DC Universe Online is a courageous breath of fresh air!  They have admirably risen to the challenge of building a game around iconic characters that players will NOT be allowed to control.  Yes, dear readers, they have done the seemingly impossible – they’ve built a game involving Batman where *I* don’t mind that I can’t BE Batman!

While some early cinematic trailers had fans worried that they’d be spending all of their time fighting generic thugs and playing the role of “sidekick” to well known NPC characters, DCUO’s team has instead developed a bold, unique world for its players to inhabit.

We begin with a flashback of sorts – a battle rages between earth’s mightiest heroes and its most terrible villains.  After some serious fan-service, Lex Luthor’s forces stand triumphant – the corpses of the Justice League littering the ground around them.  At this moment, an armada controlled by Braniac emerges and begins a siege of the now hero-less Earth!  In the wake of his greatest victory, Luthor is faced with the prospect of total annihilation!  He is forced to devise a bold and startling contingency…

Now, the “safe” choice here would be to use some sort of preposterous gag involving time travel where Lex Luthor goes back to the past to warn his enemies of the impending invasion (instead of, for example, just telling HIMSELF not to kill them all and/or to crush Braniac back when he was just a green-skinned doofus in hotpants) and blah blah blah. Ignore that! There is no such silliness here!

DCUO wisely avoids this rather clichéd and unsatisfying route and instead offers a more gripping scenario:

The world is a near-futuristic dystopian hellscape where most of the well-known characters are dead. Led by a battle-scarred Lex Luthor, a desperate and tenuous alliance of new heroes and villains must form a resistance army whose sole purpose is to repel the invading Braniac armada filled with strange and powerful creatures from a thousand worlds AND super-powered zombie humans controlled by Braniac directly.

Inspired by their martyred idols (both heroic and villainous) players can ally their characters with power-appropriate groups like the Speed Force, the Marvels, Amazonians or the Sons of Batman.  Each group has at its center monuments to the great deeds of the fallen giants that inspired them and players are tasked with living up to those legends as they seek to fill the void left in the wake of their demise!  You can sport their colors and wear costumes and armor that honor and reflect their iconic status and – because you do so as part of a coherently implemented group and movement – it never bothers you to see a city filled with LITERALLY NOTHING BUT PEOPLE IN SLIGHTLY-MODIFIED BATMAN COSTUMES.

The alternative really is silly.  Save the world by grinding away on generic henchmen while the Real Deal Heroes fight in scripted, but ultimately pointless instanced encounters? Ye gods! Change the future by stopping urban street crime? Perish the thought!  Play a villain who ACTUALLY has the ability to defeat Batman? Nonsense!

Luckily, we have no such problems to worry about.  DCUO is an excellent, innovative game that brings new vision and wonder for both gamers and comic fans alike!

Editor’s Note:

No one from OUR Earth has had the chance to properly play or review DC Universe Online yet, so the quality and features of OUR universe’s DCUO remain uncertain at this time. Concerned marketeers, lawyers, etc. should find a dimensional portal and seek out reviewers from parallel Earths if they have comments or concerns.

In other words, this is satire.

Inception is a very good film. If you’re one of the handful of people who haven’t seen it yet, you should make time to do so. It’s well-acted, tightly-directed and provides a story that unfolds in a generally satisfying way. Its most successful moments are almost entirely visual and those portions of the film are truly unique and compelling and make it a worthy effort entirely on their own.

That being said, I found its core philosophical and narrative challenges to be rather uninspired and some of the story’s choices (particularly near the end) were disappointingly shallow. Inception is a movie defined by new vistas, but not new ideas.

In my view, it exists on the film spectrum occupied on one end by The Matrix and on the other by Dark City. In fact, it felt very much like a movie that has been written and re-written numerous times in the shadow of those earlier films. The result is a partial success – it is better than The Matrix and not as good as Dark City.

Spoilers follow from this point forward:

Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

- Zhuangzi – Chinese philospher (369-286 BC)

That’s Inception in a nutshell – ideas that have been rattling around in recorded human consciousness for the better part of two and a half thousand years. Hundreds of years before Zhuangzi, the Greek philosopher Gorgias tackled the same issues. And later Descartes (he of “cogito ergo sum” fame) and hundreds of others weighed in as well.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine that Inception was scripted without some rather direct inspiration from good ol’ Zhuangzi. See if any of this rings a bell:

He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.

Some of that is nearly word-for-word from the film.

But my point is not to accuse Christopher Nolan of theft or plagiarism or anything other sort of intellectual dishonesty. My major criticism of the film is that it chickens out and presents a rather banal consideration of the philosophical challenges that inspired it.  It asks the Big Question (“Is it ALL A DREAM?”) and then opts for the cop-out answer (“It’s up to the audience to decide for themselves.”).

It’s a bit of a tall order to expect a film to offer something truly NEW to an issue that’s been puzzled over by many of history’s great thinkers, but to fail to stand behind even the most juvenile, surface interpretations of the issue is disappointing.

Which leads me back to The Matrix and Dark City. Both films – like Inception – deal with concepts of “reality” and with the so-called “problem of other minds”. You can only know what’s in your OWN mind and you can only understand other people and even the world around you by analogy. You can’t trust your perception – only that you are, in fact, CAPABLE of perception, which leads to all sorts of Philosophy 101 queries:

Is the world real?

Are the people around you real?

Is your world real or a facade?

If the world you perceive is false, but more pleasant than reality, would you want to “wake up”?

All three films splash around joyfully in this rather shallow pool and the audience is understandably amused by the display. It’s like a late-night, freshmen year bull-session – fun and engaging enough while everyone is just killing time, but goofy and mostly pointless in the long run.  Its value is as a catalyst for fun – not as a sustaining motivator.  Only Dark City seems to REALLY be in on this gag.

The Matrix fails because it thinks these ideas are revelatory and Dark City succeeds because it never loses sight of the rather trivial nature of its core inspiration.

Inception fails because it puts too much stock in the narrative value of the “secret” philosophical challenge. By failing to fully clarify itself throughout its climax and into its final scenes, the result feels both lazy and uncertain. The resulting crisis of narrative confidence ripples back through the rest of the story and makes it just feel like a stylish – but futile – exercise. The Matrix suffers from the same problems.

In contrast, Dark City revels in its “secret” and presents it clearly and without equivocation. This leaves us with a complete and extremely satisfying narrative journey. It doesn’t “leave the top spinning”, so to speak.

Inception mistakes this narrative equivocation for depth.  Have the top spin perfectly or knock the damn thing over and the film immediately improves.

All of that being said, Inception is a noble – and FUN – failure. Like I mentioned previously, the visuals are worth the price of admission and – perhaps best of all – they AREN’T available in 3D.

UPDATE: All is now well.

One line review:

A cheap, purely emotional ending to what had been (at least initially) presented as a smart, methodical narrative.

Detailed thoughts:

The writers made a point to say that “not everything would be answered” and that the show was “always about the characters” which, to me, is pretty lame.  Seinfeld was a show about its characters.  The Sopranos was a show about its characters.  LOST was a show about a magical mystery island full of surprise polar bears and monsters.

From the very beginning, it was structured such that the overarching narrative was preeminent and where the “point” of the entire affair was that there was a “Big Mystery” at the center of it all that would eventually be revealed.  For the first few seasons, it seemed to coherently move in that direction.  Clues were given, small mysteries were uncovered and then resolved.  Half the fun of watching the show was trying to piece the puzzle together.

Somewhere along the line (Season 4-onward, in my opinion) they stopped delivering satisfying explanations for ANYTHING and got tangled up in a mess of parallel, time-displaced narratives, followed by ACTUAL time travel and a slow, relentless descent into metaphysical vagueness and seemingly endless side-track narratives that never got resolved.

I think it’s pretty clear that the gag was ALWAYS supposed to be that the island was some sort of “Limbo” analog.  The fact that EVERYONE in the audience got that in the first season sent the writers down a largely fruitless path of trying to find a way to stick with that basic concept while not TECHNICALLY having it be “Limbo”.  After all, your “Big Mystery”-focused show is going to have a tough go of it if everyone figures it out from the very beginning.

It’s a hell of a problem and I don’t know what the right response would have been.  Stick to your original plan and likely lose a large chunk of the audience or deny the obvious and then try to layer on tons and tons of red herrings, subtle variations on the original plan and oodles of dead-end side-stories and hope for the best?  There’s not a good answer.  I CAN say that they never should’ve let it drag on for six seasons.

I definitely found the touchy-feely pseudo-religious focus of the final part of the finale to be DEEPLY disappointing.  Obviously, LOST was always a show with a pronounced sense of the metaphysical, but that was (at least initially) tempered with an effort at grounding everything in some sort of rational, “scientific” context.  The worst kind of deus ex machina is one that ACTUALLY just uses god to explain its loose ends.

Overall, I think that LOST is a noble failure, similar to Battlestar Galactica – another serial sci-fi drama that ran off the rails into confusion and that ultimate cop-out: “It’s up to the VIEWER to decide.”  Like BSG, its first two seasons were rock-solid and it ran into trouble when it became clear that the network wanted more than three seasons worth of storyline.  In addition, it was GREAT sci-fi that got ruined by bad pseudo-religious silliness.

In the end, I’m grumpy because I liked it a great deal and wanted to see it live up to its full potential.  Let me be clear: You can do MUCH worse than LOST.  Despite all its warts, it’s still better than most of the stuff on TV.

I hold his opinions in high regard.  That is not to say that I AGREE with them all the time, but I find that he regularly displays an extremely difficult-to-balance mix of advocacy and objectivity in his writing.  Objectivity, contrary to the notions put forth by cable news outlets and the like, is NOT simply the act of “presenting both sides” or of creating a bullet list of positive and negative aspects of the thing being considered.  Objectivity allows you to (even DEMANDS that you) take a stand and defend your position, so long as you are willing to have your mind changed by a reasonable counter-argument.

This is, in my view, what made his work with Gene Siskel so compelling. They were two smart, strong-willed people who could ferociously disagree, but who could also be reasoned with.

And Ebert has had his fair share of public dust-ups that could easily have challenged that objectivity to the point of failure  (his feud with Vincent Gallo who – after Ebert gave a scathing review to “Brown Bunny” – mocked his weight and put a hex on Ebert’s colon, for example).  But he’s displayed a fine capacity for tolerance and reconsideration (going so far as to re-review a recut version of Gallo’s film positively).  THAT’S the Roger Ebert I love.

Tough as nails, honest, but fair.  A man who says what he thinks, but who is not dogmatic in his thinking.

Which is why I find his zealous criticism of the idea that there is potential for art in games so troubling.  This is not a new assertion from Ebert, but he has chosen to renew his dismissal of games with greater energy and volume as of late and it has garnered a great deal of attention (and an enormous volume of contrary arguments) as a result.  I’ve found many of these counter-arguments to be trivial (usually asserting that Ebert is “too old” or some such), but there are also a few that I think are quite worthy.  For example, Brian Ashcraft’s open letter on the subject is insightful and compelling.  I find Ashcraft’s comment that “[film criticism has moved past the question] “Is film art?” and has now settled on “Is this film art?”" to be worth consideration.

In spite of this, Ebert remains steadfast and, unfortunately, has primarily chosen to respond to his critics with derision and the kind of petulant defenses I’d expect of (and I admit that this is a cheap shot) someone like Glenn Beck or Intelligent Design “advocates”.  Arguing that the lack of  ”a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets” means that games cannot be art is preposterous.  What, then, was art before there was GREAT art?

Is there only “great art”?  Is anything less evocative that the Sistine Chapel simply to be dismissed?  I assume that Ebert would not claim that this is the case, but it IS the logical conclusion of the (quite weak) line of argument he puts forward.

His other significant act of rhetorical “Beckery” comes from his constant, but subtle, confusion of the act of CONSUMPTION and the act of CREATION.  He routinely targets the act of PLAYING a game as a means of arguing that the game, itself, is not artful.  But the same can be said of watching a film, reading a book, listening to music, etc.  Is there “art” to be found in the simple act of being part of an audience in those cases? If not, how is it a valid criticism of the artfulness of games?

This leads to the most profound weakness of Ebert-as-game-critic.  He has no idea HOW games are made.  He says things like “I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist” and then calls out the idea that Kings are responsible for the “vision” behind cathedrals or that film directors control and dictate the creative and artistic force in the production of a movie.  This may be the case (though it’s rare that a film gets made simply through the force of will and creative chops of a director, the art is collaborative and diverse beyond simple direction), but it is NOT something that game development lacks.

Quite to the contrary, we’ve had more than our share of “auteur” creators over the years – people without whom revolutionary and inventive new games would never have come about.  Will Wright, Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, Richard Garriott, Hideo Kojima – the list goes on and on.  But Ebert chooses to cite John Carmack – an engineer, not an artist or designer – to flesh out his “insight” into the creative process of game making.  This may simply be an error of inexperience, but it displays an ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the vision and creativity necessary to develop games.  Yes, we work in large teams and we look to market trends to help get projects green-lit and we are interested in creating challenges that can be overcome by our audience, but so do movies.  Just because OUR puzzles require basic physical interaction in order for you to overcome them doesn’t mean they are substantially different from the puzzles often presented in great films.

Is there REALLY a difference between the “a-ha” moment that comes when you fully realize what’s been going on all throughout “Dark City” and the feeling you get from working out a puzzle challenge in a game?  It’s a sense of satisfaction that comes from ACCOMPLISHMENT in both cases.  The “big reveal” in a film is basically just a puzzle for lazy people – it does the work for you.

And as for the “creation of one artist” argument, I’ll just assume he means “controlled or overseen” by one artist – since it’s obvious that dozens if not HUNDREDS of people are necessary to make a “great film”.  We video game makers also regularly work with singular, creative visions that are controlled by a single person.  We don’t just feed engineers head-first into a marketing computer and wait for a game to pop out on the other side. For every new game that comes out, there is a person who has put their neck on the line CREATIVELY – a person who has loved, believed in, struggled for and advocated on behalf of a creative and – yes – ARTISTIC vision for that game.

We face the same trials that film makers do.  It’s hard to get money for bold work, but it’s a worthy thing to fight for and many, MANY people do.  It’s hard to control a team of hundreds of people while struggling to maintain your vision.  Compromise looms at every turn, but still people fight – and sometimes WIN – to make games according to that vision.

No, there isn’t great “art” in the PLAYING of a game, but it is intellectually disingenuous to judge a creative work simply by the mechanisms through which it is consumed.  The art lies in the CREATION, not in the CONSUMPTION.  If we are exclusively beholden to how our work is consumed, then nothing can ever be elevated beyond the simple label of “product”.

After all, I’ve watched “Citizen Kane” in my underpants and it somehow survived the indignity.  It’s STILL a great work of art.

The result?

You and I live in a world where we DON’T believe in lots of weird and wonderful things.

For example, we don’t believe that some lambs are the fruit of a magical super-plant.

No, really.

In an effort to figure out why cotton exists, medieval “scientists” decided that the best possible explanation was that a special kind of lamb sprouted from a plant and was connected to to that plant by an umbilical cord.  The Vegetable Lamb spent its life grazing about its host-plant and – once the plant died – the lamb died, leaving behind cotton.

THAT’s what science used to be like.  Totally insane, comic-book crazy explanations for EVERYTHING.

And I CHALLENGE you to tell me you’d rather live in a world where cotton comes from a stupid, boring little bush rather than from an insane plant/animal hybrid that exists in a legendary far-off land.

Best Picture

Who will win: Inglourious Basterds

I know everyone is saying Hurt Locker, but I’ve just got a hunch that Tarantino will score a dark horse victory here.

Who SHOULD win: Precious

I honestly can’t understand how anyone could have seen this film and come away convinced that any other picture this year was better.

Actor in a Leading Role

Who will win: Colin Firth

Who SHOULD win: Colin Firth, George Clooney or Jeff Bridges

Morgan Freeman was good, but you shouldn’t win an Oscar simply because you already looked like the guy you’re portraying.

Actor in a Supporting Role

Who will win: Christoph Waltz

Who SHOULD win: Cristoph Waltz

The other nominees should just stay home.

Actress in a Leading Role

Who will win: Sandra Bullock

Who SHOULD win: Gabourey Sidibe

I actually think there’s a good chance of things breaking the right way and giving Gabourey Sidibe the nod, but there seems to be a lot of energy in favor of rewarding Sandra Bullock for finally making a movie that wasn’t terrible.  I’d put it at 60/40 in favor of the wrong actress winning.

Actress in a Supporting Role

Who will win: Mo’Nique

Who SHOULD win: Mo’Nique

Her performance towers above every other nominee.

Animated Feature Film

Who will win: Up

Who SHOULD win: The Secret of Kells

I LOVED Up, but The Secret of Kells is just a better film with a more unique creative vision.  I can actually see it winning in an upset if enough Academy voters bothered to watch it.

Directing

Who will win: Quentin Tarantino

Who SHOULD win: Lee Daniels

I have to go with Tarantino since I’m going with Inglourious Basterds for Best Picture because you almost never see the award go to the director of something else.  That being said, Lee Daniels work on Precious was amazing.  To craft a believable version of the world in the midst of a story so horrific that is punctuated by honest moments of joy and humor AND that’s informed by an overarching sense of hope is borderline miraculous.

Documentary Feature

Who will win: The Cove

Who SHOULD win: The Cove

There’s a chance of Food, Inc. winning because there are lots of stupid people in the world.

Adapted Screenplay

Who will win: Precious

Who SHOULD win: Precious

Original Screenplay

Who will win: The Hurt Locker

Who SHOULD win: The Hurt Locker or A Serious Man

Maybe.

Anywho, in the meantime, you can continue to stalk me via any or all of the following means:

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Standard caveats apply: Opinions posted are my own/do not represent The Mothership, may include salty language and/or bizarre iconography, not liable for fits of Lovecraftian madness, etc.

Lung cancer. It took him pretty quickly after the initial diagnosis.

He opted for hospice in his home, which was astonishingly humane and dignified and I can’t say enough great things about them.

For a few weeks, an army of well-wishers came to see him. We visited once a week, usually on Sundays to watch football with him.

Though he faded pretty substantially and was very weak, he never lost his wit, humor and mental acuity. By last weekend, he was at peace with his situation and was ready to pass, but for one thing. He hadn’t gotten a chance to see my brother, Zach, who lives in California.

Zach arrived late on Tuesday and immediately went to my grandparents’ house. He spent a few hours with my grandfather, just talking and getting a chance to connect one last time. By Zach’s account, the talk put him at ease and was one of the best conversations they’d ever had. My grandfather was that kind of guy, even at the end. Soon after, Zach went spend to the night at our Mom’s and everyone at my grandparents’ house went to bed. Or so we thought.

Some time in the early hours of the morning, my grandmother returned to my grandfather’s bedside. They spent the next hours together and just prior to dawn he passed away in his own living room with his wife at his side. It was the right way for him to go. Just him and his beloved Bride.

My grandfather had seen everyone he needed to see, he’d given us all the best kind of comfort and guidance in those last days. We all knew he was ready and that his passing would be cause for celebrating his life as much as it would be for mourning the loss of him. And man, what a life he’d lived.

I can say with pretty firm confidence that lives like his are a thing of the past – great and meaningful and special and blessed, full lives. He helped save the world. He served in the Navy during WWII and – when the War ended – moved into private life and profession leveraging the experiences and relationships he’d built during his time in the service. He got married, had a family and thrived.

He saw the world with my grandmother and filled his home with artifacts of his life and travels. He was a leader of men, unto his last (every time we visited him in the final months, someone from his church would come by, scrambling to figure out how he’d been keeping the parish running smoothly for decades with little help from others). He taught his son and then my brother and cousin and I what it meant to be a man – kindness, humility and the kind of deference to women that never suggests they NEED our help, but rather that they deserve our respect. He also taught us all how to craft a story, tell a joke and – when appropriate – employ subtle, sarcastic humor to make a point. He taught us all to love the Redskins above all other teams. At my wedding in May, he danced with more of the young girls than anyone else in attendance and was widely hailed by those same ladies for his talent on the dance floor. Even after he took ill earlier this summer, he still made sure to hit the links for a few holes of golf (weather permitting).

He also endured his share of tragedy, some unimaginably terrible, but always with faith, grace, decency and calm. This was important to the rest of us, as it served to lead by example and taught us how to face adversity with dignity and humility.

In short, he lived life on his own terms and they were the kind of terms that most of us can only ever hope to achieve. I will always miss him, but am glad that his suffering was relatively brief, his final weeks filled with love, friends, family and fond remembrance. A lot of people say this sort of thing, but in his case it was truly the case – he was One of A Kind in the best of ways.