decade have been applying the same tiresome open world formula of having one main quest and hundreds of sidequests that, rather than having their own unique narratives, are simply the same rinse-and-repeat activities that you tire of after the 20th variation.

The best kinds of quests are the ones players give themselves when they connect the dots on what they need to do in order to advance in the game outside of simply grinding. This will require careful world design, with precious tools and resources located in very specific and perhaps remote areas, as opposed to simply acquired by murdering the nearest gang of enemies. One game that does this well is STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Many of the structures and areas in the game are completely devoid of useful items. However, in order to navigate past the exceedingly dangerous areas of the game, you need weapons and armor. Surveying the land, you see a structure in the distance that looks like a military installation. Since it’s likely protected, you elect to go in at night so you can sneak in under the cover of darkness. That right there is a quest, and it came entirely from you, and not a scripted NPC.

One of the greatest moments in gaming was onboard the 747 in the original Deus Ex. You are tasked with killing a terrorist leader by your overzealous instructor, and the game makes you think you have a choice between either killing the guy or letting your instructor do it. However, what many players didn’t realize at first is that there is a hidden third option: You can kill your instructor in order to prevent the execution of an unarmed prisoner. This is what quest-giving should be like: having a strong narrative and world design that allows players to come up with their own objectives and solutions, and go “Wow, I didn’t know the game would let me do that and even acknowledge it.”

NO MORE HYPERSPACE INVENTORY

One big reason I just can’t immerse myself in most open-world games is how generous they are with how much you can carry. In Cyberpunk 2077, for instance, you can carry up to 200 pounds of stuff, with no size restrictions. This means you could be lugging 200 pounds of assault rifles on your body, which is literally impossible. It’s hard to immerse yourself in the world when you open your inventory and see an entire library of crap that no human being could possibly carry, but most games make this concession because, for the sake of entertainment, you are expected to face off against numerous enemies and other challenges that would necessitate having plenty of gear.

A truly immersive inventory system would factor in both weight and size. For example, you wouldn’t be able to lug around five assault rifles, even if you were under the weight limit, because you don’t have the space to do so. Conversely, you wouldn’t be able to carry around a stack of gold bars, despite their small size, because they would take you over the weight limit.

One of the great joys of any RPG experience, especially a survival RPG, is defining not just your character, but your inventory as well. Many games pride themselves on having worlds with scarce resources, but they forget that a skilled player can gradually accumulate a vast repository of weapons and gear that they carry everywhere. Choosing what to bring and what to discard should be just as important as how you define your character.

YOUR ENEMIES ACTIVELY HUNT YOU

One idea that I really like but don’t see enough of is that enemy characters can take the initiative and actively seek you out as part of their own quest. The notion that actions have consequences is criminally underserved in RPGs, and in many cases you can gleefully slaughter hundreds of enemy faction members with little consequence besides them imposing penalties on future dealings with them. In The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, killing too many members of certain factions can trigger bounty hunters to come after you. This sounds good on paper, but in practice it amounts to a randomly generated enemy NPC awkwardly trying to “sneak” by crouch-walking up to you in plain sight…during the day. In Fallout 2, you would start getting random encounters with squads of bounty hunters. This is a better, more realistic idea, but at the end of the day simply amounts to the addition of a specific type of random encounter.

Red Dead Redemption 2 comes very close to this idea. As you progress through the story, rival gangs that you previously inflicted death on will set up ambushes at specific points of the world. You could be riding on a road when suddenly a gang of O’Driscolls would pop up from behind a nearby hill and open fire on you. The best iteration of this idea would combine Skyrim and Red Dead’s concepts: organized opposition that seeks you out in more ways than one. What if, besides the usual physical confrontations, the bar that you frequently drink at spawns an assassin who poisons your food and drink? What if a call girl that you pay for a good time turns out to be an assassin who kills you if you don’t pay attention to details in the environment?

RPGs are big into empowering you as a legendary hero who strolls into town and kicks ass and takes names, but they rarely account for the negative long-term consequences of all that killing you do. The idea that, as you level up and build your reputation in the world, you must also be more vigilant for threats that actively seek you out, is something that would give players investment in what is becoming a more banal activity in many RPGs.

NO MORE FUCKING STATS

It’s a staple of all RPGs, the idea of item stats and character stats that allow your character to move faster, shoot better and take hits stronger. Having to look at your character’s stat points as if he/she were a robot with built-in monitoring systems to tell you how much poison resistance or critical hit chance he/she has was fine back in 1990s and 2000s, but today it is an unnecessary time sink. Having to constantly switch out the same type of weapon every half an hour because you stumbled upon one that does 5 points more damage than your current one is mind-numbing. Stat scrutinizing in RPGs is a distraction from immersing oneself in the game world; a holdover from the days of pen and paper RPGs. Why is it still a requirement for RPGs to have this feature in the 2020s?

A more unique and intuitive way to handle character build is for specific attributes to improve based on how you play WITHOUT any of the detailed real-time updates (ie “You gained 1 point in athletics” a la The Elder Scrolls IV). Players would instead have to pay attention to their character’s performance to notice these changes. They could then go to an NPC and undergo tests that would produce different readouts of their character build. This would be a great way to integrate game systems and game world together, and it would give players a sense of excitement as they anticipate what their character readout will say based on how they have played so far. Similarly, instead of looting very nook and cranny for a rare drop, weapon and armor upgrades can be best handled by seeking out increasingly skilled armorers or gunsmiths, allowing you to invest more deeply in a smaller pool of gear rather than having a revolving door of them. This spreads out the upgrading experience over a more meaningful and narrative driven manner rather than the loot-based design that has already outstayed its welcome.

As you can probably tell by now, all these ideas are designed to drive RPG design closer to how things are in the real world. At the end of the day, the goal of any RPG is to maximize immersion so that players feel invested in the experience. As game production values become more lifelike, the mechanics that drive gameplay must also become more lifelike in order to deliver what so many games aspire to but rarely ever achieve.

Cyberpunk 2077: A Ferrari With No Doors

More so than any other game in history, Cyberpunk 2077 is an abject reminder that, for all the technological sophistication of videogames today, greed and mismanagement still remain the biggest obstacles preventing the industry from advancing into uncharted waters. In the eight years leading up to its release, it really looked as if this gargantuan RPG from CD Projekt Red was too impressive to fail; the city looked amazing, the gameplay trailers were phenomenal, and of course the developer’s track record was immaculate. As detailed by a Bloomberg report, Cyberpunk turned out to be yet another classic case of a triple-A game with a spectacular marketing campaign, but behind the scenes was barely being held together by overworked developers and ruthless upper management. We’ve seen this many times before with publishers like EA, Ubisoft and Bethesda, but few imagined that CD Projekt, long regarded as a bastion of integrity in an industry awash with greed, would allow themselves to succumb to this sickness.

It’s important, however, to establish that Cyberpunk 2077 is not a bad game, or even a mediocre game. It is a good game with a breathtaking visuals, versatile combat, and a very engaging story. The problem is that Cyberpunk was supposed to be a great game; a game that would take the open world RPG into the 2020s. I’m not talking about the bugs; from Vampire: The Masquerade to Skyrim to Red Dead 2 and now Cyberpunk, it’s been established quite well at this point that it’s virtually impossible to launch a massive game like this without a slew of bugs. No, it’s not the bugs that are the problem with Cyberpunk, it’s the fact that there are so many gaping holes in the design of the world. Where’s the public transportation? Why is the police system utterly pointless? Why is the pedestrian and driver AI about 20 years outdated? Why are so many buildings inaccessible? Why are there no NPCs on motorcycles? Why is there no mechanic where you can repair, upgrade and customize your vehicles? Why, in a city full of reflections, is your character the one and only thing that never appears in any reflective surfaces? Why, for the love of God, is there still no “Walk” button for mouse & keyboard setups two months after launch?

Cyberpunk 2077 is like a Ferrari that drives fast as you expect it would, but is also missing the air conditioning, the radio, one of the doors, and the hood. CD Projekt have boasted in their marketing that they have crafted the most immersive open world ever, but a few hours in Night City quickly disproves that notion. While the sound and visual design of this game is immaculate, I found myself doing quite a bit of heavy lifting in immersing myself in world. For example, within literal seconds of exploring Night City for the first time, I was greeted with an endless parade of NPCs driving into a road barrier in front of me, ripping their cars apart thanks to their inability to negotiate a left turn. When driving to specific locations, I was again taken out of the experience when I realized there were no parking spaces anywhere. The only option was to park in the middle of the street, prompting a massive traffic jam of brainless NPCs who couldn’t understand the concept of driving around a stopped vehicle.

Another hyped aspect of the game was the level of character creation and ability to define your role in Night City as a Nomad, Street Kid or Corpo. Much ado was made over how the character creator was so detailed you could adjust the size of your character’s dick. It turns out this, along with the many Role-Playing aspects of the game, were red herrings. You can adjust the size of your dick or breasts, but can’t adjust any aspect of your body shape or height. You can choose between three character backgrounds, but aside from the first half-hour of the game and a few extra lines of dialogue here and there, this has no bearing on how the story will play out. Dialogue design is also sparse for a game of this scale, with generally only two dialogue options to react with, neither of which feel particularly distinct from each other. For a game that bills itself as an RPG, it’s really light on the character building.

The more I play Cyberpunk 2077, the more I feel that it’s a Deus Ex-style action RPG that wears the skin of an expansive open world game. Where the game excels is its story, and when it presents locations filled with enemies for you to tackle. Its atmosphere and the scale of its story is everything we’ve come to expect from CDPR on the backs of the legendary Witcher series. Where the game stumbles is when you try to live your second life in Night City, and find that you can’t because so many details and features you expect from an open world game today are hideously undeveloped or simply not there. There is a good game underneath all the missing skin, but we likely won’t see it until the end of 2021, after CDPR patches the myriad of bugs and hopefully adds all the quality of life improvements necessary to flesh the world out.