Gordon Freeman, Pit Diving Messiah

I recently played through Half-Life 2 again, thanks to the excellent Xbox 360 release of The Orange Box. In Half-Life 2, you play hero Gordon Freeman who has returned from whatever magical place he was hiding to help fight off the evil force of The Combine. In the time that Gordon as been sitting out on some other dimension, he's become a sort of Messianic figure, the last "Freeman". This despite the fact Gordon Freeman is a mute who only communicates through flipping switches and killing many, many people and creatures.

Why is it that sci-fi movie and game sequels so often require that the main character to be elevated to the status of Jesus Christ, Serial Killing Superstar? The Matrix, Oblivion, Chronicles of Riddick, Halo 3, The Passion of the Christ; all have Messianic heroes. Can't we have more John McClanes? The Wrong Guy in The Wrong Place at The Wrong Time (with excellent marksmanship)?

Despite the fact that everybody in Half-Life 2, hero or villain, swoons at the presence of Gordon Freeman, Gordon has only two attributes that make him a hero. First is the afformentioned Massive Killing Potential. Like many video game heroes, Gordon can carry more weapons and ammo than the laws of physics normally allow and switches between them very rapidly. As my friend Alec Muzzy has stated to me, you need to suspend disbelief and I do, mostly because I need all the guns and ammo to kill the hundreds of troops rushing at me.

Gordon's supreme skill, imbued to him by you, the player, is his extreme desire to jump into pits. If you or I saw a pit in real life which we could safely jump into put could not easily come back out of the same way, it is highly unlikely that we would jump into the pit. Gordon Freeman, on the other hand, must jump into pits. If you can jump in (without dying) and can't jump back out (and you haven't been there before), you no for certain that you must jump in. The lord god of the Half-Life universe has given his son Freeman a sign that this is the way to go.

Gordon wouldn't need to jump into so many pits if there was a straight path from point Alpha to point Lambda, unfortunately two things get in his way. The first is debris. Gordon's world is crumbling at a rapid pace and 9 out of 10 halways a blocked by colapsed roofs and piles of cars. If Gordon Freeman is very bad at climbing over piles of debris and climbing in general, so he'll have to find another way around.

The next problem is locked doors. Gordon's debris problems pale in comparison to his locked door problems. Most of the world's doors are locked, and Gordon has no ability to unlock a standard door. If the door uses a huge switch or giant crank he can deal, but the average door is a mystery that he's never worked out. Not only is unlocking a door out of Gordon's reach, but so knocking it down.

If only Gordon could knock down locked doors and walls he'd get around quick, but despite having a big crowbar, 5 guns, several grenades, a rocket launcher, and a weapon that bends the fabric of the universe Gordon can't seem to pass break down a single door. He's also positively stimied by fences and wire mesh security glass. A simple pair of wire cutters would save Gordon hours of running in circles.

Half-Life 2 is the ultimate in on-rails FPS. You're lead down a single fixed path and see all the same sequences everyone else sees. It's a great manufactured experience, but completely manufactured nontheless. In many ways it accomplishes what the Full Motion Video games of the early 90's wanted to to but couldn't: Place the player straight in the middle of a movie. It's pure thrill, like heroin (hey kids, use drugs!).

It's a great game, and the ultimate anti-game. Half-Life 2 lacks strategy, and long term choices. A choice you make will only effect your ammo supply and life totals until you die or until you reach another room full of ammo. Because of that I don't think it can ever occupy the same place in gamers hearts filled by open-ended games like GTA (and Bioshock to a lesser extent), MMOs, and any multiplayer game.

The Consumers are the real losers

MOVIE REVIEW: The Producers
Horrible Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) and mild mannered account Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) discover that they can make more money by prodcuing a flop and conning investors than by producing a hit. The set out to make the worst musical ever: Springtime for Hitler. Based on the hit musical based on the 1968 non-musical movie.

The Producers is bad in a way that's hard to quanity. It's the worst kind of bad. The first circle of bad films are bad because they're trying to be serious but are completely absurd, or absurdly poorly made. You can enjoy a film like that ironically.

The second circle of bad are films that are bad because they are not entertaing. These are dramatic films that aren't engaging and comedies that aren't funny and action films with little action or really hard to enjoy action. They're like waiting in a Doctors office. You would rather be some place else. You wish you had a magazine.

The third and lowest circle are the rare films that are actively bad. The films that are painful to watch. You want to turn your eyes away from the scream. It's like that guy at a party who's really loud. You wish he would just leave. This is the circle that The Producers falls into.

Every single performance in the film is awful. The two main characters are intolerable, loud, and constantly wearing weird expressions on their faces. They make me pine for the restrained performance of Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate. When one actor is bad, you can blame the actor. When everybody is bad, it's the director.

Director Susan Stroman was the Director and Choreographer of the stage version of The Producers. If there's one thing you can tell about The Producers, it's that it's a stage musical. Every line is yelled so the cheap seats can hear it. Every musical number is blocked as though it was being performed on stage. Some are performed exactly as seen on stage. Every joke is exaggerated to the point that nearly every single one falls flat. I had trouble enjoying the music as I was so distracted by the performances. Cinematography is flat and unimaginitive. It's mostly designed to simulate the effect of watching the event from a theater.

Not everything is horrible. Some of the songs are cute when I can tolerate the performances. Unfortunately most of the songs feel unatural, uncomfortable. They didn't belong in that form on the big screen, like the entire movie.

1.5 Stars. Painful.