Review: "The Lego Movie"

The Lego Movie is high art. I stand by that statement with 100% conviction, too. Despite being a laugh-a-second, impeccably-timed, must-see family comedy, it is smart. And by that I mean book-smarts smart; it brushes on so many themes, most of them having to do with Lego itself as an institution, that it kind of defies rational explanation. It's majestic in its audacity and it is audacious in its majesty, and directors Chris Lord and Phil Miller have bought an influence to the table that is completely bereft of irony and cynicism. Which isn't so impressive considering their prior masterworks, until you realize it's a goddamn Lego movie.

In a world entirely made of Lego, we follow our protagonist Emmett, a minifigure so devoid of imagination, personality and free will, that he is a literal blank slate. He lives by the rules. He follows the instructions. The benevolent leader President Business (secretly the villainous and super-evil Lord Business) has basically brainwashed the entire world to be unquestioning and passive; none moreso than Emmett, who is basically destined to be completely forgotten. His only defining feature is that he is utterly generic and indistinct... until he stumbles upon the Piece of Resistance, and fulfils an eight-and-a-half-year-old prophecy, becoming The Special - a Master Builder so powerful he can stop the ancient weapon known as The Kragle, and save all the universe. Chased by Business' robotic minions, the schizophrenic Good Cop/Bad Cop, and his own looming sense of inadequacy, it's a race against the clock to save the world before Lord Business destroys it.

How "Man of Steel" Made Being Alive Painful (And Other Observations)

Man of Steel made my being alive painful. While watching Man of Steel, the visual and aural bombardment - the speed, the jerkiness, the brightness and the screeching - made existence a chore. I refer explicitly, mind, to the last fifty or so minutes of the movie, the so-called "climax," in which the "characters" engaged in "fights". These scenes (if one is willing to afford them such a status) made me motionsick, and gave me a pounding headache. But it is the insult to my intelligence that truly made me wretch.

Review: "Injustice: Gods Among Us"

Since the beginning of time itself, since the first words of recorded history; since man first stepped, blinking, naked, and scared from the darkness of nonexistence, and a bunch of grubby-fingered children clamoured around a magazine parlour reading comic books, realizing that different superheroes existed in similar continuities, a singular question has prevailed – a question consistently on every living being’s breath, continuing to drive scholars and plebeians alike to the edge of madness and beyond: “COULD BATMAN BEAT SUPERMAN??”

Yes, there’s something so very appealing about comic book heroes fighting each other. Notjust fighting – no, they do plenty of fighting - but fighting each other. It’s the kind of thinking that leads to a buzz of excitement when in, say, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, Iron Man squares off against Thor. But they’re both Avengers, right? They’re not supposed to be fighting. It is, for all intents and purposes, a “what if” scenario – and yet, it’s the kind of scenario which has prevailed and stuck with popular culture and its audience for generations. More than heroes fighting villains, we clamour at the chance to see heroes fighting other heroes. So, here’s Injustice: Gods Among Us – an entire game dedicated to the notion of heroes fighting other heroes.

Review: "Batman: Arkham City"

I Am the Batman

review for Batman: Arkham City (PC, X360, PS3), 1 player action, out now

To say Batman: Arkham City is the best videogame to come out this year is a hefty mouthful of a statement indeed, but the more I think about it, the more it rings true. Y'see, analysis of this game comes all but rationally. I've thought long and hard, and I've decided, as full of unbridled awesomeness as Batman is... it is really, really hard to do it right. I've been rewatching The Dark Knight, the Tim Burton Batman movies, Batman: The Animated Series, and as good as they all are - and they're pretty much all universally brilliant - there's always elements of Batman that come off as pretty damn, almost irredeemably, stupid.

Batman started off as a funny pages strip, of course. It wasn't until incredibly recently in the character's long, varied history that he became less of a detective and more of a fucking ninja, and the series started to focus less on a colourful array of comically fiendish bank robbers and arsonists, and more on a staggeringly dark, painfully accurate depiction of the depths of the insane, criminal mind. Modern Batman is incredibly deep and psychologically rooted. It's not quite Watchmen standards of dark, brooding, edgy and psychological, but it's damn close, and that says a lot for what started off as an incomprehensibly silly game of men-in-flashy-tights-beating-each-other-up back in the Golden Era of comic books.