Black Ops (cont’d), and why release dates are meaningless as a Yellow Pages in Klingon.

Time for a proper review of Call of Duty: Black Ops’ single player. (If you've read my other posts, you've probably figured out that I don’t do multiplayer.) Following my illogical and somewhat off the rails outburst in the previous instalment on the subject I feel compelled to advise my loyal reader base, however depressing a sum total that might be, that I did not in fact jam up my computer’s fan with a donut as punishment for it refusing to run aforementioned game properly and in fact have subsequently had the opportunity to do a complete run of the story mode. And I would just like to note at the outset that I did almost forgive the game its shortcomings, upon which I shall soon expand, for the line, “Your president needs slugs!” delivered by the dev team’s resident JFK ghost-writer in the post-credits zombie mode. Timeless.

All the standard-issue set-piece cinematic “wow” moments that have defined the high points in the Call of Duty franchise are there, as you’d expect, and similarly it’s during these that Black Ops has its finest moments. Pelting parkour-style across the virtual rooftops of Hong Kong, dodging sniper fire on all sides is as breakneck-exciting as it sounds. But it’s when the game stamps its foot and locks you into doing something an FPS isn’t designed for, like driving a motorbike while firing a sawn-off shotgun (Terminator-style) or hammering open a submerged helicopter door, that problems begin to arise. These scripted events are occasionally somewhat haphazardly or awkwardly implemented (one section where you guide a stealth bomber off the runway is particularly abstract/pointless).

Moreover, you can’t shake the feeling that there are basically just too many of them. The game seriously tests the boundaries of interactivity by yanking you unceremoniously out of the action every five minutes, whether it’s to impart some new tidbit of knowledge unravelled by your mysterious interrogators or to ask you to press Space to abseil down a cliff. This naturally leads to the overall impression that there’s not really actually a great deal for you to do in this game. It’s like showing up to audition for a movie on the second-last day before filming wraps, and rather than strike you off altogether they somewhat grudgingly re-write the script  to include an extra character who, I don’t know, has to push the button to detonate the bomb or something. The outcome is already pre-determined; you’re just required to press the button as a token gesture to interactivity. Because of the sheer number and implementation of its predetermined scripted sequences, I’m leaning toward the interpretation that Black Ops is not so much as a game as it is first-person cinema masquerading as a game.

The game also has some pacing issues. After a gleefully enjoyable first couple of missions the campaign was let down by a run-of-the-mill midsection and especially lacklustre finale littered with clichés. See, after watching the fairly excellent 21 Grams the other day I was growing attached to the idea that it wasn’t actually possible to make a nonlinear narrative that was boring.

But in Black Ops the back-and-forth mission structure that allows Treyarch to take us on a heavily stylized highlight reel tour of the various historical conflicts and flashpoints of the Cold War also works splendidly to defuse any narrative tension that ignites more effectively than an automated sprinkler system at a pyromaniac convention. Before we can actually muster up any inclination to care about whichever life-and-death cliffhanger situation Mason and his pals have been left… erm, hanging in, we’re whisked away to a different time and place either years after or before where we have just been biting our nails into nonexistence. Annoying and then some.

See, this mightn’t have been such an issue if the various character sub-plots (i.e. Mason, Hudson) had been taking place simultaneously within a localised time period and had progressed in something approaching chronological order, but the apparent modus operandi of jumping back and forth wherever and whenever the explosions are results in a truly migraine-tastic sense of dyslexia. Note the word LOGICAL in CHRONOLOGICAL. Are you paying attention, developers?

The entire experience reminded me of reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book where whenever I got an ending I didn’t like I’d go back to an earlier story branch and pick page 34 instead. (Always 34.) While this way meant I got to see all the different narrative possibilities (which I would have been able to do anyway if the book had just progressed as a linear sequence of events) it also meant I had to mark fifteen different pages at any given time. Thus the first casualty of the “scraping plot elements off the linoleum of the creative ether and compressing them in a Powerball machine” mode of narrative was a shortage of available fingers making the physical task of reading rather annoying. The second was all sense of what the hell was going on in the narrative or why I should care. I was just reading words.

But at least in the above example it was somewhat justified, because I was reading a Choose Your Own Adventure Book. I knew beforehand that what I was getting was a non-linear narrative, so I’ve really no right to complain. But I do have a right to complain about you, Black Ops. The time period is perhaps the most ambitious the series has attempted to cover, due to the need to create an entirely new set of game assets (textures/models/sounds etc) for each stop on the Cold War highlight reel tour, and I must admit I was impressed by the lengths to which the developers went to keep things historically on-par. But really, was it worth for a narrative structure that basically shot your own game in the foot?

Something else that nonlinear narrative done badly achieves is to completely nullify the foundation of a three-act dramatic structure. This is probably partially accountable for the game’s finale being so weak (and predictable) and the midsection having a tendency to meander a bit. The story reaches Vietnam and effectively bunks down there for the majority of the rest of the campaign, using at as a springboard to jump back and forth between time zones as you investigate further into what the Soviets are doing behind NVA lines. Sure it’s fun to appreciate the minutiae of references to various classic Hollywood depictions of Vietnam (The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now to name a few) but I really felt this was one of the clearly identifiable areas the pacing got bogged down.

Not that the gameplay doesn’t achieve this with flying colours on its own, as the regenerating health/autosave system the series has embraced with open arms since Call of Duty 2 naturally lends itself to replaying the same fricking area 25-odd times as you attempt to cross a wide open space without getting shot to pieces, or blasted into a low-earth orbit with that mysterious exploding bulldozer that a second ago was just sitting there innocently apparently waiting for you to advance within a five-metre proximity of it. I found myself particularly dreading the large open-area fights that were scattered at intervals throughout the level design. Nine times out of ten Mason’s reason for kicking the bucket was a stray bullet from someone I couldn’t even see. 

And then there’s the super-size serving of glitches. This is the most unpolished CoD effort I’ve seen. I understand the pressure to meet release dates, particularly with a big-budget blockbuster like Black Ops is greater than ever but at the same time those of us who constitute the ever-dwindling minority of the PC gaming market would like to actually be able to play the damned thing we’ve just paid $90 for rather than just admire the pretty box with its enigmatically shadowed dual-pistol wielding Batman impersonator. Are we reaching the edge of some slippery downhill slope where it’s acceptable to ship a product which is effectively still in beta? Where downloadable patches and content become a band-aid after-the-thought for doing a shoddy job with the initial release? It’s as if the line between internal and external playtesting has blurred to the point that developers now apparently expect the players to find out what’s wrong with their game.

To be fair, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as you’re likely to get a far broader indication of potential glitches when a product is released out in the community than within the limited parameters of the internal playtesting environment. But you have to draw the line somewhere. Namely, at problems that render the software unplayable, as was rather incisively documented in my previous article on the subject.

So, to summarise: disjointed and pedestrian story, clunky scripted events, occasionally thrilling gameplay moments interspersed with frustratingly repetitive gunfights and a road-train-sized truckload of bugs. What can you learn from all this, Black Ops? Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd start by giving us some consistency in narrative context. Please. There’s a reason time goes forward not backward!

Grey kingfisher.

This time the film that I saw on the weekend was Black Swan. I knew virtually nothing about it, but the damned thing kept popping up in my Facebook feed so often that I couldn’t help but arrive at the deduction that my own personal film critic homunculus was trying to tell me something. So I took the hint, rang up a friend and barrelled off to see aforementioned stretch of celluloid. And let me start by saying that Darren Aro-I can’t-possibly-pronounce-the-remaining-few-syllables’ psychological ballet thriller Black Swan is an arty, arty film. In fact, it couldn’t possibly be artier if it sellotaped itself to the back of a Rembrandt and had itself smuggled into the Louvre by a disaffected professor of 19^th century humanist literature dressed in a beret and a coat made entirely of paintbrushes.

This isn’t to say it isn’t watchable. It’s just that it wears its artiness so self-consciously on its sleeve that it may as well be shouting, “Look at us, we know how to make a movie cleverly! Critics of the world, cough up the stars”, with every ominous crystalline chime of the soundtrack that accompanies Barbara Hershey’s tyrannical mother bursting in on Natalie Portman’s darling daughter in the middle of doing something embarrassing. Which, incidentally, happens more often than you’d think. But that’s enough about that.

It’s shot in grainy desaturated colours that turn highlights to brilliant ivory white and cast shadows around the unknown edge of the screen, playing light off dark in a somewhat too-neat visual parallel of the struggles in its heroine’s inner psyche. Only when Portman’s Nina ventures outside the world of the theatre and into the New York nightlife do more vivid colours begin to dominate, and then only for a very brief period. Then there’s the at-turns alternately grandiose and minimalist soundtrack. And, of course, the surrealist nightmare episodes that offer insights into the mind of Nina as it cracks under the pressure of her own psychological metamorphosis.

If you told me beforehand that Black Swan was going to include freaky Japanese horror-movie F.E.A.R.-esque sequences, I’d reply that I’d be interested to see how they’d fit in without seeming artificially grafted on, and probably also mention something about how it would be kind of hard to achieve that. Yes, I just compared this self-consciously super-arty film to a first person shooter game series, go and have a cry about it and try and drown me in the tears if you require a topically relevant means of exacting revenge. But they do work and it’s because they segue effortlessly into a cinematic sea of relentless tension, where you’re never quite at ease. The predictable main arc of the storyline is the only comfort the audience is allowed in a film where anything could happen next, one which – like the ballet itself - is so heavily stylized that everything or nothing that occurs might be real or just a figment of the heroine’s imagination.

Sure, there are a couple of cheap shocks. The moments where Nina spins round and the camera lurches across to reveal – surprise, someone standing right behind her, usually Mila Kunis’ deadly rival in the main role stakes, or her mother – didn’t sit too well with me. They’re squatting there self-impudently on the border fence between being overdone and staying just under the quota. But the actors are so good in their respective roles that we’re sufficiently immersed to let this kind of potentially awkward stylistic transition pass without noticing. And there are even a few instances of subversive humour, so low-key as to be non-existent, like when one of Nina’s fellow stars clad in full monster costume shambles past her and mumbles an affable “Hey.”

So what else can I say about it? Hmmm. In a sense, Nina’s transformation into the Black Swan mirrors the journey of an adolescent into full maturity through the discovery of art. When we first encounter her at the beginning of the film, she’s still a child; naïve, sheltered, innocent, repressed. The sexuality, self-expression of adulthood: both have been swallowed wholesale in the yawning singularity of discipline enforced by her mother. Nina’s allowing the Black Swan to flourish within herself is akin to reaching a belated maturity – or perhaps just unlocking a part of herself that has remained latent. She knows the choreography, the technique perfectly, with mathematical precision; but true feeling is unknown to her. Learning to exert control over one’s emotions is a skill that is generally associated with growing up – but recast in this light, the film seems to suggest that learning when it is appropriate to relinquish control over emotion can be just as much a part of reaching true maturity.

So on one hand, maybe it’s essentially a tale of growth. But the Swan Lake subtext seems to suggest that both the child and the adult can coexist within one person, and be adopted at a moment according to whatever the situation calls for. Like actors on the stage, we too can switch wholesale back and forth between innocence and maturity as we wish. This is a film full of chameleons.

Sunshine and daisies and rainbows

Ok, Black Ops: I'll cut you a deal. You stop locking up halfway through the first fricking mission, and then maybe I won't go play Medal of Honor: Airborne instead. Not out of any desire to play that aforementioned piece of pectoral-punching hyperpatriotic crap, mind you, just a bloody-minded and in all probability completely futile desire to piss you off to the most distant horizons of my potential in this department by voting with my two rational choice-making-agent-of-free-will-consumer feet. Or in this case, the ASDW keys.

Alright, that rather vitriolic opening was uncalled for. Well, at least 50% of it. Sorry. Back to nice me now. Technically, Medal of Honor: Airborne is actually a halfway decent game, for a comparative relic from (gasp) 2007. And I did have a bit of fun playing it. Notably (for the purposes of this post), the myriad of cinematic flourishes I found scattered within the single player campaign like Fantales on the linoleum after a piñata massacre smacks of a post Call of Duty: Modern Warfare FPS environment. And it’s because of this that I’m left suitably confuzzled. Despite the collective of similar gaming franchises doing their best to move with the times I thought it unlikely that the thematically stubborn MoH would ever be prised loose from its firmly concreted, Saving Private Ryan-Band of Brothers-heyday gung-ho-patriotic origins.

The reason for my thinking this has a lot to do with the franchise’s age and the fact that it’s been relegated to the margins of FPS gaming for so long under the all-consuming Call of Duty reign of popular acclaim. It’s like the MoH franchise went into hibernation for nine years after the release of Allied Assault, popping up to offer only the occasional token bad entry like a half-choked snore before waking up properly when the alarm went off in 2007 only to discover that notions of what an FPS was had changed considerably. The entire WW2 fad-phase in first person shooters had well and truly come and gone to be replaced by “Modern Warfare” as the new bullet-scarred hellhole to be in if you wanted to make it on the modern FPS scene.

Perhaps it’s for this reason that Airborne seems almost nostalgic and quaint for 50% of the time you’re playing it. The other 50% of the time is spent reminding yourself that this is not in fact another Call of Duty game. The choose-your-drop-zone gimmick is occasionally cool (i.e. when you manage to pull off an obscenely difficult skill drop like parachuting in through a window to land on top of an unsuspecting French peasant’s ice cream cake) but ultimately of marginal use. We also find ourselves with a Gears of War-style motion blur effect whenever you sprint (sprinting itself being one of many Call of Duty/Halo-esque mechanics to be found within, along with grenade warning indicators, regenerating health, iron sights, gun attachments, nonlinear gameplay and multiple objective sites). To level the charge at a WW2 shooter that it’s generic is like accusing a continent of being too big to conveniently steal, but then a game like, say, World at War manages to duck that particular spinning razor blade of accusation by a half-millimetre and just avoid getting its Padawan braid sliced off at the knot. Airborne feels like the average of every WW2 game that’s come before it, and carries an appropriately average level of fun.

More recently, the MoH franchise even loyally followed CoD into the controversy mosh pit by allowing players to select the Taliban as one of the two sides in its multiplayer mode for the more recent modern-warfare themed, generically titled Medal of Honor (2010), although unlike CoD they ultimately bowed to pressure from a variety of angles and replaced it with the necessarily ambiguous title “Opposing Force”. It’s somewhat baffling, although I must admit I’m not particularly emotionally invested on the matter, to see MoH exhibiting so many similarities to CoD. It’s a case whereby the forefather has been eclipsed by its tackier, prodigally hedonistic digital offspring. 

Whatever. I suspect, although I could be completely barking up the wrong tree here, that where I’m heading with all this is to say that Call of Duty is overrated. Where the chief pitfall of the Medal of Honor series is to indulge itself with chest-thumping patriotism, the Call of Duty franchise revels in violence for its own sake; violence as sheer mindless spectacle.

Mind you, I didn’t always withhold that view. The series’ major watershed moment was the release of Modern Warfare, and the subsequent branching off into a sub-franchise that entailed marked the beginning of a downward spiral for a previously well-regarded name in first person shooters. That wasn’t to say that the signs weren’t there in Call of Duty 2 – a number of bad habits were apparent in that game that would grow into ever-more detrimental issues with the itinerant repetition that each subsequent entry in the series demanded. I won’t start rattling on about regenerating health, wave after wave of respawning enemies or lack of a quicksave key, but I do think some questionable design decisions were made in Call of Duty 2 from a purely ludic perspective that would funnel the series into the spectacle-oriented gameplay standard that it ultimately carries into the epic battle for our consumer dollars today.

Even putting this aside, there are at present some dire problems with the CoD series that need to be addressed, and the largest and most glaringly obvious of these is easily summarised. The series has lost the freshness that made the original Call of Duty such a hit. The stock-in-trade cinematic set-pieces have been taken to such an epic scope and scale, and overdone to such an extent, that nothing can impress us anymore. From the moment I started playing Black Ops, I couldn’t shake a feeling of déjà vu that has been the defining atmosphere to every single CoD game I’ve played since Call of Duty 2. It’s a sense of the generic. Every single mission is the same, just with slightly different shades of window dressing.

It’s compounded by some very fundamental realities of the series, which are not necessarily specific to Black Ops. At the basic level, these games are about shooting people. People; virtual people to be sure, but there’s no robotic alien microwave death turrets or baked-bean powered cyborg zombie stegosauruses to be found here. When you distil it down, the range of actions the player is able to perform are so one-dimensional as to be telling. You can move, sprint, jump, go prone, shoot, throw grenades, perform melee attacks. That’s about it. And every task that you complete is with the ultimate objective of being able to advance to the next area so that you can shoot more people. Albeit in slightly different settings, or wearing slightly different uniforms. Or in slightly different ways, such as using thermal imaging to strafe enemies from an aerial gunship. The essence of war is violence, and war is the essence of this game series. It takes precedence over plot, gameplay or, somewhat paradoxically, even realism. The end result is more than a tad mind-numbing.

Granted, occasionally there’s a car, boat, airplane or helicopter chase thrown in just to mix things up a bit. Indeed, the promise of that next big blockbuster cinematic scripted sequence just around the next corner was the only thing that prevented me quitting to Windows every time Mason decided to eat paving stones when playing Black Ops (which, incidentally, happens quite a bit whenever I play a CoD game as I invariably select Hardened difficulty or above, each time illogically reasoning to myself that I’m getting more of my money’s worth that way. I never learn.) The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening.

At least within the WW2 setting, there was the basis for a claim that Call of Duty had some value as a historical simulator, even if only vis-a-vis a very stylized rendering. But with the shift to fictional real-world modern scenarios (not to mention the Frederick Forsyth 60’s spy-thriller-type pulp material that the Black Ops plot appears to have been hewn wholesale from like an eco-friendly tea towel) the series has trodden further and further outside the boundaries of realism into the smelly dank jungles of sheer mindless spectacle.

With Modern Warfare 2, perhaps the most spectacularly brain-dead entry in the entire series - epitomised in the “No Russian” mission and its aforementioned attendant controversy surrounding the massacre of virtual citizens in an airport - the mandate of violent spectacle above all else has reached its logical zenith. Yet curiously, for all the controversy, there was very little actual outcome, but plenty of noise was made (read: spectacle). Not exactly of the violent variety, but. The phrase “life imitating art” is one I’m often a little too eager to trot out of the stable like a prized show pony with a jewel-encrusted saddle but I think it’s justified here. Though somewhat downplayed in comparison to its predecessor, Black Ops attracted its own fair share of the magic C-word because of its opening mission where the player is tasked with the assassination of a living real-life figure (Fidel Castro). I hope we’re not seeing the beginning of a trend. Spectacle and violence. Where does it end? (Oh look, I made it rhyme.)

None of the above really matters, though. Activision have found a winning formula for success, and it’s unlikely they’ll mess with it too radically in the next instalment of CoD, wherever or whenever that may be set. But at the same time, just as species evolve or get eaten, the series needs at the very minimum to keep pace (in both ludic and narrative arenas) with its competitors in the FPS marketplace. Which makes me think that Medal of Honor may well have just been on something vaguely resembling the right track after all.

But pulling a u-turn at the lights and screeching back in the opposite direction to Call of Duty: Black Ops. In the mean time, I just wish the blasted thing would stop bringing the fireworks show screeching to a halt just as I’m running through Cuban cane sugar fields in the middle of a CIA bombing raid. Does it have some aversion to sucrose, I wonder? Is my computer trying to help me lose weight by systematically censoring all references to junk food? Stupid thing, we’ll see if a Krispy Kreme shoved in your fan improves your attitude any. (Don’t look now, but it looks like not-nice me has returned with no particular aplomb). That should make you eat your words. Or your digits, rather. Your 1s and 0’s. Your binary. Yes. Tasty binary code…

Quick thought...

When I say that the name Tim Burton has become a cliché, I’m aware that things are a mite more complicated than that. Sure, saying you were a Tim Burton fan used to mean something; you were a little bit oddball, you had a slightly skewed sense of humour, a fascination with the morbid, the gothic, the unexamined. Recently I attended the Tim Burton Exhibition at Federation Square, Melbourne. The queue awaiting admission in itself was enough to make me sit up and take notice as it was approximately the length of Quetzalcoatl tied to a nine-headed hydra using a printed transcript of the Internet as a rope. I think that was the point at which I really woke up to the reality of what I’m now trying to grapple with. Now we are at the stage where the phrase “It reminds me of Tim Burton”, is thrown around on DeviantArt like a diseased dead cow over a castle parapet and where any non-3D animation that doesn’t resemble a 1930’s Disney cartoon down to the letter is instantly branded with the term. Or so it seems.

To some extent Burton’s work has always simultaneously and somewhat uncomfortably straddled the line between mainstream and sideline pop culture, like an unfortunate rodeo stuntman balanced precariously on twin horses both of which are trying to ride off in opposite directions. What accounts for this, is that thematically much of the director's work parodies the sameness of everyday life in Western society. The exemplar of this, of course, is Edward Scissorhands with its pastel-colour pastiche of American suburbia, but so many of his own drawings and paintings provide a unique perspective on instantly identifiable scenes and figures from everyday life.

Which is of course what makes assigning the label “cliché” as ironic as it is problematic.

Art imitating life? Another overused phrase. Nonetheless, I think there’s a rich vein of humour to be mined in the fact that an artist whose work parodies the mainstream has drifted slowly in the direction of the mainstream after the fact. The same type of twisted irony, in fact, which might well appeal to the maestro himself.

Little less action and a little more conversation please.

Five weeks later… I’m back. Somewhat better travelled hopefully. On the flight home I watched a lot of movies. Three good ones and one not so good. Thankfully though, one in the former category was Clint Eastwood’s understated World War II epic Letters from Iwo Jima. Certainly, lurking in the back of my mind like a pride of starving lions (no, of course I haven’t been anywhere in particular recently…) the whole time were a whole bunch of peripheral concerns about topics such as the presentation of history through film and, more specifically, the presentation of war in film and other mediums. All of which are pet concerns of mine.

What really struck me and I what I walked away with from Letters, though, was the emphasis that Eastwood places on people. He understands a fundamental requirement which so many other directors, authors and artists frequently under-prioritize in their tales: the need for an audience to identify emotionally with characters. I got a vague sense of this in watching Gran Torino and Letters has that similar field of human scope. It’s such a basic, foundational ingredient of good film-making, but it’s so often undervalued or overlooked. I’m fairly strongly of the opinion that having good actors who can play their parts convincingly is among the most critical elements in a film, but until recently, I didn’t fully understand why I thought that way.

The reason is simply this. I judge whether a film is good or not based firstly upon whether it moved me emotionally, and secondly whether or not I was aware I was being manipulated in this respect. Either way, a story cannot have dramatic impact unless you actually care about the characters involved. If the audience is disconnected from the emotional plight of the story’s protagonists, then the story loses that immersive quality that defines pure fictional escapism. The screen displays a series of fragmented images of pretty places and people, but the audience is still sitting there in the darkened cinema, aware of their own powerless embodiment and probably, in all likelihood, getting restless and waiting for the damn thing to end so they can trudge off home to bed. For films about war, this is perhaps all the more important, given that the stakes in the fictional scenario being presented are so much higher (i.e. unlike a romantic comedy, characters can die; unlike a James Bond film, no character is immune from death, etc)

Was I aware I was being emotionally manipulated in Letters From Iwo Jima? At times, yes; at others, no. But the film’s most valuable trump card is that it creates recognizably human, empathetic characters from the fabric of an enemy which historically has been demonized as barbaric, faceless and inhuman. Most notably, Eastwood uses music minimally, which gives dialogue scenes a realistic quality, as if of everyday conversation, perhaps engaging with an old friend. Realism in this respect goes hand-in-hand with historical immersiveness. As the audience, we become fully enmeshed in the plight of Saigo and Nishi, Shimizu and General Kuribayashi because we come to know them as others do, through conversation; through that simple human quality of speaking and listening.

That not so good movie I was talking about? It actually wasn’t that bad. It was this wacky little Ukrainian thing called We Are From The Future 2. The thing was that technically it was far superior to what I was expecting. It must have had a decent-sized budget for a foreign film. I’m inclined to rate it down because the scenes of battle carnage that are shoved relentlessly up the audience’s nose for the film’s second half are so grossly mired in their own tacky gorefest, often accompanied by a driving metal soundtrack, that they overshoot the ballpark of realism and land squarely in the neighbour’s backyard of kitsch (I’ve always wanted a chance to use that word, and there it is! I’m happy now, for at least the next four minutes). Moreover, some of the earlier scenes taking place in a modern WW2 re-enactment of the battle are equally cheap. Partying youths wearing SS uniforms dance to the same bloody annoying Eastern European heavy-metal, as slow camera movements pan over the stage and the crowd and luxuriate in the violence, the noise and the visual palette of militaristic symbolism.

But I’ll say this for WAFTF2: it was economical. It only had an hour and a half or so to do its thing, and as an action film, it succeeds admirably. By the end of it I was mildly interested/morbidly fascinated to go out and look for We Are From The Future 1, so I’m prepared to count that a success. I suppose it’s just that straight after watching Eastwood’s far superior (although to be fair, marketed at a somewhat slightly different recipient base) WW2 film, this was a starkly noticeable change of pace.  

The fact that WAFTF2 chooses as its focus a less historically Hollywood-trodden theatre of war (i.e. the Eastern Front and Ukrainian involvement), however, gives me an immediate instinct to scrutinize it as a work of filmic history, rather than as the sheer escapist entertainment it is. I mean, it’s about time-travelling college students, for Pete’s sake. In this respect, WAFTF2 suffers rather than profits from having a relatively high-budget technical arsenal at its disposal: as the audience, I didn’t know whether the filmmakers’ intent was to create a realistic portrayal of what it would have been like to fight in the Battle of Brody in 1944, or whether I should be taking the action at face value. So I posit the question: is it possible to depict historical violence and warfare at a high technical level (Saving Private Ryan being the oft-quoted textbook example/high water mark) without the element of cheap, escapist thrills that inevitably seems to go hand-in-hand? Something, hopefully, to think about.