Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

I wasn't originally going to do this, but then I got a request for it.  And I truly have nothing else to talk about right this second, so let's go:  "I'm stiiiiiiiiill in a dream, SNAKE EEEATEEEER!!!!!"

Of the entire Metal Gear Solid series, "Metal Gear Solid 3" seems to be that one real hit, the one game that everybody has on the tip of their tongue when asked "what is the best Metal Gear game you've ever played?"  Interestingly, it actually is by far the worst selling console Metal Gear Solid game, selling about half the numbers of "Metal Gear Solid 2", and several million less than "Metal Gear Solid 4".  Yet while this game had about half the audience of the other Metal Gear games, it still stands out as the true classic.  After the dada nightmare that was "Metal Gear Solid 2" everybody from Hideo Kojima down just wanted to make a simple fun Cold War spy game.  And that's what he did, and everybody loved it.

For my own viewpoint, "Snake Eater" does actually do particular thing far better than any other segment of this series:  story.  "Metal Gear Solid 1" perfectly captured the mood of a modern action hero SciFi soldier, basically conquering forcing every other game starring Solid Snake to be either an homage or a parody to that first classic.  "Metal Gear Solid 3", however, doesn't need to walk in the footsteps of anything, since its so far removed from the other titles in the series, taking place some fifty years before every other event, we're effectively seeing a whole original mythology being born.  Even better, this James Bond-gone-wild stylized view of 1963's spy world grounds Kojima in a way that the other games could not.  We don't have any cloning, no nanomachines, no designer viruses, and nobody has the final boss of the last game living inside their right arm*.  There is a dude who keeps an entire colony of bees inside his lungs and uses them as a machine gun, but that's just part of the fun.  We've finally left the increasingly nonsensical web of Metal Gear Solid plotting to push into brave new ground.  It won't be until "Metal Gear Solid 4" that the relatively simple story of "Snake Eater" gets pulled into the bullshit and is completely torn apart in endless last-minute ideas.

I'm not going to say that "Snake Eater" is a bad game.  It is a satisfying experience of Tactical Espionage Action, with a great adventurous pace that is as close as Kojima has gotten to equating the brilliance of the original.  However, the raw gameplay mechanics are considerably worse than "Metal Gear Solid 2", with an indoors stealth engine being thrown right in the middle of the jungle, a place it was never born to experience.  It just didn't know how to cope, it wound up hiding under a tree for a few hours, got malaria, and was then devoured by a crocodile.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

The year was 2001, the PlayStation 2 was then cutting-edge technology, and the greatest gaming generation of all time was about to begin*.  Hideo Kojima was standing in a situation that most game developers could only dream to be in:  the creator of one of the best games ever made now working on a brand new follow-up using vastly enhanced technology and seemingly unlimited possibilities.  Any "Metal Gear Solid 2" would have been a guaranteed Best Seller, such was the excitement of millions of gamers.  And Hideo Kojima had ambition to match that excitement.  He was going to create a game unlike any ever before:  This wasn't just going to be a new tactical espionage action game, this was going to be a mindbending genre-breaking experience, ripping the player out of easy and simple paradigms into a new world of confusion, satire, and gonzo madness.

And what was the result?  Well, "Metal Gear Solid 2" is still not a fondly-remembered game.  Much of this results from Kojima's elaborate joke, where for years this was marketed as another Metal Gear adventure starring Solid Snake, when in actuality, you can only play as Snake for about two hours, and then suddenly replaced with the rookie Raiden.  The world's reaction was at best mild annoyance, at worst a barrage of ad hominem attacks with not a small undercurrent of homophobic hatred.  (Gaming culture was not a very enlightened place a decade ago, and it hasn't evolved much.)  Worse, to Kojima's long confusing rants about Internet controls and loss of player control and God Only Knows how many other ideas wound up filling "Metal Gear Solid 2"'s gumbo of pretentious twaddle.  Most gamers simply shook their head unable to understand anything that was going on, creating an entire side industry of MGS2 scholars, similar to that of the "Chrono Cross" scholarship.  While some fringe intellectuals worship MGS2 for all of its weirdness, gaming history seems to have called this title a failed experiment, and cheerfully devoured the next Metal Gear game:  a simple fun call-back to James Bond in the 1960s, known as "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater".

I was actually rather excited for "Metal Gear Solid 2", because there really isn't a very large collection of games that anybody would call "arty" or "pretentious".  Honestly there aren't enough games that go off the deep end into merciless soups mocking their players and laughing at our dreams of super spy action.  I heard the dim claims of "Fission Mailed" and "I need scissors, 61!" and was into it.  Unfortunately, that's only part of the equation.  "Metal Gear Solid 2" for its first half is just another Metal Gear game, one which only at times manages to equal the design brilliance of the original.  But the final section of the game only half a lunatic adventure, the other half is long boring speeches about... well, I haven't even a clue.  I get the distinct feeling that "Metal Gear Solid 2" was quite simply a game that wasn't finished, leaving huge holes in its story not out because it was being coy with its players and leaving everything up to interpretation, but because a deadline was coming up, Kojima didn't know how to end the story, and just left it unfinished.

Elysium

What is the point?  Why even write a review?  "Elysium" is not a movie anybody is going to remember in ten years, I doubt I'll remember it even tomorrow.  This is not a film of any historic importance - its a crappy, badly-made dystopian SciFi film, the likes of which have most definitely been seen before.  Many.  Many.  Times.  "Elysium" is a movie about dudes in big dumb robot suits fighting each other, but pretending to have some kind of social commentary.  And that kind of complete cynical falseness makes "Elysium" somehow worse than just being a dumb action movie, it comes off as a fraud to trick the empty-minded.  Sorry, this movie is despicable.

I don't understand, Hollywood.  I get your compulsion to make movies about dudes in big dumb robot suits punching each other.  That is fun for the entire family!  Its fine!  Its pure, its primal, it can tons of fun.  But why do we need to justify these big dumb robots suits with lame and meaningless constructs of dystopian societies?  Why can't a guy in a robot suit just punch another guy in a robot suit?  Why do we need to pretend to give a shit about the Third World by making our hero a member of the working class, fighting valiantly against Evil French-Speaking White People?  You think just because director, Neil Blomkamp made "District 9", a reasonable intelligent SciFi film with an original concept that "Elysium" isn't going to be as pointless and dull as the trailers so clearly showed it to be?  Sorry, no, Neil Blomkamp got his paycheck, and he cared as little as anybody else.  The hypocrisy of these movies is so blatant even in their casting:  Matt Damon is #5 on the Grand List of Whitest People Who Ever Lived, just below William H. Macy.  He is not a poor Mexican farmer getting his leg caught in barbed wire to get a job as a dish washer at Denny's.  Even worse, while "Elysium" juggles income inequality, healthcare inequality, racism, forced poverty, and god knows how many other hot button issues, it has NOTHING TO SAY about any of them.  Its just rich people stealing all the health care because... they wanna tan and have garden parties in space.  It references those real problems which cause real suffering to real people, all just to create a backdrop for why Matt Damon can punch people.

Just two years ago "In Time" came out, doing exactly the same thing.  At least "Elysium" doesn't base its entire concept around an economic system more insane than Communism, but its still just as empty of a movie.  There aren't people, there isn't any intelligence, there's just a few brief flashes of competently-directed action scenes.  And there aren't half as many action scenes are you'd need to keep your attention.  At least there's a cyborg redneck South African who likes to cook ribs with a katana.   Even the second-billed actress, Jodie Foster, couldn't give a shit, spending the entire film hamming it up in a bizarre posh accent.  "Elysium" is so desperate and pandering that it gives us a cute little girl who supposedly has leukemia, but somehow suffers from no symptoms and is only there to generate false sympathy.  Everything is empty, one-dimensional, and completely false.  Its worse than "Oblivion"!  "Elysium" is a false movie, do not be fooled by it.

Wolf Children

"Wolf Children" is the newest film from Mamoru Hosoda, the director of "Summer Wars" and one of my favorite movies of all time, "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time".  Considering how good those last two efforts were, it would be easy to imagine that his third film would be a lesser creation, as a human being could only posses a limited reserve of creative energy.  In that you are wrong, because the powers of Mamoru Hosoda are unlimited.  "Wolf Children" may in fact be his greatest film yet, a movie of scope and power unequaled by anything else in recent memory.

It was only two years ago that critics were fawning with praise over Terrence Mallick's "The Tree of Life", claiming it to be this unparalleled cycle of pure artistry.  I've heard some of the most glowing reviews possible for that film - never before has the word "art" been more poorly applied than to "Tree of Life".  If you're wondering of course, if I must play the Scrooge to everybody's festivities over morbidly obese American arthouse, what would I actually call great cinematic art?  What is the movie that really connects to all people in a universal representation of the human family, while being so fantastically well-shot that you well up in emotion over the power of it all?  Could we have a movie such as that and actually give a plot?  And characters?  Could some Japanese anime director who made his bones with mercenary grunt work with "Digimon: the Movie" really outdo Terrence Mallick, the darling of the arthouse crowd?  Absolutely.

Despite its fairy tale premise of being a single mother raising two werewolf children, "Wolf Children" is not a light children's tale.  It takes its concept very seriously, forcing its protagonist into a very difficult situation of raising children whom she may not be able to completely control, who she has to hide from the rest of the world, and on some level, whose biology is a mystery even to her.  But really, the fantastical elements are simply there to add whimsical energy to a story that is really about a mother watching her children grow up and letting them take their alternate paths in life.  For a cartoon movie, there is nothing cartoony about "Wolf Children".  This is Homoda back in his more serious examination of human relationships, not the comic excess of "Summer Wars".  The result is a movie which may be the prettiest damn film ever made.  This isn't a movie I'm recommending simply because "its fun" or "you'll laugh" or "the Minions are cute".  This is a movie I'm recommending because its important.  This is something that everybody should see, and maybe, everybody needs to see.

Metal Gear Solid

I recently purchased the "Metal Gear Solid Legacy Collection" for one single fifty dollar bill.  And trust me, at no point during the last three weeks have I missed President Jackson's face decorating my wallet.  In terms of pounds of entertainment per cent, this is the wisest purchase I've made since I put a "Wind Waker" mini-disc into my GameCube.

Now "Metal Gear Solid 1" is not the first Metal Gear game I've played.  I actually finished "Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater" first.  Typically the party line on this series is that "Snake Eater" is the best of the best.  In fact, having played several of these titles already, the real classic is none other than, "Metal Gear Solid: Coca-Cola Classic".  I may not wind up reviewing every single one of these Metal Gear titles*, but "Coca-Cola Classic" I mean, "Metal Gear Solid 1" happens to exist within a stellar semi-divine place as being one of the best video games I've discussed on this blog, living right up there with "Arkham City" and "Tactics Ogre".  And that is something I cannot ignore.

That's all a funny conclusion to make considering how obviously awful "Metal Gear Solid" is.  Let that line smash you over the face while I explain it.  The camera is top-down for no particular reason, deeply limiting your perspective in a 3D stealth game.  Actual combat is based upon praying that the auto-targeting controls answer your prayers or hoping that the sluggish first-person perspective will let you line-up your target fast enough before enemy bullets take the solidity out of Solid Snake.  The character models are almost embarrassingly basic, looking less like the heroes of a Tactical Espionage game than a couple of action figures being wiggled around by director Hideo Kojima hiding under a table, desperately hoping to keep his hand out of the shot.  They don't even have eyes!  Altogether its a stiff, sometimes ugly, and bitterly unforgiving experience, which somehow amounts to being one of the best games ever made.