John Carter

The problem with adapting the John Carter of Mars series of books is that everyone’s already stolen all of the best scenes. As prolific as the original works were, their influence so obviously and completely permeates the history of sci fi cinema that seeing it in its original context feels weird. The sith aren’t weird insects, their followers of the dark side of the force. Don’t try to Jedi mind trick me, I know my sith. But, if you’re able to overcome your biases and appreciate the film John Carter on its own merits, I think you’ll see it’s not just the best movie this year, it’s one of the best ever.

Like all great adventures, John Carter begins with our hero; solitary, damaged by past atrocities. A veteran of the Civil War, John Carter roams the land aimless, with little will to live. That’s when Bryan Cranston happens upon him, in that infamous scene when he tries to recruit Carter to him team. He’s unsuccessful, but he does at least corner John Carter in a bar. It is at that moment that Carter, misreading the sign that says “Barsoom” as “barroom,” accidentally runs through a portal to Mars.

Upon arriving at the red planet, John Carter immediately discovers that the difference in gravity has given him super jumping ability, sort of like Superman before Superman just started flying everywhere. This power is so appealing to him that he starts bounding across the barren wasteland that is the planet, leaping like the king of kangaroos. He continues picking up speed and height, and soon enough is circumnavigating the globe in mere seconds. Eventually, he reverses Mars’ rotation, throwing the planet, and himself back in time.

John Carter decides to land and survey the damage he has done. He finds Mars populated by a green, four-armed people. Realizing he has to be careful, John Carter tries his best to blend in and not alter the future. This is when he runs into Willem Dafoe, a Martian scientist who has been developing a time traveling machine. John Carter considers himself lucky, until Willem Dafoe tells him that to go back to the future, he’d have to enroll in Mars High School and convince young Bryan Cranston to fall in love with his mom. That’s when John Carter realizes that Bryan Cranston was his dad and he was trying to help him all along!

John Carter meets young Bryan Cranston and convinces him to date his mom, only to find out that she’s been kidnapped on a diplomatic mission. So John Carter, Bryan Cranston and Willem Dafoe head off to rescue her from British space nazis. Along the way, a Martian beast monster attacks them while at the same time their ship’s AI betrays them. In a lucky turn of events, the AI accidentally blows the monster out of the airlock, giving John Carter the chance he needed to rip out its motherboards and shit.

The trio get to the bad guy space base and rescue John Carter’s mom. She’s spunky, making fun of John Carter’s height, much to his chagrin. As they make their daring escape, Willem Dafoe ends up fighting with and getting killed by Mark Strong. John Carter is very upset about this until Mark Strong reveals the big twist: he’s John Carter’s real father, and the evil space base is actually a time machine he built so his son could go home. But the only way to activate it is to shoot a pinpoint weakness in its outside.

John Carter gets in his alphabet-themed starfighter and flies around the base. He gets caught in a dangerous dogfight with Dominic West, until Bryan Cranston arrives and saves the day. This is when he yells him infamous catchphrase, “Never give up, never surrender. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” So John Carter uses his magic to fire a shot that someone curves downward into the hole, activating the time machine and sending him home…

Or so he thinks! John Carter wakes up in a mysterious pod, unplugging weird cables that were plugged into him. He looks around and sees that there are millions of similar pods all around him, as if all of mankind has been turned into living batteries. John Carter is dumped out of the pod into some weird pool, and prepares to die. Suddenly, a spaceship appears and lifts him out of the water. There, he meets Samuel L. Jackson, wearing an eyepatch, who tells him he’s putting a team together.

Needless to say, John Carter is an amazing movie and I can’t wait for the sequel.

Mass Effect 3

Commander Shepard certainly was aptly named. Over the course of the Mass Effect series, the Commander has continually grown her flock, enlisting the support of politicians, soldiers and organizations. Mass Effect 3 poses her biggest challenge, a threat so big she can no longer win with a small team. Instead, she must rally the entire galaxy to her cause. Yes, the Reapers are coming and the fate of sentient life hangs in the balance.
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The Hunger Games

Human sacrifice was a big part of a lot of cultures for a long time. Sure, now it sounds rather gaouche, but that’s because we live in slightly more sophisticated times. The Hunger Games is set in the future and it sounds like we can at least look forward to human sacrifice coming back in vogue. Here, 24 kids, aged 12-18, are taken to battle to the death in a futuristic arena to remind the population and, of course, make the best damn reality show ever. Because nothing says entertainment like an 18-year-old man fighting a 12-year-old girl.

It turns out there was some big war in North America, which left the world we know behind. Now the continent is run by the ruling class in the capitol city, with the rest of it (the losers in the war) divided into 12 districts and subjugated by capitol city peacekeepers. Every year, the city takes one boy and one girl from each district to compete in The Hunger Games battle royale, to remind the people who’s in charge and that revolution is a bad idea. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) comes from District 12, the poor coal mining district, and her getting sent to the games is basically a death sentence.

But she’s tough and spunky and makes a go of it. The Hunger Games is not a short movie, dedicating plenty of time to showing just how sick and bizarre this tradition is before giving us what everyone really wants, the bloodbath. There’s not much subtlety to the social commentary here, and the reality show set-up makes it difficult to read the characters. There’s a romance in the film that, at inception, is just an act to get audience sympathy. By the end of the film, it is not in anyway clear if that relationship transcended that or not. I never knew how anyone really felt or thought about what was going on.

I do give props to Jennifer Lawrence, who continues to prove herself one of the most talented young actors around. Katniss is tough and not very talkative, but Lawrence brings a lot more to her performance, giving us a window into her mind that I’m sure fans of the book didn’t need but someone like me appreciated. The rest of the cast is fine. Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson and Stanley Tucci all play weird city-dwellers and look like they’re having fun with their ridiculous wigs and outfits. Donald Southerland’s in here too, although he felt more like a sequel setup character than anything else.

A few scenes from The Hunger Games stuck with me. There’s a great scene when a particularly sad death provokes a riot that I thought was well done and I hope is a sign of things to come in the sequel. All I was really looking for was some fun action, and I got it, eventually. Hell, the movie has enough pathos, I even want to read the book now. But if you haven’t read the book, don’t want to read the book, or won’t be dragged to the theater by people who read the book, you’d probably be safe letting The Hunger Games pass you by.

SSX

When it was announced, the new SSX game was called Deadly Descents. It looked to be a departure from what the extreme sports series was known for, and I was worried about the direction it was going in. In the many months between that first trailer and the game’s release, the retitled SSX reshaped itself as both a modern interpretation of the franchise and a return to what made it fun in the first place.

It begins with the formation of a team called SSX, for Snow, Surf, Motocross. Despite the name, SSX is all about snowboarding and doesn’t actually partake in the other events. So I guess chock that up on the big board of terrible backronyms. Anyway, one of the guys on the team betrays the others, who decide they have to conquer the world’s most dangerous mountains to win some contest that I think they just made up. Along the way, they add new members to the team. The characters run the gamut from French model who loves adventure to Hawaiian guy who loves adventure. The story unfolds in comic-style cinematics that aren’t particularly good and frankly, if your into this game for the story, your weird.

Events are broken up into three modes: Race It, Trick It and Survive It. The first two are obvious, you win races by getting to the bottom of the mountain fastest, you win trick contests by scoring the most points. But when you get to the legendary deadly descents, the final level in each mountain range, your only objective is survival. Each mountain has a gimmick that you’ll have to deal with; a particularly rocky mountain, for example, will require the use of body armor. This gets especially crazy with the introduction of active gear, like wing suits used to extend jumps and survive big gaps. It’s a neat addition that makes the game just that little bit fresher.

But what really helps is that there simply hasn’t been anything filling the SSX void since the last game came out. The tricks are as reality-defying as ever, the jumps as ridiculous, the sense of momentum as exhilarating. Most of the time I spent playing this game reminded me of my glory days playing Tricky and SSX3 – and that’s not a bad thing at all. The original games’ quirky control scheme even remains an option for those veteran players who are still comfortable playing like that, but I found the new controls perfectly functional.

SSX lacks any real multiplayer, instead it chooses to follow the model established by Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and put all the focus on leaderboards. Whenever you complete an event, you immediately get to compare your performance to your friends’ and the rest of the world. What’s more, there are events that you can participate in for worldwide glory and in-game rewards. That’s right, if competing with your friends wasn’t enough, the game has its own currency, which you use to buy new gear for your characters, earning both cosmetic and gameplay bonuses. It’s all pretty slick and makes the game pretty addictive.

It wouldn’t be an SSX game without a great soundtrack and this new title does not disappoint. A mix of rap, electronic and rock will accompany you down the slopes that is just eclectic enough that I bet anyone will have at least one song that they love. As always, the music responds to how you’re playing, making the experience that much more cinematic. My favorite touch is the dubstep remix of Run DMC’s “It’s Tricky” that plays when you fill the tricky meter. That’s really this game in a nutshell. That familiar old song, remixed just enough to fit in 2012.