The Best Movies of 2019 (In my opinion)

2019 may very well be the year we saw the worst that mass-marketed cinema has to offer, with a vomitous deluge of awful, awful superhero movies (Avengers: Endgame, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Captain Marvel), pointless live action remakes (Aladdin, The Lion King) and several beloved franchises butchered to death by cancer-grade directors (Terminator: Dark Fate, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker). Fortunately, despite Disney’s increasing efforts to reduce movies into the same bland flavor, a handful of amazing movies managed to bubble to the surface this year. These are movies that broke new ground within their respective genres, whether through original storytelling, cinematography, or choreography, and in doing so, kept movies relevant as meaningful experience in an ocean of meaningless Disney-fied nonsense. So without further ado, here are what I consider to be the best movies of 2019.

The Mule

Movie review: Clint Eastwood's 'The Mule' feels rushed

It may very well be the almost-90-year-old Clint Eastwood’s last on-screen role, but The Mule will rank as one of his most thought provoking movies to date. A crime drama that portrays the power of human decency to shine strong against over-ambition and greed, The Mule, much like Eastwood’s other genre-defying classics like Unforgiven and Gran Torino, takes a hard look at what it means to have a meaningful life. Is it to enrich oneself and seek the approval of others, or is it to enrich those you love and be of service to them? Protagonist Earl Stone finds out much too late that he’s spent his life wanting to be loved by people he can only have fun with while neglecting those who genuinely want to love him, and the journey to that realization, coupled with Eastwood’s masterful directing, make this one of the most nuanced and thought provoking movies of the year. Read my full review.

Hotel Mumbai

Hotel Mumbai is an extremely rare case of a movie that kept my heart pounding  for much of its running time. An Australian production that recreates the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, the movie has an uncommonly unflinching take on the monstrous brutality that was inflicted on the inhabitants of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. It also portrays the utter incompetence of the local government to deal with the threat, leaving the hotel staff to stand between the guests and the terrorists. Thanks to fantastic performances from the entire cast and no-nonsense cinematography, Hotel Mumbai boasts the rare feat of immersing you in the emotional journey of its characters. Adding to the authenticity is the fact that the phone conversations between the terrorists and their handler, The Bull, are taken from the actual transcripts of the real-life versions. Easily the best thriller of 2019. Read my full review.

Midsommar (Director’s Cut)

Director Ari Astrid’s feature-length directorial debut, Hereditary, was without question the best horror movie of 2018. His follow-up, Midsommar, is unsurprisingly the best horror movie of 2019 thanks to its highly unconventional take on the genre. Taking place almost entirely in daytime, the movie relies less on the conventional visual motifs that drive the horror genre and instead relies on its characters’ motivations and thought processes to conjure that feeling of unease that any good horror movie should aspire to. There are no supernatural elements or otherworldly creatures, yet thanks to the unusual setting, a Swedish village in a region with exceptional long days, and the villagers’ bizarre customs, it’s easy to assume that some evil magic presence is at play. Yet the true horror of Midsommar is the darkness within the characters, the same kind of darkness that resides in many of us, that drives them to betray one another. It’s the intersection of these deep character flaws with the unsettling Utopian setting that makes Midsommar an excellent companion to Hereditary, and by extension, a worthy addition to what is hopefully a new generation of horror movies. The Director’s Cut, which runs about 3 hours, is vastly superior to the theatrical version.

John Wick 3: Parabellum 

John Wick 4 Teased by Director Chad Stahelski, Keanu ...

The newest addition to the John Wick series has condemned all action movies that follow it to having an outrageously high bar to reach. This movie has just about everything you could ask for in an action film: gunfights, knife fights, sword fights, book fights (?) fistfights, chases with motorcycles, chases with horses, dogs taking down baddies, and guys getting thrown through glass walls. With two previous movies having established an alternate version of New York City, in which every person on the street is seemingly a part of or aware of a secret society of assassins, John Wick 3 is relentless in showing its central protagonist defending himself from, well, the whole goddamn city. Some of the scenes in which characters complain that Wick has come to them for help, followed by him showing them some valuable trinket to change their mind, grow tiresome. Once the carnage resumes, however, John Wick 3 is far and away the most well choreographed action movie since the last John Wick movie. Whether Wick is stabbing some poor sap in the eye or evading motorcycle thugs on a horse, the camera lingers back, never resorting to idiotic shakey-cam, allowing you to scrutinize the meticulous stuntwork and Keanu Reeve’s weapon mastery in all their glory. In particular, the battle scene in which he, Halle Berry and a pair dogs work in tandem to take down an army of mercenaries is so extraordinary it seems almost physically impossible to film something so complex with minimal camera cuts. The million dollar question is how the hell they plan to top all of that in the sequel.

Ad Astra

Forget Interstellar; Ad Astra is the true heir to the space movie throne previously occupied by 2001: A Space Odyssey. With some of the most visually arresting sequences of the decade and a story that subverts expectations in a way that Rian Johnson could only dream of doing, Ad Astra truly captures the extreme isolation of space, with no friends, no family, and no extraterrestrials to call on. Where other space movies focus on the notion of discovery and humanity advancing to new scientific and philosophical frontiers, Ad Astra shows how the colonization of space only leads to more of the same. Nowhere is this better illustrated than the stunning moon rover chase, in which McBride’s party comes under attack from pirate forces while traversing a lawless sector of the moon. It seems ridiculous at first; dudes in astronaut suits in a rover chase on the damn moon, but Ad Astra is constantly hammering home the point that once humans get over the novelty of interstellar travel and living on other planets, they will simply revert to their typical bad habits. McBride’s father, played by Tommy Lee Jones, recognizes this and goes through extraordinary lengths to seek alien life, hoping that such a game-changing discovery would allow humanity to break out of this cycle, but Ad Astra is ultimately a story about looking at ourselves for the answers, rather than the stars. Ironically, it’s this message that will alienate many audiences who are expecting the same kinds of answers McBride’s dad is.

Terminator: Dark Fate -A Sequel Sent to Our Time to Kill a Franchise

Today’s major blockbuster sequels have been following an undeniable formula: functional, entertaining, but completely lacking in soul. Unlike their predecessors from decades ago, these modern sequels ride on nostalgia, heavy-handed CGI and meaningless cinematic tradecraft. They’re driven not by directors with a vision, but by film studios with Chinese backers who want to rake in profits by suckering in fans of the originals and Generation Z-ers with soft-rebooted storylines. Terminator: Dark Fate is the latest example of this, and on the backs of similarly awful sequels like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I’m just about out of hope.

Much of Dark Fate‘s marketing angled itself towards old-school Terminator fans as a return to form for the franchise, with Linda Hamilton and James Cameron involved for the first time after three pointless sequels. The notion is that this would be the movie to finally take the series forward with its original creator in the mix (in reality, he just made notes on the script while filming Avatar sequels). I walked into the theater with an open mind as to how they would do that, and even with low expectations, I walked out not just disappointed, but kind of insulted.

Incredibly, the filmmakers, led by Deadpool director Tim Story, decided to make Dark Fate a Star Wars New Trilogy/Rian “Fuckface” Johnson-esque soft reboot by killing off John Connor right away, replacing him with a new soon-to-be resistance messiah Dani Ramos, replacing Skynet with some vague AI called Legion, and tacking on Sarah Connor and the T-800 Terminator in order to draw in the fanboys, even though they aren’t entirely critical to the overall plot. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a Terminator is sent back in time by an evil AI to assassinate the future leader of the human resistance, so the resistance also sends back a human guardian, who protects and mentors the future resistance leader, then sacrifices their life to that end. This is the story of the original Terminator, and, rather amazingly, Terminator: Dark Fate. It adopts the brain-dead tactic of trying to have it both ways by appealing to younger viewers who don’t know or care about Terminator while suckering in older viewers who do with generous sprinklings of meaningless fan service.

Unfortunately, even as a reboot, Dark Fate doesn’t work. Dani, the new female Mexican version of John Connor, is extremely cringe-y in the way her arc goes from timid to badass, suddenly becoming an iron-willed warrior without any meaningful justification. In one scene, she is practicing firing a gun to no avail. The T-800 tries to give her advice, but is shushed by Sarah Connor, who instead tells her, “The Terminator has killed your family. What are you gonna do about it?” In a straight-up comic-book moment, Dani instantly gains the marksmanship of a Navy SEAL and swiftly nails two targets with a shotgun. It’s a cheap way to get a laugh out of the audience, but it belongs in a stupid Marvel movie, not something with the weight and gravitas of Terminator. 

It doesn’t even work as a science-fiction action horror movie, either. It’s evident in the way the film is shot and the action sequences are handled that Tim Story doesn’t have a  clue on what made Terminator 1 and 2 so great. Whether it’s the legendary helicopter chase and Galleria battle between the T-1000 and T-800 in 2, or Kyle Reese dreaming of the apocalyptic future while the Terminator is running around murdering people in 1, the original films were permeated with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, and the action scenes were slower, muscular, and packed a lot of punch. By contrast, Dark Fate has no sense of horror or dread, and its action scenes are so fast, overly CG’d and filled with criminally generic orchestral action music that they rapidly become uninteresting. In Terminator 2, every punch, every body slam and shotgun blast was memorable because they were synced to carefully designed sound effects and a distinct soundtrack. Here, it just feels like Tim Story copied and pasted the action formula straight out of Deadpool.

The one thing that was terrific about Dark Fate also happens to be the one thing that the writers chose not to explore more deeply, which is the dynamic between Sarah Connor and the T-800. The brief interplay between the two is great, with Connor, the human, ironically single minded in her hatred of the T-800 for killing her son, while the cyborg T-800 has “matured” to atone for its sin. This, I thought, would have made for a genuinely interesting Terminator story; a parent who has turned into a killing machine alongside a killing machine that has turned into a parent. Arnold in particular plays the T-800 to perfection, more so than in Genisys, which is amazing considering he does so by being completely devoid of emotion. Everything about his performance, from his monotone voice, to his movements, to his poise, proves that the role belongs only to him, and when he calmly talks about his day job of selling drapery, it’s believable and doesn’t come off as forced humor. Watching Sarah Connor practically frothing with rage at the T-800, which has gained a Zen-like serenity, is one of the best moments in Terminator.

It felt like such a missed opportunity to have had a new movie based on this subplot, rather than a boring, over-CG’d rehash featuring Mexican female John Connor. But, as is the case with many of our beloved film franchises today, Terminator is no longer driven by director-auteurs who want to tell a new story, but by film studios who use market research and focus groups. The franchise now only serves to function at the whims of greedy executives, riding on its successful past in order to kill its future.

As of today, Terminator: Dark Fate is doing terribly at the box office, and surely its creators and the backers at 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Skydance and Tencent (yuck) must be wondering what went wrong. The truth is that Terminator succeeds when it doesn’t think like a mass-market action blockbuster, but a deep, richly nuanced science fiction story that wears the skin of a major action blockbuster. The vast majority of fans who would have turned out to see this movie are people in their early 30s to late 50s; guys who fell in love with the originals as kids and have matured into moviegoers who demand some creative honesty in a Terminator follow-up. This is not a franchise you can just “Marvel” up with Chinese backing and mass-marketing; this is a franchise that can only succeed when it is led by a director who just wants to make a damn good movie and story, and not give a fuck what some film executive asshole thinks or how many people turn out to watch it. Unless James Cameron gets bored of the dozen Avatar sequels he’s making, or a director like Christopher Nolan takes the reins, it’s doubtful this franchise will change the fate that’s been made for it.

El Camino: For Breaking Bad Fans Only

This is a no-spoiler review

After half a decade, Breaking Bad fans have finally gotten their wish in the form of El Camino, a Netflix feature-length follow-up to the legendary series that centers around Jesse Pinkman, one of very few survivors from the main cast following the bloodbath from Season 5 of Breaking Bad. Although it features higher production values and a beefy two-hour runtime, make no mistake: El Camino is essentially an epilogue that seeks to tie up as many loose ends as possible and give Jesse Pinkman the proper send-off he deserves. It assumes that you have watched Breaking Bad to conclusion, so if you haven’t, you wouldn’t be doing the movie or yourself much good.

Although Breaking Bad was primarily about Walt’s descent into utter villainy, it also portrayed, more subtly, Jesse’s gradual loss of innocence as he experienced one traumatic event after another. From an immature and obnoxious child trapped in a young man’s body to a shell-shocked man struggling with his guilt, Jesse always seemed to reach a new stage of evolution with each horrifying event he had to deal with. Yet, there was one stage in his development that was absent from the show, and that was during his imprisonment at Jack’s compound and his subsequent escape. This is, at its heart, what El Camino seeks to address, and it’s what makes the film’s heart beat.

The primary narrative of El Camino revolves around Jesse evading the police as he scavenges for money in order to escape Albuquerque forever. It’s not a particularly exciting premise for a feature-length film, and there aren’t any major set pieces or even a sense of a grand adventure that one might think a movie of such repute would have. In fact, El Camino can only be judged as an extension of Breaking Bad; a coda, if you will, to the path of destruction Walter White left in his wake.

The movie’s greatest asset is, of course, Jesse Pinkman. We see him at the final stage of his character development; a man, not a boy, who has experienced just about the worst that life can throw at him. He’s been tortured and forced into slavery, watched two of his lovers die, been rejected by his family, lost all his belongings, and had to struggle with extraordinary guilt. Yet, unlike his mentor Walt, Jesse doesn’t become bitter at the world and succumb to evil; his firm grip on his moral compass is what makes us root for him in his quest to start over.

One of the things that made Breaking Bad such an excellent show is that it kept changing genres depending on what the story needed it to be. One moment it would be a crime thriller, then a family drama, and then a comedy. This is entirely because of the multi-faceted nature of Walter White, who regularly alternated between stone-cold criminality and bumbling around hilariously in his attempts to keep things secret from his wife and son. Without him, El Camino sometimes seems one-dimensional by comparison because it lacks Breaking Bad‘s signature unpredictability. Early on, it’s obvious there won’t be any major plot twists or mysteries to hold the audience in suspense. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a must-watch for Breaking Bad fans; with the same writers and showrunner Vince Gilligan helming things, El Camino feels like a reunion with an old friend. It’s just that the reunion is more of a simple, straightforward dinner than a wild night out.

This isn’t a bad thing if you’re a Breaking Bad fan, of course. The movie is peppered with various characters from the show, including several flashbacks of unseen vignettes from the Breaking Bad timeline that show Jesse hanging out with key characters under more peaceful circumstances. They’re great to watch, not necessarily because they advance the plot in a meaningful way, but because they open up the full scope of Jesse’s character in ways that Breaking Bad could not because it was too preoccupied with Walt’s story. By the time the credits roll, Jesse is a fully-fledged character alongside Walt; 50-50 partners, as he would say.

It’s interesting to see how Breaking Bad and El Camino take on the personalities of their respective protagonists. The former is neurotic, unpredictable, and see-saws between loving and deranged. The latter is more straightforward, introspective, earnest, and firm in moral rightness. Considering the mayhem that defined the Breaking Bad storyline from start to finish, it’s a welcome and suitable touch for the greatest show of all time to conclude on a note that tastes like fine wine.

Joker: When Cinematic Universe Becomes Branding

After an endless string of nauseating Marvel movies, culminating in the oh-so-dull Avengers: Endgame, the comic book cinematic universe market has presented an opening for DC to shine. Initially, the franchise stumbled around, unable to find its footing, before deciding to copy the risk-free action-comedy formula of the MCU. This climaxed with the gigantic crap-show that was Justice League. However, thanks to 2018’s Aquaman and now Joker, DC appears to have figured out their cinematic universe formula: making great, director-driven stories and disguising them with superhero/villain branding in order to lure mass audiences.

This is the revelation that struck me about halfway through Joker, a slow-paced movie permeated with so many bursts of shocking violence and psychological terror that I initially couldn’t understand why it was receiving so much interest from general moviegoers. Unlike just about every major DC/Marvel movie of the last decade, Joker features no action set pieces, no traditional conflict between protagonist and antagonist, no ensemble cast, and, rather ironically, very little in the way of humor. In other words, it has none of the qualities that have drawn hordes of audiences to fill the coffers of Marvel. Instead, what we get is something more akin to 2004’s The Machinist; a small-scale character study of a severely disturbed man as he struggles to find his place in the world.

You’ve probably heard people praise Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Joker’s greatest asset, but what I think makes it stand out the most is that it goes where few movies dare to go, by challenging how far we’re willing to sympathize with the main character. Arthur Fleck isn’t so much an inherently evil person as he is a byproduct of a society that’s lost its moral compass. When all hell breaks loose in Gotham, there are no identifiable good guys or bad guys; just people whose unwillingness to understand each other has set them on a collision course. Whether it’s the elitist one-percenters, the Antifa-style rioters, the uncaring social workers, or the apathetic dead-eyed citizens of Gotham, no one is innocent in the world of Joker. Not even Thomas Wayne, Bruce Wayne’s often revered father, is given an entirely sympathetic portrayal. This is a movie that portrays not just the decay of a man, but that of an entire city.

As a result of this uncommon morality play, Joker has been stirring up controversy in the media, with morons on the interwebs criticizing its violence, its portrayal of a psychopath, or claiming it will inspire mass-killers. It’s a movie that, thanks to its superhero (or in this case, supervillain) branding, draws the attention of even the most casual moviegoers. Yet, once you remove that branding, Joker is precisely the kind of movie that would only attract psychological drama fans and make, at best, $20 million at the box office these days. Most people would have no interest whatsoever in watching a lurching two-hour psychopath character study; yet those very people now find themselves watching one, and in many cases it’s well beyond the mass-marketed entertainment they’re used to. One might even think that director Todd Phillips used the comic book branding to trick superhero audiences into watching something that’s actually good.

In an age when major film studios are becoming risk-adverse and the call of the lucrative Chinese market ensures that blockbusters are thematically castrated and dramatically inert, it’s interesting to see a director use the superhero brand as a delivery device for a story that he, not so much the studio, wants to tell. Hopefully DC will stick to this formula as they make further inroads into the superhero film genre; so far it’s the only one that’s working for them. Perhaps we could next see a detective-style Batman movie in which the caped crusader spends the entire time solving a crime without so much as throwing a punch. Who knows? Miracles can happen.

The 2019 Gaming Industry’s Heroes and Villains

Ever since my parents bought me a Sega Mega Drive for my third birthday, each one of my birthday anniversaries has also been my anniversary as a gamer. In the 30 years that have transpired since, I’ve watched as this relatively niche, geeky activity I enjoyed grow up alongside me into a humongous, unfathomable being; a far cry from what people used to consider a stupid distraction for social neophytes. Gaming, now a multi-billion dollar industry, is synonymous with everyday life. Your uncles and aunties, the same ones who tisked at you when they saw you playing your Famicom or Mega Drive, now play stupid crap like Candy Crush and Angry Birds on their phones. Zillennials, kids born after 1995, gorge themselves on Fortnite. Esports is now on par with traditional sports in terms of revenue and viewership. Meanwhile, companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon want a piece of the pie and are starting their own gaming divisions. Gaming is undergoing its industrial revolution, and various publishers, developers, and media platforms will be driving this revolution in both productive and destructive ways. A lot has happened in the first half of 2019 alone, so I thought now would be a good time to take stock of the most prominent heroes and villains in the industry (in my opinion) and see what they’ve been doing to take gaming in both good and bad directions.

HEROES

CD Projekt Red

Of all the behemoths across gaming history, from Activision to EA to Nintendo to Sega, Polish developer and publisher CD Projekt stands proud as perhaps the greatest example of how to make great games and treat your players right. CDPR are the people behind The Witcher game series, the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, and Good Old Games, a digital storefront that specializes in DRM-Free games, both classic and current. Ever since they put themselves on the map in 2007 with the first Witcher game, CDPR have been very upfront and true to their word in promoting a player-centric philosophy. With every game release and community announcement, they have demonstrated time and time again that their allegiance is to the players, and not shareholders, corporate overlords or media figures with ulterior motives. Their success is attributed mostly to the strength of their games and player loyalty, and not from clever business strategies that work developers to death in order to milk players of every dollar they’re worth.

The design and business strategy behind CDPR’s The Witcher games themselves best reflect the company’s values. The storytelling is extraordinarily mature and sophisticated, at no point stooping to pander to sensitive or ignorant people. These are games that demand your full mental investment, and in return they reward you with some of the finest of stories and richest of lores to ever grace any creative medium. The series has also been supported by robust post-launch DLC, both free and paid. The Witcher 3, in particular, had two massive story expansions that were worth way more than what was charged for them.

I had the pleasure of attending CDPR’s E3 2014 presentation of The Witcher 3 and briefly spoke to one of their senior designers, and it was evident that these people genuinely love what they’re doing and are fully aware of the role they play in the battle for the gaming industry’s soul. As triple-A gaming is besieged with greed and political correctness, CDPR is holding the line for the rest of us who still care about quality titles made by people who love both games and their players.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft changes logo for first time in 14 years - Polygon

Ubisoft, in my eyes, have turned quite a corner with some of their most recent releases. Once the domain of classic titles like Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six, their game design became appallingly lazy around the early 2010s, with games like Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4, and Assassin’s Creed being little more than grindfests and collections of minigames set in open worlds. Interestingly, rather than ditch the formula entirely, they’ve listened to player feedback and made innumerable improvements in their two latest games, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and The Division 2, the latter of which I’ve been enjoying the hell out of. I also appreciate the deluge of content The Division 2 provides, with plenty of missions, campaigns, weapons, armor, customization and gameplay opportunities that well exceed the $60 price tag. The fact that the game isn’t overly monetized is appreciated, even though it is so good that I actually wish they would monetize it a little more by offering more apparel sets and weapon skins.

Recently, Ubisoft’s VP of Editorial Tommy Francois stated that although many of their games feature political themes and motifs in order to define their characters and settings, they do not promote a specific ideology. This is a very welcome statement for many players like myself who don’t like being lectured to by our entertainment media, and the fact that it ruffled a few feathers in places like PC Gamer and The Verge, two media sites that indeed do a lot of lecturing and finger wagging, is proof that it was an effective statement. I don’t mind that games feature realistic settings, ripped-from-the-headlines stories and real social issues, but since gaming is an experience built around player choice, it makes more sense to present these issues in such a way that players from all walks of life can have different interpretations of them. Ubisoft are so far the biggest company to openly acknowledge this, and so they’re on this list.

Capcom

Once upon a time, the Japanese dominated the videogame industry thanks to powerhouses like Sega and Nintendo. That dominance began subsiding once the 2000s rolled in and giants like EA, Activision and Ubisoft rolled in, but thanks to a combination of blunders from western publishers and a steadfast, gameplay-centric philosophy, the Japanese are regaining their foothold as a beacon of respect in the minds of many gamers. This is nowhere better exemplified than in Capcom, who have put out quality title after quality title over the last few years such as Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 7, Devil May Cry 5, and Monster Hunter World. While many western game companies are busy catching bad press from their bumbling attempts to radically turn their games into live services, Capcom has stuck to its guns and have continued improving on their existing franchises based on player feedback.

One new development with Capcom and other Japanese gaming companies that’s put them on this list is that they no longer shun the PC. Japanese games, for the longest time, have always been the domain of consoles, with the PC getting ports so half-assed that the first thing you often see upon starting a game was “Press Start”. It was sometime after the utterly broken, unmitigated disaster that was the Dark Souls PC port and the backlash that followed that Japanese developers sat up and realized they couldn’t ignore the PC market. As of late, Capcom’s PC releases for practically all their titles have been flawlessly optimized and offer a range of graphics and control settings.

Finally, while many western triple-A titles such as The Last of Us have increasingly aspired towards the gravitas of high cinema, Capcom have always maintained an energetic 1980s B-movie tone with their games. This is most apparent in the Resident Evil series, which has everything you could possibly want from a good weekend’s worth of entertainment: body horror, gratuitous gore, corny dialogue, lots of firepower, and vibrant, memorable characters. The storytelling may not win any BAFTAs, but they sure are entertaining and stick with you long after you’ve finished the games, and that’s perhaps the best thing any developer should aspire to.

Independent YouTube Commentators

Upper Echelon Gamers – Agent Inq Apparel

The proliferation of independent gaming YouTubers in recent years is a classic case of supply and demand. Ever since the 2007 fiasco in which Gamespot journalist Jeff Gerstmann was fired because he wrote a bad review of Kane & Lynch, whose publisher Eidos had advertised heavily on Gamespot, there’s been a growing demand for games journalism that players could trust.

As YouTube has democratized previously specialized professions, many of today’s professional game journalists are finding themselves usurped in viewership by lone YouTubers operating out of the bedrooms. Unlike mainstream gaming media sites, all of which have coalesced into the same bland flavor, these YouTubers have diverging styles and personalities. On one hand, you have the vibrant, energetic types like theradbrad and Markiplier, who appeal to younger viewers, and on the other, you have The Quartering, Upper Echelon Gamers and LegacyKillaHD, whose no-nonsense working joe, man-on-the-ground analysis appeals to older gamers like myself. A great deal of these personalities’ appeal is that, for the most part, it is self-evident in their work that they genuinely love games. The things they like about games are far more in line with gamers in general: good gameplay, good stories, and a player-first design philosophy.

The weird thing about the gaming media today is that they are so intricately wound around the industry itself, and therefore their ability to present objective coverage is inherently compromised. PC Gamer, for instance, did a live show last month that was sponsored by Epic Games. They, and many other media platforms, gain exclusive access to game previews based on favorable relations with the game publishers offering them. Of course, many of these same publishers offer the same deal to the bigger indie YouTubers, but commentary-based ones like The Quartering live and die by the trustworthiness of their opinions and not the access they have. The moment that trust is lost, it is incredibly easy for a viewer to take their patronage somewhere else. In short, these guys are one of us, and they just so happen to have a talent for articulating their interest in gaming far better than most of us can. If we want them to stick around, it behooves us to support them with clicks, views and donations.

VILLAINS

Electronic Arts

Since roughly 2007, EA have rapidly established themselves as the bad guy of the gaming industry and have done just about every shitty thing a major game publisher can do. Here’s a short list of some greatest hits I can recall simply off the top of my head:

-Acquired beloved studios like Westwood Studios, Pandemic, Bullfrog, and Maxis, leading to their shutdowns through greed and mismanagement.

-Sabotaged Star Wars: Battlefront II with pay-to-win lootboxes and tried to deceptively sugercoat it to the community.

-Mismanaged the production of Anthem by, among other things, forcing Bioware to use the Frostbite engine, leading to a broken game delivered by an overworked developer.

-Completely botched the launch of SimCity 2013 and lied about its online-only functionality.

For such a high profile company with seemingly all the money in the world, many of EA’s biggest game releases have been mediocre at best and total goatfucks at worst. Anthem, Battlefront II, SimCity 2013, The Sims 4, Battlefield V, Dragon Age Inquisition, and Mass Effect Andromeda all failed to deliver on the lofty expectations foisted on them with center stage coverage and triple-A production values, and it’s not hard to see why. The suits behind EA see videogames through the lens of businessmen, not gamers, and when deadlines and microtransactions take precedence over wholesome game design, no amount of money will ever hide the inevitable shit-show that follows.

Ever since Andrew Wilson became CEO in 2013, EA have only innovated ways to generate more revenue from all their releases, adopting a Games-As-Service mantra that has faced a lot of pushback from the community. The end result is that they haven’t put out a remotely interesting game in the last three years, and given their business model as of late, this is not likely to change anytime soon.

Activision

Next on this list is EA’s evil cousin, Activision. For the longest time, Activision’s biggest crime in my mind was milking the Call of Duty franchise to death, with three entire studios dedicated to making nothing but CoD games every year, each one getting progressively less interesting as the well of ideas runs dry. However, it was a rather disgusting development from earlier this year that put them on many gamers’ shitlists, and that was its laying off of nearly 800 employees despite record-breaking profits from 2018. No, you’re not misreading that. Literally in the same month that it announced it would be firing 8% of its workforce, Activision announced it had $7.5 billion in revenue, a 7.1% increase from the previous year, and that it had hired a new CFO, Dennis Durkin, giving him a $15 million signing bonus (!). They also hired a new President, Rob Kostich, with CEO Bob Kotick (what is with these names?) offering this vomit-inducing statement to go along with it:

With these proven, principled leaders at the helm, we will continue to invest in the strategic growth drivers of our business; our talented people, and creating the world’s best videogames, live services, mobile experiences, and new and growing franchise engagement models.

Reading shit like that, it’s hard to imagine that gaming was once championed by ordinary guys with a lot of passion working out of their homes.

Being laid off because your company is struggling to make ends meet sucks, but is understandable. Being laid off because your company did amazingly well, thanks in part to your hard work, borders on inhumane. Although many of those laid off were working on Destiny, which no longer belongs to Activision, there’s no reason they couldn’t have been re-purposed to work on the company’s existing franchises or other new initiatives. Regardless of how justified they were, this is really, really bad optics for Activision, a company that already exemplifies all the worst manifestations of greed in the gaming industry.

Epic Games

In the HBO crime show The Wire, one of the key antagonists is a drug gang informally known as the Stanfield Organization. Compared to their rival, the Barksdales, the Stanfields have low-quality drugs, but plenty of muscle, and so they use that muscle to beat the Barksdales and their high-quality drugs off the streets and force the drug addicts of Baltimore to accept their inferior product. This is basically what Epic Games are doing with their much-despised Epic Games Store.

Not content to let Valve rake in the lion’s share of digital game purchases, Epic have muscled in with their own storefront, a product that, to put it mildly, sucks. It has no reviews feature for players to gauge the quality of a game, barebones game management, threadbare customer support, no discussion sections, no screenshot function, no cloud saves, no achievements, and no offline play. It is a Flintstones car compared to the Dodge Ram that is Steam, and Epic knows this. This is why they’ve used their enormous warchest from Fortnite to basically throw money at publishers, developers, and media platforms like PC Gamer, making the Epic Store a developer-centric platform, rather than a player-centric one. This is thanks to the generous 88% revenue cut Epic gives to developers compared to Valve’s 70%, along with various subsidies for smaller developers to ease the financial burden of publishing games. While this has proven beneficial for indie developers, it has also resulted in Epic aggressively negotiating exclusivity deals for games players were expecting on Steam, such as Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, and Shenmue III.

There’s nothing wrong with making a developer-friendly digital storefront. The problem lies in the principle of Epic’s approach, which runs counter to the customer-focused approach that has defined all capitalistic industries. More than any with other industry, gamers are highly aware of the innumerable ways publishers, developers and platforms try to hoodwink us with shady practices. Epic doesn’t even bother to pretend; they know they have a bad product, they know we know they have a bad product, and they don’t care. That’s why they’re on this list.

Deep Silver

Deep Silver’s on this list specifically because of two games under their wing: Metro Exodus and Shenmue III. Within the space of six months, the relatively low profile German publisher has managed to piss off the entire PC gaming community by abruptly committing the two hotly anticipated games to the Epic Games Store (Metro’s would be a timed 1-year exclusivity). In the case of Metro, it was advertised for several months on Steam before Deep Silver declared that they would exclusively publish it on the Epic Games store. The game was suddenly unavailable for purchase on Steam (though players who pre-ordered it beforehand were safe) and now the only place to get it for the PC is Epic’s junk-grade storefront. Shenmue’s case is even worse. The game was crowdfunded by thousands of fans who expected Steam keys upon release, only for Deep Silver to not only switch the game to the Epic Store, but outright refuse refunds for backers. Epic would later agree to foot the bill for all refunds.

The kindest way to describe Deep Silver’s actions would be consumer-unfriendly. Their defiance in the face of near-universal anger from the PC community is so startling that you kind of have to give them credit; not even EA or Activision would have the gall to try the same dirty trick twice within half a year. In the case of Shenmue, they have dealt a huge, long lasting blow to future games that will seek crowdfunding. Kickstarter is a great way to create games that old-school gamers like myself want to play, but without legal constraints to obligate developers to stick to their end of the deal, the concept of a crowdfunded game is built entirely on trust between creator and consumer, much like a society in which everyone can leave their front doors and car doors unlocked. Deep Silver broke that trust and couldn’t give a damn what their players thought. Not only have they so masterfully tarnished their reputation, they have also dissuaded many from investing time and energy in supporting crowdfunded games in general. Assholes.

Mainstream Gaming Media

Note: Many of the issues discussed below are written of in greater detail here.

Rounding out this rogue’s gallery is perhaps the worst of them all, mainstream gaming news outlets like PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, and Polygon. Much like journalism in general, game journalism across these platforms has been experiencing a steady slide in quality, become more detached from their target readers and driving many gamers to seek out alternative news sources. Many of today’s game journalists are cut from the same cloth and their reportage often drips with the politics of social justice and wokeness, pouncing to paint gamers in general as racist sexist bigots the instant a pre-pubescent teen in a Call of Duty lobby says something stupid. Below is a gem from Rock Paper Shotgun’s Graham Smith, in an article about Mordhau developer Triternion stating that their game would not have a toggle function to disable female character skins to maintain a realistic medieval warfare setting:

It’s good that they’re not doing the on/off toggle on women, but bad that the only reason they cite is that to do so would undermine player’s character customisation. A better reason would be: because our medieval brawling game is silly, not realistic, and to claim “realism” in this one single instance and offer an option to erase women would serve only to pander to sexists and embolden the toxic elements of our community.

In the 25-something years I’ve patronized gaming magazines and websites, I don’t think I’ve ever read something so sneering and arrogant. If I read a news article to find out what’s happening with a game, I shouldn’t come away feeling genuine anger at the asshole who wrote it. Yet this is what’s happening with great frequency in the gaming press, particularly when they cover developers from Eastern Europe, where woke politics aren’t in vogue compared to the US and Western Europe. Though these news sites do still cover gaming news reasonably well, like with Kotaku’s expose of Anthem‘s troubled development cycle, much of their editorial content has devolved into holier-than-thou finger-wagging SJW platitudes in which entire swathes of the gaming community are painted as bigoted young men infected with toxic masculinity. The problem, I think, is that many of these so-called game journalists live in their own echo chamber, where a complete lack of ideological diversity has led them to believe that their political viewpoints aren’t viewpoints, but universal fact. Therefore, there isn’t anything wrong with propagating them in what should otherwise be objective coverage, because after all, how could you possibly disagree that CD Projekt Red are transphobic bigots and Cyberpunk 2077 has racist depictions of minorities?

There’s the argument that as games become more sophisticated and touch on more social issues, so must game journalism. I agree, but so far many of the afore-mentioned platforms aren’t doing a great job at this. Their commentary is contemptuous, monolithic, and heavily skewed towards an ideology that wants to conjure social outrage out of games and communities that aren’t asking for it. Rather than offer sophisticated commentary, these journalists offer ham-fisted political agendas that serve as little else but distractions from the games we want to play.

That rounds up my Heroes and Villains of 2019 so far. Keep in mind that, with the ever-changing gaming landscape, there will always be shifting heroes and villains. Maybe the Epic Game Store will receive loads of improvements and become a worthy competitor to Steam. Maybe Ubisoft will shoot themselves in the foot with some microtransaction-related fracas. Maybe EA turn over a new leaf, or maybe they’ll just wind up on The Consumerist’s  “Worst Company in America” list again. Plenty of time to find out…

 

Black Powder\\Red Earth: Yemen – There’s No Call of Duty In This Modern Warfare

If you have even a passing interest in military stories, both fiction and non-fiction, you’ll know that the most crucial element that these stories live and die by is accuracy. Are the characters correctly demonstrating military protocol in their tactics, dialogue and use of equipment? Does the story reflect the chaos and moral grayness of warfare? Is violence depicted in all its unkind glory? It’s an incredibly hard thing to get right, given the near-infinite levels of complexity within the military world; a world with its own set of rules so foreign to civilian life that those who leave it often find themselves at a total loss as to what to do.

Black Powder//Red Earth: Yemen, a graphic novel by writer John Chang and artist Josh Taylor, is arguably the most realistic, well-researched and visceral works of modern military fiction that delves into the unexplored realm of private military contractors. They’re often depicted as cannon fodder or convenient villains in many other military works, but in BPRE we get to see an honest and realistic portrayal that is as refreshing as it is labyrinthine.

BPRE follows Cold Harbor, a PMC (Private Military Company) that, officially, has established operations in Yemen to train the local military (or “indig”, as they put it) and protect foreign aid workers. In reality, they are there to hunt ISIS. Without the diplomatic shackles and threat of repercussions that would normally keep a conventional military in check, Cold Harbor are free to negotiate under-the-table deals, trade prisoners like currency, work with both US allies and enemies, and backstab them when convenient. One of the most iconic moments happens early in the story: a squad of Cold Harbor operators, led by a man known as Crane, wipe out an Al Qaeda cell on behalf of the Yemeni military. Upon returning to base, they are greeted by an officer, who salutes Crane. Instead of returning the salute, Crane hands the man his business card.

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The narrative style is minimalist. There is virtually no captioning, little exposition to set up each scene, and many of the action sequences have little to no dialogue. This is a wonderful example of “Show, don’t tell”, though given the complex nature of the story, I did find myself having to re-read several sections in order to better grasp what was going on. As someone who yearns for more accuracy and authenticity in military works, BPRE at times felt to me like a classic case of “be careful what you wish for”. This is an exhaustively researched story that does not hold your hand at all and requires at least a basic understanding of military lingo, the history of the War on Terror, and the geopolitical situation in the Arab peninsula. For example, one of the key plot elements involves Cold Harbor working with the Houthis to invade an ISIS-controlled town. If you don’t know what the relation between the Houthis, Quds Force and Saudis are, you will have no idea what the hell is going on in the negotiations that follow. That’s the beauty of BPRE, though. It’s a very sophisticated story written for adults, and it expects you, the reader, to be an adult and do your homework if you want to fully appreciate it.

The most striking aspect about BPRE is how brutally honest it is in its portrayal of modern warfare. This is neither a pro-war nor anti-war story; it’s a neutral-war story. There are no heroics, no big morality speeches, and no answering to a higher calling other than the call of profit. Yet, despite their decidedly greed-driven motives, Cold Harbor are shown to be a necessary evil in a country so deeply corrupt that it simply can’t deal with the ISIS threat with its own soldiers. Although BPRE has no shortage of battle sequences against terrorist insurgents, it takes a refreshing approach by devoting much of its time to the backroom deals and tactical planning that allow these battles to take place. We are shown Cold Harbor agents negotiating with a myriad of shadowy figures within the Saudi, Iranian and Yemeni governments; many of these characters would normally belong in the darker side of the morality scale, but even they see ISIS as an existential threat that must be wiped out at all costs. These backroom deals don’t involve suitcases full of money; instead, entire battles are waged by Cold Harbor just so they can capture a specific high-value target and trade him to an interested party for information on their primary ISIS target. The battles often entail collateral damage; scenes of hapless civilians blown apart by bombardment from both sides of the battle are common, and most disturbingly, there’s a sense of resignation in the way these civilians are portrayed. One panel shows a man, his arm sheared off at the elbow from an explosion, calmly walking his son out of the raging battlefield.

 

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Aside from their technological and tactical sophistication, the one thing Cold Harbor has that none of the local forces have is best embodied in Crane: a man who has devoted his existence to waging war, not for family or country, but because he’s good at it and there just so happens to be an enemy no one on planet Earth likes. At one point, he waterboards a captured Al-Qaeda agent for information on ISIS, but unlike what you’ve seen in shows like 24 and Zero Dark Thirty, Crane literally drowns the man, has him brought back from the dead with CPR, drowns him again, revives him a second time, and THEN asks for information. It’s this scene that tells you everything you need to know about the plausible future of BPRE, and the kind of men and methods it takes to wage war on an enemy driven by religious fervor to the point of inhumanity. It reminds me of Colonel Kurtz’s iconic speech in Apocalypse Now: “You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement.”

The world of BPRE is relentlessly dark, and Jon Chang and Josh Taylor conveys this by simply giving us an honest, no-bullshit look at the world of the modern mercenary. There’s no emotional hysterics, no dramatic character arcs, and no plot twists; there is only the cold, calculating game of chess played by private contractors, religious fundamentalists, rogue generals, and shadowy politicians in their respective quests for personal gain. Black Powder//Red Earth: Yemen is a story about war itself, the likes of which you will rarely, if ever, see in more recognizable works, and is a stunning and important achievement for crowdfunded projects.

If you want to purchase the graphic novel, go to the official website if you’re in the United States. Otherwise, use Amazon (Volumes 1, 2 and 3).

Chernobyl – The True Horror of Tyranny

The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, for the longest time, stood out to me for two reasons: It took place on the year I was born, and it gave inspiration to one of my favorite videogames, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. To me, and presumably many others, the disaster was a relatively minor footnote in history and at best a point of curiosity for some late night Wikipedia reading. HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl was like a violent wake-up call, jolting me out of my ignorance with some of the most shocking depictions of bravery and environmental horror. However, its most notable accomplishment is how it masterfully exposes the Soviet Union to its own kind of radiation: Truth.

Chernobyl is a rare feat in which a show manages to stick to the facts of its real-life story as much as possible while maintaining an insane level of dramatic tension that few works, fiction and non-fiction, can conjure. This is even more remarkable when you consider the imperceptible nature of the show’s major antagonist: the radiation. Although basic storytelling conventions suggest that you should show and not tell, some of Chernobyl’s most unsettling moments are when its lead character, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), is describing the incalculable dangers of the radiation billowing out of the Chernobyl power plant to various ignorant bureaucrats. Indeed, the show goes through great lengths to ensure you, the audience, have a rudimentary understanding of how nuclear power plants and radiation work. By the time soldiers clad in protective gear venture into the irradiated zone, their geiger counters crackling like white noise from a TV, it’s hard not to feel nervous for them, because by this point the show has made clear that anything, anything within the radiation zone can trigger a slow, agonizing death. It’s like a horror movie, except the danger isn’t some creature lurking around; it’s in the air, the ground, the walls, the ceiling, and before long, inside one’s skin and bloodstream. Worse still, many of the men don’t fully understand what this radiation will do to them once the mission is over; they cheer and hug when they succeed, not realizing their lifespans have just been slashed in half, at best. The show doesn’t shy away from the effects of exposure either, and it’s hard not to feel genuine anger at those responsible for the disaster once you see the suffering that inevitably dooms these young men.

There’s a scene in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series, in which the Galactica discovers a civilian ship heading their way, but are unable to establish communications with it. An argument ensues among the crew: is the ship full of civilian refugees, and their communication systems are merely not working? Or is everyone on board dead and the Cylons have set the ship on a suicide course for the Galactica? Unable to take the risk and lacking any good options, the crew of the Galactica opts to fire on and destroy the ship. It’s this kind of grim reality that drives the dramatic tension in Chernobyl; when they realize the gravity of the situation, the Soviets have no fancy tools and no “a-ha!” moment. They field their best scientists, the full weight of their military resources, lunar rovers, and even beg the Germans for sophisticated robots, but instead of arriving at a brilliant plan, they come to the slow realization that the only solution they have is to basically send waves of men to their deaths and annihilate everything that has been touched by radiation. One of the show’s standout moments involves thousands of soldiers having to scoop enormous piles of radioactive graphite off the power plant’s roof with shovels in 90-second shifts (any longer would certainly kill them from excessive radiation). The comical simplicity of this solution, faced against such an enormous threat, makes this scene one of the most compelling in recent memory.

The battle to stem the flow of radiation and the sacrifice of so many firefighters, miners, soldiers and scientists already makes Chernobyl a superb drama, but what makes it exceptional is how it slowly unravels the true cause of the disaster: the Soviet Union’s  futile quest to project an image of strength to the world. The show has no shortage of despicable bureaucrats who care more about the Soviet agenda than the lives of those beneath them, and the heroes struggling to salvage the situation often find their efforts needlessly sabotaged from behind because some KGB asshole deemed it more important that the Soviet Union not look vulnerable in front of its allies and enemies. The irony is that, in order to achieve this cause, the Soviets have built an institution that is so good at spying on people, withholding vital information, blackmail, coercion, and ruining the lives of those who step out of line, but is jaw-droppingly incompetent at protecting its own citizens when the time to shine comes. It’s a deeply corrupt empire built on lies in order to perpetuate more lies, all in an effort to pretend that it’s something it’s not, using people as commodities that can be thrown away at the slightest inconvenience, even if those people are the very ones who saved the country from radioactive destruction. Chernobyl presents such a savage and decisive takedown of this regime that it’s surprising it’s even allowed to be shown in Russia.

The big tragedy of Chernobyl is that it’s the decent, honest people who suffer the most. The Soviet Union was one of the worst blights on human history, but within this failed socialist state were millions of good people who, when called upon, willingly risked their lives for the simple reason that there was no one else who could. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character arc of Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), a deputy chairman who, at first, is your typical government stooge, but is gradually humbled by the sacrifice of those beneath him and becomes disillusioned when his superiors’ executive meddling condemns so many of those people to a fate worse than death. Chernobyl is one of best dramas to come out of HBO, but it’s also a masterful lesson on the horrors a corrupt, selfish government can wreak on so many ordinary people, many of whom will never realize how avoidable it all could have been.

There Is Something Terribly Wrong With Game Journalism

Ever since I started reading gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro in the 1990s, and then eventually moved onto online outlets like GameSpy and Gamespot, I’ve always enjoyed reading reviews, commentary and coverage from a variety of game media outlets. Much like the relatively young gaming medium, game journalism always stood out to me as more youthful, fun, and vibrant than the hoity-toitiness of more established mediums like film. Guys like Greg Kasavin, Jeff Gerstmann and Alex Navarro were some of my favorites, and it really felt like both gamers and game journalists were part of the same community, experiencing this fascinating and burgeoning world of videogaming together as it forged its own brave new world.

Unfortunately, somewhere around 2014, I began to notice a growing disconnect between today’s generation of game journalists and the gamers that formed the bulk of their readership. It seemed like many game journalists were coalescing into some kind of elite private club that was increasingly out of touch with the game community at large, sneering at them from up high while allowing their political biases to contaminate their game coverage.

The first time I noticed this was with the worst game I have ever played in my life, Gone Home. I had read many reviews from the likes of Kotaku and PC Gamer about how amazing this indie title was, and the Metacritic Critics’ Score was also exceptionally high. Gone Home was quite expensive for an indie game, but I mean hell, it was supposed to be amazing, so why not? As it turns out, not only did I beat the game in slightly over 90 minutes, but it was a ferociously boring experience with a weak story that may have been interesting in the 1960s, but definitely not in 2013. I felt like I had been lied to by everyone; this was, by every conceivable objective standard, nowhere close to a 9/10 or 10/10 game. The most likely explanation for the disproportionately high critic scores for this at-best-mediocre game was its LGBT-centric storyline.

Indeed, in the years since then, many of today’s professional game journalists have become more flagrant in allowing their political views to infect their game coverage and reviews. Here are some notable examples that I can recall simply off the top of my head:

  • Grand Theft Auto V was marked down by Gamespot reviewer Carolyn Petit because of its misogynistic characters, completely missing the point that the GTA series has always been a visceral satire of the worst elements of modern society.
  • A writer for Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez, described the indie game Papers Please, in which you play an immigration officer in Soviet Russia, as a white male power fantasy of deporting Mexicans.
  • The #gamergate controversy, in which the gaming media used incidents of sexist harassment and death threats towards game journos to paint the gaming community as a whole as being bigoted thugs.
  • Nathan Grayson of Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku criticized Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a historical RPG set in medieval Europe, for its uniformly white cast.
  • Far Cry 5 was also criticized by many in the gaming media, such as PC Gamer, for not using its rural America setting to make a political statement on their favorite topic of white supremacy in the age of Trump.
  • VentureBeat journalist Dean Takahashi, often regarded as a joke in the gaming community for his inability to get past the Cuphead tutorial, openly advocated for the censorship of the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare because he felt the game’s real-world violence had no place in a game.
  • CNet journalist Ian Sherr wrote a hit piece on several independent gaming YouTubers such as The Quartering and Upper Echelon Gamers that was designed to pull advertising revenue from those channels.
  • Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer journalists Jay Castello and Andy Chalk openly criticized a statement from Ubisoft regarding their refusal to politicize their games, opining that such impartiality could lead to sympathy for slavery, Nazism and homophobia.

Note: The last three examples alone happened in the span of the past week.

One could argue that, as games become more sophisticated and touch on real-world topics, it behooves game journalists to offer more “mature” commentary in turn. The problem is that many of today’s so-called game “journalists” are losing sight of the difference between being a professional journalist and being a political activist. As shown in some of the above examples, you have cases in which journalists are openly advocating for certain political causes, most particularly LGBT and Net Neutrality, and even going after independent creators by targeting their sources of funding. The sneering, condescending attitude a number of these journos have towards gamers, many of whom are young men, does not make the case for continued patronage, either. When gamers complain that Battlefield V has included ahistorical female soldiers in frontline combat, it’s not a good look when gaming outlets dismiss these gamers, many of whom form their readership, as sexist bigots filled with toxic masculinity, rather than gamers who just can’t buy into the notion of black female Nazi soldiers.

It’s also worth pointing out the monolithic nature of these political views in the gaming media; they cut in one direction only, and I cannot recall having ever read an editorial from any of these outlets that argued from a more conservative or even centrist point of view. There is virtually nothing that distinguishes the political and social commentary of Kotaku, Polygon, PC Gamer, and virtually every other major game media outlet, which is kind of ironic considering that they all champion diversity in gaming.

This is all a far cry (no pun intended) from the days when gaming coverage and commentary were much more in-line with the expectations of the people who consumed such media. It’s not necessarily that the political viewpoints today’s gaming journos are expressing are right or wrong; it’s that they are so vastly removed from their target audience, and expose these journos as biased and unreliable at doing their one job: covering and reviewing games fairly.

This is not to say there is no room for political and/or LGBT commentary in gaming media; of course there is. That kind of commentary should be relegated to games that inherently want to deal with those topics (of which there are very few), and not more mass-marketed games like Far Cry 5, which use real-world topics to set the stage for story and gameplay, not to define them. Most game developers are not looking for this kind of trouble; they just want to create games that are fun and generate profit. It’s the responsibility of game media platforms to cover these games fairly and expose poor gameplay and narrative design as well as shady business practices in order to keep gamers informed and push the industry to higher standards. It is not the responsibility of these journalists to use games to promote their political activism, call for censorship, disparage their own readers, and threaten the livelihoods of independent competitors.

Of course, if these media platforms knew this, they wouldn’t be losing their audience to independent creators like Pewdiepie, Markiplier, The Quartering, and Upper Echelon Gamers. Some of them, like Markiplier, have a sense of youthful wonder and excitement that reminds me of the game journos from when I was growing up. Others, like Upper Echelon, have highly nuanced, relatively apolitical commentary on the industry that is in increasing short supply in mainstream outlets. Part of this, I think, is because these creators are a lot closer to their audience than, say, an editor at Polygon is, and are better able to get a feel for their audience through livechats and comments.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still great content from major media outlets such as Game Informer’s Replay series, which is an absolute hoot, and Giant Bomb, which has alumni from Gamespot’s best days. It’s just that after all that I have seen and read, I think more old-school gamers like myself need to stop sitting around, being spoonfed politically inept garbage from the likes of Ian Sherr. We have to be more proactive in seeking out indie creators who love games like we do, and show them our support both through continued viewership/readership and donations.

Upper Echelon Gamers

The Quartering

Downward Thrust

The 5 Shittiest Movies I’ve Ever Watched

Having spent a great deal of time extolling the wonders of the 21 greatest movies of all time (in my opinion), I feel it’s time to balance out all that positivity a little bit by listing a few of the shittiest movies I’ve ever watched.

What do I consider a shitty movie? Well, first of all, there are plenty of bad movies out there; you don’t have to look hard to find bad acting, bad storytelling, bad cinematography and bad everything else. As a fan of the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its spinoff Rifftrax, I have seen a lot of these movies, including Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Pumaman, The Room, and Birdemic. Here’s the thing: it turns out that making a decent movie is really hard. You need hundreds of people to work on it, at least a couple million dollars, tons of expensive equipment, a good script, and above all, a vision. Because of this, I have a lot of respect for filmmakers like Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen; guys who lack financial backers, big film studios, marketing, and the necessary artistic and technical skills to make decent movies, but do it anyway because they are genuinely passionate and make their movies out of love. The movies themselves may be terrible, but you at least get a sense that the people behind them were genuinely trying. Sometimes, the movies are so terrible that they’re enjoyable. You laugh at the sheer incompetence, the unnatural acting, and hideous special effects. If the measure of a movie is how much you enjoy it, does that truly make them bad?

What I consider to be a genuinely shitty movie is a movie that is unexpectedly bad to the point of being offensive. These are movies you willingly go to the cinema to watch, thinking it’s going to be decent or good because you looked at who was in it and thought “Yeah, this should be at least an entertaining movie”. Then, as the movie progresses, you are utterly blindsided by how awful it is. It’s like being slapped in the face by someone who just told you a great joke. You feel betrayed, angry and genuinely offended that you paid money and hauled your ass to the theater thinking you would have a good night’s entertainment, only to have your time wasted so spectacularly. This is the mark of a shitty movie, and although I try to do my research on movies to ensure I don’t walk into a shitfest, mistakes happen every so often. So, without further ado, here are 5 of the shittiest movies I’ve ever watched:

5 – Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

The first Jurassic Park (1993) wasn’t just a breakthrough for CGI and a landmark blockbuster adventure; it was also a superb meditation on the dangers of man’s reach exceeding his grasp. Two crappy sequels later, the Jurassic Park franchise was rebranded and soft-rebooted as Jurassic World, and the most recent title, Fallen Kingdom, is an absolute travesty and a betrayal of all the things that made Jurassic Park exceptional.

In two separate scenes in Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) chastise park owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) for ignorantly defying mother nature and resurrecting dinosaurs for purely profit-driven reasons. In one memorable exchange, Malcolm tells Hammond: “You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and now you’re selling it.” It blows my mind that the people behind Fallen Kingdom don’t seem to realize how much their movie plays right into those cautionary words. Jurassic Park is an intelligent movie that also happens to be a family-friendly blockbuster. Fallen Kingdom is just a straight-up dumb blockbuster, with a message so childishly simplistic it can be summed up as “We must save the poor dinosaurs!”

Lacking any new ideas,  the filmmakers continued on with the soft-reboot approach and basically copied the story of Jurassic Park: The Lost World, with mercenaries hunting dinos, activists trying to save them, dinos running wild in the city, and greedy corporate executives who get their comeuppance via death by dino. Aside from Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), all the characters are pretty much archetypes. There’s the funny black guy, the tough Latina chick, the mercenary commander who abuses dinos, and the evil corporate stooge who isn’t above murder to have his way. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), who was surprisingly nuanced in Jurassic World, is also reduced to a villainous eeeevil scientist.

The movie plays out like run-of-the-mill B-grade schlock most of the time, but it’s the ending that really outraged me and put it in my bottom five. All the remaining dinosaurs from Jurassic World are trapped in their cages, with poisonous gas leaking in. They will soon all die, finally erasing the work that John Hammond did and sparing the world further calamity. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the former park manager of Jurassic World, can push a button to open the cages and save the dinos, but it would set them free and unchecked into human civilization. As much as she loves the dinos, she realizes that after all the death and destruction that has been wrought by bringing them into the modern world, dinos should stay extinct the way mother nature intended. She decides to let them all die. “Wow,” I thought, “This movie actually has some balls.” Then, very unexpectedly, the stupid little girl they saved earlier sneaks up and hits the button to open the cages. The movie tries to show this as a good thing, as triumphant music plays as the dinos run free, but it conveniently ignores that by any logical conclusion, they would inevitably cause havoc in human cities and stomp on hapless civilians. It’s such a jarring, idiotic moment that goes completely against the trajectory of the narrative. It really feels as though they filmed a version in which the dinos die, but at the last minute, the studio realized they wouldn’t have a sequel to profit from and re-shot the ending to have the dinos run free instead. What a betrayal of the entire message of Jurassic Park. What a shitty movie.

4 – White House Down (2013)

At the number 4 spot is a movie that defied my already low expectations, the moronic White House Down. Curiously enough, this movie came out almost at the same time as the vastly superior Olympus Has Fallen, which also features a plot involving a hostile takeover of the White House. Unlike that movie, WHD has little respect for its subject matter and even less for its audience.

This shit movie spends much of its time suffering from the film equivalent of bipolar disorder. It can’t seem to decide if it’s a serious action thriller like Die Hard or a slapstick parody like The Naked Gun. One moment you’re watching Air Force One get blown out of the sky, killing the Vice President and a whole bunch of cabinet members. The next, you’re watching a surreal moment of product placement as the movie stops to show you how much the President of the United States (Jamie Foxx) loves his Air Jordans and will not leave without them.

The plot reads like something out of former President Obama’s id, after it’s been adapted for the screen by a 10-year old. The POTUS has miraculously come up with peace process that will cure the entire Middle East of war by pulling out US forces from the region. The terrorists are entirely composed of right wing fanatics, white supremacists and the like. The Republican Speaker of the House is the true mastermind of the terrorist attacks. The POTUS loves his Air Jordans. And on and on and on.

This would all have been somewhat salvageable with an appealing protagonist, but WHD‘s choice in Channing Tatum, whose range of emotions is narrower than an isosceles triangle, puts a nice, fat .50 cal round in any last traces of hope. It’s basically a stupid movie that thinks its target audience is even stupider. Forget this crap and watch Olympus Has Fallen instead. Same movie, better everything.

3- The Purge: Election Year (2016)

I would have never watched The Purge: Election Year if my friend didn’t have soon-to-expire movie vouchers and the only two remotely viable choices were the all-female Ghostbusters and this. I had watched the first Purge and thought it was decent, so I decided to go with Election Year. I should have gone with Ghostbusters.

Election Year is so mind-bogglingly terrible because it spends a fair amount of time setting the stage for a thrilling survival/tower-defense action narrative, but once things start happening, the movie quickly urinates it all down its pants. The action sequences are incompetently shot, filled with unnecessary slow motion shots that look like they’re building up to something visceral and cathartic, only to fizzle out with a whimper. The cast, headed by the reliable Frank Grillo and Mykelti Williamson, are utterly wasted in one nonsensical sequence after another, and the plot rapidly devolves into a left-wing wet dream.

In a similar vein to White House Down, watching Election Year feels like putting on special glasses that allow you to see America through an SJW’s eyes. You have the streets of Big City, USA turned to chaos thanks to second amendment rights run wild. You have the street-smart black and Latino working class Joes, the former being an ex-gang member who manages to turn a gang of Crips into the good guys by getting them to kill a squad of neo-Nazi soldiers. You have the evildoers, the all-white psuedo-Christian cult that practices human sacrifice. Then you have the main characters, the heroic Hillary Clinton-esque presidential candidate, and her secret service bodyguard. They may not be minorities or members of the average Joes, but they’re “allies”, you see.

It’s so laughably stupid how one-sided and pandering The Purge: Election Year is for a movie made in the 21st century. Towards the end, I thought to myself, “The only way this movie can get any dumber is if the black ex-Crip fist-bumps the white secret service agent,” and seconds later that is exactly what happened. Shit movie is shit.

2- The Happening (2008)

I don’t think there’s a director as high-profile as M. Night Shamalamadingdong whose movies have taken such a dramatic slide into the crap pile. Unlike many other people at the time, I was more appreciative of his work up till The Happening. I really liked Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, and I thought Lady in the Water was weird but okay. Then I watched The Happening and I finally realized this guy had finally lost the plot.

The Happening is an unmitigated disaster because it appears to be devoid of human characters. In a strangely Tommy Wiseau-esque way, the characters and dialogue feel as though they were conceived by an alien who came to planet Earth, discovered a vault of movies and watched a bunch of them, then decided to make one of its own. MNS doesn’t seem to make any effort at realism or inhabiting the multitude of characters, ranging from teachers, to police officers, to army men, to horticulturalists, to mathematicians, in his writing; they all speak in the same bizarre, stilted manner that makes you unsure if you should laugh or not.

The unintentional comedy continues with the plot device involving plants making people kill themselves in increasingly hilarious ways. There’s one scene that’s meant to be taken seriously, in which a guy turns on his lawnmower, slowly walks in front of it, lies down, and allows it to run over him and shred him to pieces. Later on, a curmudgeonly old lady elects to kill herself by walking up to every window in her house and smashing her head through it. Keep in mind, this is what MNS describes as his take on 1960s paranoia movies like The Birds.

I kept wanting this movie to get better and stop making an ass of itself, and it never did. By the time Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel’s characters are having what’s supposed to be an emotional conversation through a metal pipe between the two separate rooms they’re in, I was praying for a gust of wind to blow into the theater and make this stupid movie kill itself right away. It’s such a catastrophic waste of good actors, premise and production values.

1- Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

At the coveted (?) #1 spot of shittiest movie I have ever seen is perhaps the biggest “Fuck You” from a film director to fans of a beloved half-century old franchise. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a textbook example of what happens when a legendary film franchise is hijacked not by incompetent filmmakers, but by filmmakers with political and profit-driven motives and little respect for that franchise and its fans. Literally every aspect of this movie, I am not joking, is a bare-faced insult to anyone who loves Star Wars and good storytelling.

Let’s start with the story, which reaches such levels of garbage-grade nonsense you have to wonder how such trash made it past so many film executives onto the big screen. This new trilogy of Star Wars movies, by the filmmakers’ own admission, was not mapped out ahead of time. They were literally making shit up as they went along each movie, and it definitely shows in TLJ. Written and directed by Rian Johnson, the movie is so screamingly obvious in its complete disregard for anything that happened in the original trilogy and prequels. There are so many strange twists and turns that don’t have any rational purpose, other than to massage Rian Johnson’s dick in his quest to be subversive and make his shit-smeared mark on the Star Wars series.

Even if you are fine with the overtly feminist tone of the movie, even if you are fine with the various acts of subversiveness (e.g. killing off Snoke), and even if you are fine with the ferociously uninteresting new heroes (Rey, Finn, Rose), it is impossible to ignore the fact that about 80% of this 150-minute movie is a complete and literal waste of time. There so many red herrings and roads to nowhere, the likes of which I had previously only seen in The Room. The biggest example is an entire subplot, in which Finn and Rose go to another planet to find a hacker, that turns out to be completely pointless. It instead turns into a strange and hackneyed commentary on animal rights and how rich people profit from war. What the fuck? The Rebels are getting blown to pieces; why in the fuck are Finn and Rose wasting time freeing a bunch of animals and making political commentary? Worst of all, they don’t even find the hacker and instead wind up with a second-rate version of him, played by Benicio Del-Toro, who winds up betraying them, resulting in even more Rebel deaths!

More nefariously, The Last Jedi confirms that this new trilogy is a soft reboot of the original trilogy, with a story that is technically a sequel to the previous movies that nevertheless reuses many of their narrative arcs and settings. Rather than craft an entirely new narrative, the powers-that-be at Disney have made the new trilogy a film equivalent of Hannibal Lecter; murdering the original (sometimes literally, by killing off Han and Luke) and wearing its skin in an attempt to draw a new generation of fans while trying to appeal to the old ones. Rebooting beloved films is one thing. Doing a soft reboot is an insult beyond insults; piggy-backing on the good ideas of the original in order to secretly deliver a spoonful of world-class shit to unsuspecting fans.

I could go on and on with the nearly endless list of stupidities in this terrible movie, but it would be a waste of good words. The main takeaway is this: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, on its own merits, is a classic example of how to make a terrible movie, with unlikable characters and a pointless story. As part of the Star Wars franchise, it will forever be the insult to end all insults; a movie so disgusting and so disrespectfully made that even Mark Hamill didn’t like it. This is clearly, far and away the shittiest movie I’ve ever seen.

Hotel Mumbai is Not For Pussies

Directed by first-time Australian filmmaker Anthony Maras, Hotel Mumbai is a real-life story that is unique in its brutality and unflinching in its courage to depict the 2008 terrorist attack on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai without any sanitizing or political correctness. Though it can be an exhausting experience, it also contains some of the most uplifting portrayals of the heroism and sacrifices that rise out of ordinary people, and the impossible choices they have to make.

Hotel Mumbai is built upon exhaustive research by the filmmakers, who stayed at the real-life hotel the movie takes place in, interviewed numerous hotel staff and guests who were there and studied phone calls between the terrorists and their mastermind. It isn’t hard to see this reflected in the movie. It portrays, with great economy, a full spectrum of emotions and factors to the attacks from the hotel staff,  guests, and even the terrorists. Fear, anger, love, bravery, smart decisions, stupid decisions, and even racism come into play as everyone tries to cope with the insane situation that has been thrust on them, and the relentlessness with which so many of these elements ebb and flow can be a lot for the average viewer to stomach.

The terrorists, surprisingly, are also given a fair shake. Though the movie doesn’t shy from their outright evil actions, it accurately depicts them as young, uneducated and gullible men who have been brainwashed into terrorism by a mysterious Pakistani known as The Bull. Through earpieces, The Bull walks them through the entire attack, instructing them on how to properly execute hostages, when to throw grenades, and so on. In the brief moments when they aren’t in contact with him, the terrorists are easily fascinated by the modern wonders within the hotel, such as flush toilets and pizza. Though some might find it improper to humanize such people, Hotel Mumbai is a film dedicated to telling you all sides of the story, whether you like it or not.

To that end, the most surprising aspect of this movie is its utter refusal to downplay the radical Islam angle of the terrorist attack. The terrorists and The Bull repeatedly invoke the God of Islam and rationalize their actions as being in the name of Islam. In the hands of any other filmmaker or studio, this aspect would have surely been sidestepped entirely in the name of political correctness, so it was quite surreal to witness such a depiction in 2019. Many parts of this movie, in fact, are exceptionally shocking and upsetting because of this dedication to realism. In one scene, a hotel receptionist is forced at gunpoint to call up guests and persuade them to open their hotel room doors for the police, only to be gunned down by terrorists waiting outside. In another scene, a character prays out loud to Allah in order to persuade a terrorist to spare his/her life. The numerous executions of hotel guests and staff alike are merciless; no one who dies in this movie dies gracefully. I’ve seen a lot of violent movies to the point of being desensitized, but Hotel Mumbai’s combination of visceral sound design, unobtrusive camera work (Note: any scene taking place in the hotel’s main lobby) and incredible performances messed with the part of my brain that differentiates fantasy violence from real-life violence.

With that said, what holds Hotel Mumbai back from becoming a pure exercise in suffering like The Passion of the Christ and Silence are the acts of bravery from the hotel staff and police. At the beginning of the movie, head chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher) reminds his staff that “the guest is God”, and even in the chaos of the attacks, the staff continue operating by this mantra by using their knowledge of the hotel layout to hide surviving guests. The police, meanwhile, are shown to be comically under-equipped and untrained to battle terrorists wielding fully-automatic rifles, but a small cadre of them decide to venture into the hotel anyway. Though they bumble their way through much of their efforts, the humanity that underlines their characters is so well thought out that you can’t help but root for them in the few little victories they manage to achieve.

Hotel Mumbai is not for pussies. You might be upset by its relentless ultra-realistic violence. You might be offended by its unflinching portrayal of radical Islamic terrorism. You might be offended by its attempts to humanize the terrorists. Yet, once you become invested in its characters, the movie is impossible to look away from. It’s both a dedication to the harsh reality of the attack, and a celebration of those who risked or gave up their lives in service to others; equal parts violence and humanity. When the climactic finale rolls in, it’s hard to resist the urge to cheer. Ditch the superheroes and pokémons and watch Hotel Mumbai, a testament to real heroes and incredible drama.