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Fallout (2024)
The Typical Insertions and Retcons the Games
The Fallout setting is supposed to be a somewhat tongue in cheek 1950s America that just never ended, so well up to the date of the nuclear war in 2077, appliances, cars, homes, clothing, etc. Are like they have been stuck in time for 120 years. The 1950s music is still there, as is the Mom and Pop culture.
The intent is to ironically contrast that saccharine existence with the harshness of the apocalypse that arrives.
Well ... this series kind of tanks that. The casting is like a commercial for Benneton or a UN diversity program and not 1950s America. None of the hair styles fit. None of the accents fit. None of the word choices fit. It's like the series just ran over to the nearest mall, found a bunch of kids and their parents, and asked them to pretend to be in the Fallout setting. Even the humour is typically straight from the Millennial handbag, with a ton of sarcasm and double entendres.
This incongruity with the setting continues with the casting, where Brotherhood of Steel recruits (called Aspirants), some of whom have been training with the Brotherhood as foot soldiers for most of their childhood, look like they haven't done a push up in their lives. They don't look like recruits with years of physical training, they look like their only battles were with controllers in their hands. The notable use of a waifish, almost skeletal actor to play the 'best' Aspirant in the pile, the one chosen for promotion, when that actor looks like they would struggle breaking bread or holding a coffee for any extended length of time is a good example. They clearly cared more about that person's demographic makeup than they did whether they actually looked like what the role demanded.
The main character from the vault is effectively a Mary Sue. In the first episode, she spouts her vault resume to convince the leadership of the vault that she's a good candidate for marriage to a man in another vault, something they do to help the bloodlines. She's literally good at everything she does, from hand to hand, to shooting, to science, to people, to bravery, to intelligence ... her only flaw is being naive, and that gets cured out of her quick, so her one real flaw is more or less gone by the end of the first episode.
There's a lot of nods to items, people and places in the game, but this is where it gets messy. The absolute and utter retcon of the lore in at least four of the games by this series is, well, unforgivable. An entire faction, probably the most positive and interesting one, is completely wiped off the Earth. It just doesn't exist.
I watched long enough to learn that, and then shut it off. It was OK, and moderately entertaining to that point, with the caveats listed above, but if you want me to swallow your casting nonsense and utter disregard for the setting at the same time, that's just not going to happen.
I've given it four stars out of deference to the games, but this show isn't really all that good at all. There's a lot of fans who will clearly vote it up because Dogmeat is in it, or the Junk Jet, or a cool cowboy ghoul, but the core jobs of making a compelling story, the writing, the casting, and the sets only see one stand out (the sets). You really need all three.
The retcon, though? Unforgiveable. The show runner should honestly be ashamed, after saying time and time again that his show was canon. That was 100% a lie.
Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness (2012)
Better than Expected
I watched the three DnD movie 'preamble' with my girlfriend to lead into the opening day of the new DnD movie and this was the last of the three movies that came out out between 2000 and 2012.
The general plot is that one of the worst evil artifacts in the DnD game, the Book of Vile Darkness, is being re-assembled from three parts, centuries after having been broken up and hidden to keep it safe.
The bad guys have one of the three pieces (the pages) already, but in the intervening centuries, the ink for the book has been found and destroyed, so new ink must be created. Due to the nature of the book, it must come in the form of the anguished blood of a truly honorable man. The protagonist's father, a Knight of the New Sun, a knightly order devoted to the God of the Sun, Pelor, is that man. He is kidnapped early in the movie, destined to be drained dry by the forces of evil.
His son attempts to find him and reach him, in order to effect a rescue, but in order to do so, he must join with a band of evil mercenaries, who have been recruited to make an attempt for the third piece of the book, the cover. The movie follows him as he attempts to join the group and pass himself off as evil, in order to follow them to where his father is being held.
The acting isn't fantastic and there's some mild over emoting by most of the core cast, but the writing was actually better than the Hollywood average these days, surprisingly. The ethos and motives of each of the four evil mercenaries is explored, and you can see why they do what they do. Competent acting and decent writing make a better than expected tale, and what it really lacked was money for better costuming and effects, and some decent promotion.
Barry Aird as Bezz, a Vermin Lord wizard that's one of the four evil mercenaries, is a bit of a treat, and steals a lot of the scenes he's in with his pithy commentary about life and reality. You can sense that he's operating on another level than the rest of the cast.
Generally speaking, there's more here for fans of DnD (and in particular The Forgotten Realms setting) than general fans of fantasy, though there's so much overlap in that Venn diagram that most fantasy fans will probably find themselves at least somewhat entertained.
Shame it's so hard to find! With is being direct to DVD in the first place, only distributed in Europe, and the distributor going under in 2018, that I could even find a copy via the Internet Archive is amazing.
The Legend of Vox Machina (2022)
I wanted to like it, but just can't.
This show is essentially sheer ego stroking.
After years of having hundreds of thousands of people sit around while they filmed hundreds of 4+ hour episodes where you got the privilege of watching trained voice actors play DnD around a table, and making bazillions on their Kickstarter, clearly the fame got to their head. Now it's more about them than the characters, the plot or the setting.
So, if you want to watch anime style animation that doesn't jive with a bunch of Millennial and Gen Z slang that could have dropped right out of any modern, hip, sitcom or web series, so none of their dialogue fits at all ... be my guest.
If you want sarcastic, snide Millennial and Gen Z insults and humour to pepper the whole thing, so it's like you're sitting on a bus, surrounded by university students making fun of each other ... be my guest.
If you want to marvel at the clumsily introduced EDI inserts that are so literally scripted and dropped in that you cannot but think that they were literally working to a checklist ... be my guest. I especially loved the bearded magic shop owner in gaudy, Romani style make up, the pansexual gnome that can't keep it in his pants for more than 30 seconds, or - the piece de resistance - the 'master hunter' in a wheel chair. I mean, seriously, how do you get to be a master hunter when you can't even go into the forest? Onto a mountain? Do four of them carry him in the wilderness so that he can feel like he fits in? When you feel you need to insert this nonsense into a fantasy story where it clearly sticks out like a 21st century identity politics it is, you're missing the point of being a storyteller.
Above and beyond that, the pacing is just ridiculous. You drop right in the middle of the first campaign and you're literally in the middle of the celebration of their victory when the attack that drives the second campaign hits. Sure, it's based on some actual DnD campaigns, but come on, let them get a beer. Give the audience a bit of a denouement.
So, I made it about half way into the second season and then called it quits. I know all kinds of people who watched the original Critical Role series and loved it, and they also love Vox Machina, but they are all 20 years my junior and they couldn't give a fig about character, plot or setting. Just be sarcastic and charming and entertaining and they will worship the ground you walk on, to the tune of 12M buckaroos. You don't need to be good at telling a story or playing a role, you just have to be audacious. Apparently.
No thanks. Even my own DnD campaign has more maturity than this lot.
Maggie (2015)
Decent Acting, Decent Story, with a couple of Quibbles
This isn't a zombie movie. It's a character drama set inside a milieu where it's a contagion that's driving the character interaction. If you're expecting a bunch of shooting and comical zombie-slaying action, this is not going to be your movie.
Instead, it's more of a story about a teenage girl in palliative care, and the family around her that has to manage her decline and find a way to get some dignity into the process, while also managing the needs of the larger community to stay safe. It was shot before COVID, but to be honest, I think it's gained more poignancy since COVID hit. We can now understand the decisions being made by the authorities, and they don't seem so draconian.
The plot is generally good, because it's a small, short vignette into the life of one family. It's kind of hard to screw that kind of truncated, limited story up. It's the framework for emotional depth and interaction, and that's what matters.
The movie does expect you to accept some doozies, like the fact that highly contagious people are being allowed to go home to spend their final days with their family, and will just get 'checked up upon' by health authorities, the police, etc. And only removed forcibly if they refuse to return to quarantine. The disease is understood in its propagation, but there's still no cure, and this is a whopper to have to swallow, especially when the establishing shots show burning fields, and devastated cities.
The second is that the only method the authorities have to 'help' the infected pass on is a drug cocktail that's apparently incredibly painful, so there's a massive motivation for families to avoid quarantine and find another route. We've been euthanizing animals (and in some countries, people) for decades with drugs that do the job painlessly and very, very rapidly. I think the plot could have done just fine with only the dehumanizing quarantine process driving families to find another way. In fact, I think it would have been stronger if families chose from two viable options, rather than fled from one clearly non-viable one.
But, if you can get past those two whoppers and accept them, then the rest of the plot falls into place, and you're going to witness some very decent acting and fine writing. This is a real family, a blended family with half brothers and sisters, a step Mom and an aging father, and all the family members bring something to the table to sell the fiction that only a few weeks prior, this was a functional family in a small farming community.
You really do get the sense of inevitability in the progression of the disease, the tension within the family from differences in opinion on how to handle it, the difficult decisions to relocate vulnerable people to a safer place and juggle the needs of everyone in the family, etc. In some places, the interaction verges on stereotype, i.e. The daughter and father mock Mom's terrible cooking as a means of bonding in her final days, but for the most part, the dialogue is excellent.
So, if you like character dramas and want a different take on zombie flicks that will get you thinking a bit, enjoy. It's pretty well crafted, very well directed, beautifully shot and scored, and has some decent writing and acting. Above average fare considering what's coming out of Hollywood these days.
The Witcher: Blood Origin (2022)
It's Bald-Faced Co-Option
What do you do when you have what you think it a decent fantasy story, but you're not confident that the public will actually want to watch it?
You co-opt an existing bit of IP so that you can trick people into viewing your show, even though it has little or nothing to do with the actual IP you're co-opting.
Aside from fear of rejection, why else would you want to co-opt an existing property like this? Well, you might not like the tone of the original and think you want to 'fix it' with some diversity casting, by shifting the focus to female characters, by ignoring the clearly eastern European origins of the product to shoehorn in some colour from around the world, etc. You can do wonderful things like include a deaf character using ASL in a fantasy world modeled on Medieval Poland, where the 'American' in 'American Sign Language" makes literally no sense, and it's being used about 1500 years before it was invented!
All of that co-option could still ultimately be entertaining, even if it had literally nothing to do with the original books or games, but you'd have to have good writing to carry it.
Well, his series does not have good writing. In fact, it's atrocious, so bad that I honestly think it was intentionally bad, as if the goal was to ruin people's take on the original IP.
The dialogue doesn't fit the characters or the setting, the plot has so many holes you could drive a fleet of trucks through them, motivations are inscrutable or make no sense, and it's chock full of what I call 'invented drama'. If you need tension, you insert pretend interpersonal tension between characters and that stands in as a proxy for actual tension the plot should be introducing in the scene.
Of course, this style of co-option is all over the place, whether we're talking Willow, Lord of the Rings or The Witcher, there's a small army of smarmy, smug and arrogant show runners that think they know better and can improve on the classics with their new, modernized takes. Of course, they won't be brave enough to put their money where their mouth is and actually create a new product to put into the market. That would expose them for what they are.