The Legend of Tarzan review

There's probably some unique challenges involved in writing a movie based on source material as old as Tarzan. Times change after all, and in trying to adapt the story to appeal to modern sensibilities you might lose something essential to the original piece. I don't know if that's what happened here, but I did not find this movie to be very enjoyable.


The plot was not bad, but the movie was very slow to get started: it took a while for anything to really happen. The first half was heavy with flashbacks filling us in on Tarzan's history, but I found these to have little impact, perhaps due to their short fragmented nature. It never really managed to make me care about the characters, and overall I just wasn't drawn into it.


Perhaps the biggest problem is that Tarzan himself is just plain boring. He has almost no character or personality, he never comes across as more than just a dour set of muscles. Neither his expression nor his voice ever really changed no matter what the situation.

Jane was more expressive and had some scenes that fleshed out her character a little bit, but it wasn't really enough, and it was dramatically obvious right from the start that she was just going to get kidnapped and Tarzan would have to rescue her. Hell, we even saw it in the trailer; her whole character was undermined before we even set foot in the cinema. But what made it worse is that Tarzan told her not to come but she insisted: the film-makers want us to believe that it's her fault that she was kidnapped, if she had just quietly stayed at home like (what I assume they believe is) a "good wife" then Tarzan wouldn't have had to rescue her. What's up with that?

Now she did have, like, one single scene where she was arguably actually useful, but it was far too little. I mean, at one point she actually had to be rescued in a flashback; she really never did amount to anything more than just a damsel in distress. What makes it really sad - apart from how clichéd and generally insulting that kind of writing is - is that even by being kidnapped and needing rescuing, she really didn't contribute very much to the plot. Ugh, I'd better leave this topic to the spoiler section actually.

I loved Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds, and I felt that his character in this movie borrowed heavily from that performance. Unfortunately the character was never really allowed to be very menacing or impressive, and as a result it just didn't work; Leon Rohm just wasn't a very impressive villain in the end.

There were a number of scenes in this movie that I did enjoy, and every single one of them featured Samuel L.M.Fing Jackson. He was genuinely the best thing about this film; his character was entertaining, relatable, and had a little more depth than I had been expecting. In fact, I found his back-story, delivered in a two-minute monologue, more intriguing than all of Tarzan's flashbacks.


The action was nothing special, with some potentially decent scenes let down by the now-standard Hollywood quick-cut shaky cam. The VFX wasn't quite good enough to bring some of the ambitious scenes to life; generally it was OK but there were a few moments troublesome enough to bring me out of the movie - but to be fair, I might be a little bit more sensitive to this kind of thing than most people.


Overall I'm going to give it a 6/10. There isn't really anything bad about it, there's just nothing particularly good about it either.

#####SPOILER WARNING#####

I mentioned that Jane being kidnapped wasn't even important, and that's because several members of the village were also kidnapped, and Rohm just generally needed to be stopped, so Tarzan was going to chase him down either way. So yeah, not only was it a tired cliché, it was also ultimately superfluous.


The film had some minor sub-plots that were probably intended to add depth, but really didn't amount to very much. Initially Tarzan seems to hate Africa, probably because of how much he suffered and how much family he lost there; I believe at one point he called it a "wretched place". But when he goes back... he gets repeatedly beaten up, his old friend gets killed, and his wife gets kidnapped and they both almost die. After this, he... stays there? What part of all that made him hate Africa any less?

Also, there's some brief hints that they want to have a baby, but no explanation why they haven't. Then at the end they have one. I assume that's supposed to be a happy ending, but they really didn't give me any reason to care, them having a baby at the end just didn't carry any weight.


Tarzan sure did get his bee-hind handed to him a whole lot this movie. I mean, out of several fights that he got into, he only really won one of them. The bit at the end where he finally faces off against Leon Rohm was particularly disappointing.

Speaking of Leon Rohm, him apparently falling for Jane just undermined his character, it didn't strengthen hers. I don't really understand the rationale behind it, other than perhaps to try to crib the scene from Inglorious where Hans Landa is having dessert with Shosanna Dreyfus.


By the way, near the end of the movie we finally hear Tarzan's roar, but I don't recall ever seeing him making it? Slightly strange that they didn't show him actually producing it, but I guess that would have required Tarzan to actually display energy or emotion, which they didn't seem to want for some reason.


The movie keeps going on about how big a deal Tarzan is; he's "Africa's favourite son", villages sing songs of his legend. And what legend is that exactly? All we see in the flashbacks is a wild boy lead a group of apes to hunt down and murder some typical tribesmen, and then get beaten up by another ape and need to be rescued by some white people. What part of that made him a famous legend that eveyone loves?


One issue I had was that I found the film's portrayal of animals to be somewhat inconsistent. The apes (which it claimed were not gorillas but something else?) were vicious bloodthirsty beasts. Hippos sped towards distant humans in water like they were planning to eat them, while lions nuzzle people affectionately (they seemed to have far more affection for Tarzan than the apes that were his family) and herds of elephants stop their nocturnal migrations (is this a real thing? Nocturnal elephants?) to have extended telepathic conversations (sort of) with strange humans. He was able to communicate well enough with apes and lions to get them to herd oxen, but not enough to say to his brother "Hey bro, don't mind us, just passing through". I dunno, I wish the film had been a bit more straight about saying something like "most herbivores won't go out of their way to attack you, but they will protect their territory", rather than "Not-gorilla apes will kill you, hippos will kill you, elephants are cool though" or whatever.

Also, whatever those apes were supposed to be, I had no sympathy for them. I'm surprised that the film seemed to expect us to at times. They were brutal and violent creatures that killed humans on sight, completely unlike my understanding of actual gorillas. By the way, why the hell was Jane wandering alone two steps away from their territory at one point?


I really liked the scene where Doctor Williams is sewing up Tarzan's wound using ants. That was pretty cool. Also, that man knew his guns!

Suicide Squad review

Suicide Squad was not exactly what I had been expecting. The trailers had led me to believe it was something of a dark comedy, but the actual movie was more of a straight-up action flick. Pretty much all of the jokes in the movie are in the trailer, and I actually thought they worked a little better there. I'm not sure why exactly, something about the timing or the tone of the surrounding scenes or something.

What's more, after seeing the bright colours and and characterful costumes in the movie posters, I was a little surprised at how generic most of the film was visually. While there were some moments with visual flair, most of the movie's settings are kind of bland; dark prison cells and dead-standard city architecture (usually at night) - we don't even see any interesting buildings, just typical square skyscrapers. While the "main" villains were pretty cool, the "grunts" that fill most of the action scenes were just boring, and it was usually so dark that they were little more than just moving black blobs. Mild spoiler warning for the rest of the paragraph: the big doomsday device was just a beam of light shooting into the sky, same as we've seen in Avengers and Man of Steel; again, generic at this point.

Having said that, it was a pretty good action movie with pretty entertaining characters who are given enough depth for us to care about (some of) them even though they are "bad guys". While the basic set-up is not complicated, the plot does have a few cool twists; there's enough parties working against each other that I was never quite sure how things were going to turn out.

There's some enjoyable acting here; it was pretty obvious from the trailers that Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn was going to steal the movie (which she did), but I was personally impressed with Viola Davis' turn as Amanda Waller. Cara Delevingne had some stand-out moments as Enchantress; she had some really great body language that made the character feel so alien. Will Smith was fine as Deadshot, but the character - while strong - was a little bland next to the rest of the crew, so his acting was never going to stand out as much as some of the others. Jared Leto's Joker... didn't really work for me. While he definitely pulled off the "crazy", "unpredictable", and "dangerous" aspects that are vital to a good Joker, I never really felt as if he was having fun, which is kind of a big part of the character to me. Jay Hernandez was great as Diablo, I would have liked to see more from him. The rest of the cast did well but didn't really get enough screen time or juicy material for me to be able to say very much more than that.


In the end I'm going to give it a 7/10; it's a good action movie with an engaging plot and entertaining characters.

#####SPOILER WARNING#####

Let's have a quick look at my earlier wishlist for Suicide Squad. I said that I wanted:

1. For characters to betray each other.
This I got. Enchantress turned out to be the main villain, Boomerang goaded Slipknot into making a break for it so that he could test whether the explosives were real, and Harley ditched the team and ran.

2. For important characters to die.
Kind of. Several characters died, but the only one we actually cared about was Diablo, and that was a heroic sacrifice right at the end. They killed Slipknot, but he'd only had about three seconds of screentime until that point, and the only thing we had seen him do was punch a woman for talking, thereby making damn sure we didn't like him and didn't care about his death. Enchantress died, but then she was the villain, that's not the kind of thing I was talking about, and in fact June Moone survived (something that I felt was just too convenient). Overall the effect that I wanted, that is for them to create the feeling that any character could die at any time, even ones that we like, did not happen.

3. For them to remember that these are actually bad guys and not to just have them turn into heroes at the end.
Yeah, they totally went heroic at the end. Stood together as a family and strode forwards into near-certain death and everything, when they could have turned around and walked away. I mean, sure, it's all great cinema and everything, just a little, you know, clichéd. Plus, it creates a situation where you can't really tell the difference between the heroes and the villains in the DC cinematic universe: both kill without remorse and both save the day at the end, just the "villains" have a little more fun doing it (and they don't whine as much).

So overall I felt that they tried to stay true to the source material but ultimately made the concessions that you would expect for a movie aimed at attracting as large an audience as possible. I guess I can't blame them for that. To be honest the only time that I really felt they did something that I would consider "not true to the comics" was when Harley came back after escaping.

That's probably my biggest complaint actually. Why did she come back? If she believed that the Joker was dead, wouldn't she go on a killing spree, murdering everyone she thinks might be even remotely responsible for his death? And why did everyone, both military and criminal, just accept her back with hardly a word despite the fact that she had betrayed them and ran away? This is after her friends opened fire on everyone with heavy weaponry and stole the helicopter that they were going to use to get out of the city by the way.

Although there is one interpretation of the movie where it makes sense. One thing we've been discussing is just how much of the movie was actually just happening in Harley's head. The bit at the end where Joker suddenly just busts in and rescues her? Clearly just a delusional fantasy. But what about the rest? I mean, think about it, what's easier to believe? That the U.S. government would pick a normal human with no military training who's only notable for being an insane and uncontrollable killer (a flashy one at that) to be part of a covert team assembled to fight superhumans, then send her into battle armed only with a baseball bat and an archaic pistol to fight against a pair of resurrected deities building a floating lightning machine that will destroy the world? Or that an insane person is having a weird dream? Plus it explains how no-one objects when she just rejoins the team after betraying them, or how Enchantress is willing to accept her as a servant even though she was a party to killing Enchantress' brother, and how she was personally able to trick the ancient deity with such an obvious ruse to save the day.


I rather wish they hadn't tried to tie this movie to the Justice League stuff they've got going on as the less I'm reminded of the B.S. movie the better, but they did, and so I have to ask: if Enchantress spent three days building this doomsday machine of hers (as is mentioned at one point), then where were all the superheroes that we know exist in this world the whole time? Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash; these are all established superheroes at this point, yet we don't hear a whisper from them. Don't tell me they didn't hear anything about half a city being evacuated while a giant magical storm hovers in clear sight. At the very least Batman should have caught wind of something; he's supposed be to be fairly plugged in, right? Well, it's always possible they'll retro-actively explain it in a future movie: "Huh, looks like something weird happened while I was busy fighting parademons on Apokolips, oh well" or something like that.


As usual I do have a few nit-picks, but I'm not going to bother writing them out as I don't think any of them are important enough to matter really, I'm just going to ask one last question. With the death of Diablo, they don't really have any actual superhumans left on the team other than Killer Crock, who isn't really that big a powerhouse. And the most popular character, Harley, has escaped (maybe). So... what are they going to do for the inevitable sequel? I guess the obvious answer is "introduce a whole lot of new characters". They just have to balance doing that with keeping the old guys relevant I guess.

Anticipating Suicide Squad

Suicide Squad had a fantastic trailer; it was so good that even though I've disliked most of DC's screen projects lately and I'm a little tired of comic-book movies in general, I've really been looking forwards to Suicide Squad ever since that first trailer. Such is the power of Queen I suppose.

But now that the movie is almost here, I've starting thinking about just how badly this could all go wrong. Let's take a look at some DC superheros shall we? We've got Superman himself, the big blue boyscout, the most well-known icon of super-heroism (both in DC's fictional universe and in the actual real world), who's logo is the Kryptonian symbol for hope. Wonder Woman, the symbol of truth and equality, who was sent to Man's world as an envoy of peace. Batman may be increasing seen as a dark character, but he's always been fighting for what's right, devoting himself entirely to protecting the innocent. The Justice League themselves are DC's premier superhero team, icons and inspirations to those they protect.

And how did Batman v Superman, DC's movie about these champions of light, turn out? It was so dark and depressing that it literally started and ended with funerals. Almost all the characters were violent psycopaths casually murdering people and picking fights with each other for no good reason. I've never left a movie theater feeling so down, so thoroughly drained.

If that's how DC makes a movie about it's brightest stars, it's most noble paragons of virtue, then what they hell are they going to do with a movie about a bunch of psychopathic killers forced to undertake suicidal missions under pain of death? I'm half expecting the name Suicide Squad to prove unexpectedly suitable as the entire audience spontaneously commits suicide after watching the movie... although to be honest, I don't really see how it could possible be any more depressing than the B.S. movie, so maybe not.

Ironically, the trailers are selling this as a light-hearted comedy. How backwards is that? And while a light-hearted comedy sounds good to me, I'm actually going to say that I think it's important they don't go too far; this movie actually should have some darkness in it considering the subject matter and source material.

Specifically, there's a few traps I'm worried they might fall into:

1. Having most or all of the team survive at the end.

2. Having the team basically all be good guys at the end (Guardians of the Galaxy style).

For the first point, they're called the Suicide Squad for a reason: they are specifically sent on missions so suicidal that even Uncle Sam's darkest of black-ops divisions aren't willing to commit their own people to. They should not all make it out alive (especially as most of the team should have no trust, teamwork, or willingness to take orders). Even Marvel killed characters (ostensibly) in some of their movies, like Age of Ultron; DC should not be afraid to do so here. And I'm not talking about knocking off a disposable character or two that we never really cared about; I think there should be actual, meaningful deaths.

As for the second point, it's important to remember that these characters are predominantly psychopathic killers who have commit crimes so serious that their only hope of ever seeing the light of day again is to accept missions so dangerous that they are, you know, downright suicidal. These are bad guys, I don't want the movie to forget that. It might sound a little dark (perhaps uncharacteristically so for me), but I want to see characters betraying each other, putting their own interests first, and so on.

Both of these are things I've seen in the comics. I haven't actually read too much Suicide Squad, but in the few issues I did read some characters died while other's betrayed the team. That's part of what made the series so unique and different; genuinely not knowing what the cast was going to do or who was going to survive was a big part of what made it so strong, and it's what I think they need to do here. I'm especially worried about Harley Quinn: she's become such a fan favourite now (which I believe the Arkham games are partly responsible for) that the trailers basically make her look like the star; this worries me because I fear that the writers will basically turn her into the hero.

But she's not a hero: she's an insane criminal who practically worships a psychopathic killer in a clown suit. If she doesn't stab a team-mate in the spine and run off to play house with the Joker at the worst possible time, I'll be very disappointed.

Now that's not to say that I want the movie to be entirely about bad people doing bad things; far from it. It's important to me that there be characters we can care about, sympathize with, and root for. I just don't think that should be true of all of them, given the subject matter.

Having said all that I'm still pretty hopeful. I mean, I enjoyed Deadpool a great deal despite disliking or hearing bad things about every other Fox comic book movie, so maybe DC can pull off a good Suicide Squad. I guess if you're determined to make all your comic books movies really dark, then maybe a dark comedy is something you could actually make work, right?

Central Intelligence review

I was looking forwards to this ever since seeing the trailer. While that kind of anticipation can lead to disappointment, Central Intelligence actually surpassed my expectations.

Kevin Hart can be annoying to me sometimes, and Dwayne Johnson was playing a character type that I usually don't enjoy watching, but somehow in this movie they both had me literally laughing out loud for most of the film's run-time. In fact I would even go so far as to say that I found it to be one of the funniest movies I've seen in years.

I think a big reason why the humour worked for me is that the writers did not sacrifice the characters' humanity and relate-ability in exchange for a few quick gags. The protagonists both had issues that I felt I could sympathise with, yet they didn't simply wallow in their problems, and while both displayed exaggerated acts of stupidity for the purposes of humour, they didn't go so far as to become simple one-dimensional caricatures. This made me care about them more, and as a result I enjoyed everything, including the humour, more than I otherwise might have.

Having said that, I did feel that the way the movie tied up their personal dramatic arcs at the end was a bit weaker than I would have liked; though overall the story was enjoyable. The action was decent but not amazing, and while I appreciated the plot overall I felt it dragged a little around the middle. Also, being something of a spy movie Central Intelligence featured some obligatory plot twists and double-crosses, and while they served their purpose thematically, I thought they were mostly quite predictable. Not that it matters really; this is a comedy not a thriller after all.

I must mention of course that from the moment I first saw the trailer, this film reminded me strongly of Knight and Day. I didn't think that was a bad thing as I enjoyed that movie a great deal, and after finally watching Central Intelligence I would say that it's not really too similar overall. It does hit a lot of the same story notes, but I believe it has a broader appeal thanks to a more varied sense of humour and characters that are deeper and more believable. Having said that, I seem to remember Knight and Day having better action and a slightly more streamlined plot, so I at least am not going to say that either one is straight-up better than the other.


Central Intelligence was probably one of my favourite comedies of the last few years. I'm giving it 8/10: a solidly entertaining movie.

#####SPOILER WARNING#####

As far as I could tell, Calvin's issue was that he was dissatisfied with himself: he had shown tremendous promise when young, yet he had simply settled into a safe, boring, unadventurous accounting job. He had been expecting better from himself. So when he declared at the end that he was happy with his life because he loved his wife, well, to me that doesn't really feel like he's actually worked through his issues and solved his problems, rather it felt like the movie was ending and needed to wrap everything up. Yes, he is later shown joining the CIA, which is a much stronger ending for him as his life will be more challenging and meaningful, but only happened later, after he was shown as having found his "resolution".

Furthermore, I didn't really understand how Bob overcame his hang-ups in the end. One minute he was clearly still suffering from the painful memories of the humiliation he had suffered, and the next he was fine. Was it meant to be something to do with Calvin's faith in him restoring his confidence or something? I don't know, maybe I just missed something, but again it felt to me as if it was simply wrapped up at the end for expediency's sake.


It might be a small thing, but personally I didn't like how many times Calvin flip-flopped between trying to help Bob and turning against him. I get that he was unsure at first, he had every reason to be, and I get that he had reason to change his mind or doubt things at various times, but overall I just found it annoying and I felt the movie kind of dragged a bit when it kept happening; I would have preferred it if that part had been streamlined a bit.


One thing I liked about this movie was that Calvin's skills were actually shown as being genuinely essential. Yes, he spent a lot of time having to be saved, and yes, a lot of what he contributed was physical, lucky, or required very little skill, but at the end of the day it was his accounting skills that made him indispensable, and the movie did not gloss over this. Even now too many movies and T.V. shows feature insanely talented super-intelligent geniuses solving what are actually tremendous difficult problems in mere seconds, providing solutions that the jocks would be nowhere without, and yet they are still often treated as second-class support characters while the jocks get all the glory. I appreciated the fact that Central Intelligence was more even-handed.


By the way, why did Calvin shoot Bob? At first I thought he had secretly dialled agent Harris (or just, I dunno, 911 or something) on the phone we saw him use earlier and was deliberately baiting Phil into a confession, but then when Bob congratulates him for getting that confession we are led to believe from Calvin's actions that he hadn't actually planned it. Also we never see a phone or any kind of recording device, so what good did the confession do? Especially since Bob then threw his body into the river, so there isn't really any evidence that he didn't die and was actually the Black Badger. To me, this felt like one of the times when going for a gag actually hurt the movie overall.

Overwatch review

Ever since the first teasers came out ages back, I've been looking forwards to Overwatch. My initial interest took a bit of a hit when I realised it was an online multiplayer only game as that's not normally my kind of thing, but the character designs and in-game abilities looked so cool that I was still interested. Plus the humorous and exciting animations did a good job of drawing you into the world, and I really wanted to know more about the characters even if I didn't end up playing much.

Well, I got the game as soon as I could and before I knew it I was hooked. Despite my self-proclaimed lack of interest in online-only multiplayer shooters, and despite my usual claims that I tend to loose interest in games rather quickly if the story isn't at least mildly interesting, and despite the fact that I've long considered Activision-Blizzard to be the most evil videogame company in the world - yes, even more than E.A. - this one has kept me playing it exclusively for a lot longer than I expected, and I'm not bored of it yet.

I think a big part of that is the massive roster of characters who all play so differently. You basically never get bored because as soon as the game starts to feel a touch repetitive, you simply swap to a different character and the experience changes dramatically. Most of the characters are well-designed and fun to play and can contribute in some way to your team. Team composition is important, so you can't always just pick whatever character you feel like playing as they may not mesh as well with the rest of your team, or might not fill a necessary hole, but I believe that's a small price to pay for the depth and variety that the system has.


I'm going to spend a lot of this review talking about those characters because, really, they are the heart and soul of this game, so it's hard to discuss any part without mentioning them. While they aren't always the most original designs, they are all very cool. Take for example McCree: he's a cowboy. That's pretty much it. But he's a really cool looking cowboy with some small but characterful touches, like his robotic arm and vanity belt buckle. Contrast this with something like Battleborn, where the character designs are all HIGHLY unique, but just not really all that cool or aesthetically pleasing; to be honest I prefer the Overwatch approach.

Besides, I'm not saying that the designs are all generic; most of them have some kind of unique touch or interesting take. Genji is a cyborg ninja with folding shuriken that pop out of his forearm, Reinhardt wears a particularly knightly suit of powered armour that bears a curious resemblance to a certain chess piece (the rook or "castle", quite fittingly), Zenyata is a levitating robot monk with floating rosary beads who manifests multiple ethereal arms, etc. I would like to take a moment mention my absolute favourite character design here: Pharah wears a very cool ancient-Egyptian-themed suit of power armour; her name is clever too as it looks and sounds like Pharoah but Farah is actually a common Arabic name - the primary language of modern Egypt.

Something that I found quite impressive is that, despite having a couple of dozen great character designs, each character actually has multiple skins, and many of those skins are significantly different while still being as good as or better than the defaults. Those skins, along with victory poses and other little aesthetic options, represent the rewards you earn for playing the game, unlocked randomly through "loot boxes" that you get as you play. That's kind of a potentially large topic that I don't really want to get too deep into, so I'll just say that the system does a pretty decent job of motivating you to keep playing, but it can be a bit frustrating and I for one have no intention of paying money for loot boxes with random contents. The most important thing I think is that they offer no gameplay advantage, which is a good thing.

Despite having multiple costumes, most characters have a sufficiently unique silhouette as to be easily and instantly recognized from a distance regardless of which costume they are wearing. Well, OK, I can't always tell at first if I'm looking at a Tracer or a dismounted D'Va, but for the most part characters are quickly and easily recognizable, which is important in a game like this where very different responses can be needed depending on the opponent you're facing.


I really would have liked a strong story to go with the cool characters, but sadly the game itself has very little in the way of storytelling going on - not surprising considering the format. Having said that, there have been a number of short animations released online, and I understand there's other media that fills out the world (I think I heard something about comic books), so I guess there is more story out there, but personally I would have liked for it to be in-game (if not actually revealed through play, then at least collected in a menu in the game itself); I'm not a big fan of having to go hunt online for this sort of thing. Put it in the game people! Additionally, there are small snippets of story hinted at in character dialogue and the game environments, such as small conversations between characters while you wait for the game to start that depend on the environment and selected characters - a very cool and characterful touch that fleshes out the world more than you might expect it to.


I've spoken about the gameplay being based on the character's different abilities working together in a team. This isn't something new; Team Fortress is probably the most famous example, and Overwatch clearly borrows heavily from the older game; the instantly recognizable character silhouettes, for example, is something that Team Fortress was known for. There's nothing wrong with that of course, and Overwatch arguably moves the genre forwards a great deal with it's significantly larger roster of characters and abilities - but bear in mind that I haven't played Team Fortress so I can't really compare the two games directly.

I can only say that I think Overwatch works very well. There are many different ways to play the game based on strategy and team composition. There's a certain paper-rock-scissors aspect to character selection, which makes teamwork doubly important and also means changing character mid-game can sometimes be a good strategy, potentially leading to a lot of back-and-forth as teams shift in order to try to counter each other and win the upper hand.

Unfortunately, in addition to imposing certain character selection requirements on you, this also means that jumping into the game alone can be very frustrating if your motley collection of complete strangers can't come together to work as a cohesive whole. I've heard it said that this game is best played with friends, and I can easily see why. Well, that just comes with the territory for any game where teamwork matters, so it shouldn't be taken as criticism; in fact the game does a decent job of encouraging you to at least form a balanced team by providing useful suggestions on the character selection screen.


In fact my only real core gameplay criticism is that the controls aren't as responsive as I would like. This is probably a good time to mention that I'm playing the game on the PS4, and that - while I'm actually OK with the PS4 controller, which I consider an improvement over that of the PS3 - I still prefer the XBox 360 controller. Obviously a mouse and keyboard trump both for first person shooters, which can affect some characters in this game more than others and could mean that the PC experience is quite different.

But as I'm playing on the PS4 I can only comment on this version, and this version is not as responsive as some other first person shooters that I have played on the 360. When I push the analogue stick to aim in Overwatch, there is a noticeable interval before my character starts to turn on-screen. At first this annoyed me immensely,  but after playing for a very short period of time I stopped noticing it. However, I still feel that it negatively affects my aim, and can make the game frustrating without it being obvious why when things get intense.

Compare this to Titanfall, which I find instantly responsive on the 360 despite being a similar online multiplayer shooter. While it might be naive of me to say this, I feel like if Titanfall managed it on much older and weaker hardware while also including dozens of A.I. bots in addition to the players in every game, then Overwatch doesn't really have an excuse. Although it's possible that the issue might have other causes, such as the PS4's analogue sticks (that I don't think are as good as the 360's); even if that were true it would not change the fact that the issue is there.

What's more, because I can't aim as precisely as I would like due to the slightly unresponsive controls, I've had to turn down the aiming sensitivity a fair bit to help me aim at fast moving character, but a side-effect of this is that it takes me longer to turn and face attackers to my sides or back, meaning I'm much more likely to just die the moment I'm flanked. While this isn't really a big problem on it's own, along with the slightly slow response and resulting difficulty aiming, it significantly exacerbates the REAL problem that Overwatch has: Turrets.

Here's the thing: I like this game a lot. That means I'm invested in it, which makes the frustration of turrets so, so much worse than if I didn't like the game at all. You see, I'll be playing an intense game or series of games, where both sides are giving it their all and there's a constant stream of amazing moments; the game is balanced on a knife's edge and could go either way right to the very end. If we win I experience a great deal of elation, but even if we lose then I've still had a great deal of fun and I can appreciate the skill that the other team showed.

So I'm riding high, having a great time and loving every minute playing a fantastic game, then suddenly I'm up against turrets and the game is no longer fun, it's just tremendously frustrating and I'm wondering what the hell happened and why the hell am I playing this stupid broken piece of crap game. It's infuriating, and that anger can stick with you for longer than you would expect. I'll save casual readers the whole rant for now, you can read it after the actual review, just know that I despise turrets and genuinely believe that they are downright bad for the game. They are, quite simply, not fun. However, it seems that Blizzard understands that there is a problem, at least on the console versions, so hopefully they will fix it eventually.


In conclusion, this is a great game with a few small issues and some balance problems that are to be expected and hopefully will be improved over time. Overall I give it a 9/10: if you like the gameplay of first person shooters you will most likely enjoy this game... if you have a good internet connection.

#####VITRIOL WARNING#####

I figured it would be better to separate this part from the main review. I should probably apologize in advance, because this topic has caused me a great deal of frustration over the past few weeks, so I'm going to have to take this opportunity to rant a little. Well, a lot. But then, the clue's in the blog's name, right?


There's number of reasons why I don't like online-only games, but rather than talk about it right now, I'll just leave these here:

This kind of thing happens more often than I would like. By the way, if it looks like I'm doing weird things like trying to walk into a wall or repeatedly switching back and forth between Bastion's modes: that's the lag, somehow preventing the system from figuring out what I'm actually trying to do. Honestly, Overwatch on the PS4 seems to behave worse around lag than Destiny or Titanfall on the XBox 360.



Let's talk characters. First off, Mei... SCREW YOU, MEI! Mei is the only character who I consider to be genuinely overpowered. I'm not the only one who thinks so; I often hear her referred to online as "Satan". Tells you something about how much people hate her, right?

Let's get the easy bit out of the way first: why the hell does Mei have 250 health? Consider that Tracer and Widowmaker and even Zenyata - who is entirely made from metal - only have 150 health. I mean, Pharah is a battle-hardened military officer clad head-to-toe in a full suit of power armour, including a helmet, and she's only 200 health. Meanwhile Mei is a small scientist wearing a parka, and she has 250 health. It just makes no sense, and it's infuriating in-game; the number of times I've almost killed her only for her to suddenly turn invulnerable and heal right back up... Seriously, whoever it is who works in Blizzard that thinks cotton and wool are somehow stronger than metal and kevlar, please: go back to school. You moron.

Also, her offensive power is kind of crazy; I can only think of one or two characters who might be able to reliably take her in a close-range fight (I'm thinking Reaper and Roadhog), but unlike those two predominantly close-range characters she can work at long range too, and she has powerful control abilities as well. Plus I still think she'll probably still win if she gets the drop on them because she shuts people down so fast with her freeze spray.

Compare her to Soldier 76. He's a highly decorated and experienced veteran soldier armed with a massive assault rifle with built-in rocket launcher, while she's a small scientist armed with an ice-cream maker; you would expect him to be the better damage dealer, yet in a close-up match she is almost guaranteed to win. As soon as she starts waving her magic wand in his general direction he completely loses the ability to aim and then, a second later, the ability to do anything at all, and she will easily kill him before he breaks out. Plus she has more health than him for some reason. And while they can both heal themselves, doing so leaves him vulnerable for a moment and he can still take damage, while she becomes completely invulnerable while healing (I think maybe Reinhardt's charge can get her, but that's the only thing I know of). What's more, she's actually arguably better than him at long range too; he has to fire very slowly to maintain long-range accuracy, significantly reducing the speed at which he does damage, but her ice-spike doesn't have that problem. I might even argue that her ultra is probably better than his as it can shut down an entire team and leave them all vulnerable while his doesn't do as much against tank characters and is more easily shut down or avoided. The only place that he's actually better than her is at medium range, and it's usually not to hard for her to avoid that kind of confrontation - at worst she can throw up a wall to buy her time to close or escape, but if you run into Mei in close range, you have a lot less options for trying to force an advantage before she freezes you solid then kills you.

The problem isn't just that she's powerful, it's also that she's incredibly annoying to play against because she interferes with your movement and aiming. For a long time my philosophy has been that you need to be really careful about taking control away from the player; I'm not saying that you should never do it, but it's a technique that should be used sparingly and only when it serves a very good purpose. Consider the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. There were a couple of sequences where it limited player control, which it did to very good effect in that it increased the impact of those scenes on the player. But after that, every single modern-style fps game (including the Modern Warfare sequels) aped it without really understanding what they were doing, and took control away from the player at every single opportunity they could find. This quickly became a meaningless annoyance that broke the player's immersion rather than enhancing it, and is one of the biggest issues I've had with shooters over the past few years.

And almost every one of Mei's abilities interfere with your control over your character. Her normal attack freezes you, her ultra freezes you, and she can suddenly bring you to a complete stop with a surprise wall. Plus her healing ability suddenly stops you from doing damage; not the same thing but kind of in the same ballpark, especially since if you ignore her and move away you run the real risk of getting killed from behind, so often your best choice is to sit and wait for her to emerge from the ice again, indirectly limiting your movement. This is not a "once or twice in the whole game" thing; these are all abilities she can use all the time, and it's infuriating.

So yes, she's annoying and I hate the philosophy behind her design. I would like if Blizzard reduced her health to 200 and did something about her instant-freeze primary weapon; I don't mind it as much for her ultra, but that primary weapon is insane. Personally I would suggest buffing her secondary fire mode and turning it into her primary, then just dropping the stupid freeze spray thing, but I doubt that will happen. By the way, how the hell does encasing herself in ice heal her? I mean, she's not immune to cold; if she was she wouldn't need that parka, and other Mei's ice guns still hurt her, so clearly being encased in ice should not be beneficial to her health!


I would like to take a moment to mention Junkrat. I would call him the coward character because every single ability he has allows you to damage enemies while being out of their line of sight. However I'm not saying he's unbalanced or easy to play: I actually think it takes a lot of skill to play him well. So while he can be annoying, I don't think there's anything wrong with him and I think he does add to the game.


By the way, I've heard complaints about Bastion, but I don't think he's OP on the the consoles at least. Perhaps on PC where it's faster to aim, but on consoles it's not so bad. He has high damage output but does have limits (unlike turrets can be flanked and he's vulnerable while reloading, for example). I don't have a problem with bastion and I think he's a nice design.


Tracer scares the hell out of me, I can't deal with her with anyone except maybe Winston; I normally just run and/or pray when I see her (or get desperate and chase her to try to kill her as quickly as possible to reduce the number of jumps she can use). But I believe she takes a lot of skill to play well and I don't really think she's unbalanced either.


Winston seems a bit underpowered to me. Once  when I was playing as Winston I was trying to kill someone who had one of Zenyata's healing orbs on them, and as far as I could tell that little orb was healing him as fast as I was damaging him, making me helpless against him. That doesn't feel right, especially considering that having the orb out was not preventing Zenyata from debuffing and attacking normally. Of course there are some situations where Winston works well, so he has his place, I just feel like he needs a bit of a buff somehow. Maybe a bit more health or damage output?


Mercy feels almost superfluous sometimes: Zenyata can similarly heal and increase your team's offensive power without needing to put himself in as much danger or sacrifice his own offense, and Lucio passively heals the whole team (well, as long as they are close enough) without any effort on his own part, allowing him to focus on attack. Meanwhile if you pick Mercy you probably won't do anything all game but hide or run around like crazy putting yourself at risk to try to heal everyone who needs it. She's effective, don't get me wrong, but other characters seem to do the same job a little more easily. Still, her alt is fantastic, so that's something.


I hate the temple of Anubis; that first archway you have to get through on the attack is a killer. If an enemy team takes a couple of Bastions and a Reinhardt to protect them, good luck getting anywhere without a fantastic and highly coordinated team. Honestly just a horrible map to have to go on the offensive on.



As mentioned in the review, the real problem this game has is turrets. I realise that in a competitive game anything that keeps killing you can feel frustrating even if it is in fact balanced, and I've already spoken about  how several character who can be frustrating to play against are still balanced and have their place, but I genuinely believe that turrets actually break the game. You might say that that's just my opinion, but please hear me out.
First of all, let's talk about how turrets work. They almost instantaneous lock-on to an enemy character, then they simply shoot them continuously with 100% accuracy. There's no way to dodge; they never miss so long as you're in their line of sight and in range. They have 360 degree vision, so you can't flank them either. They also ignore some ultras for some reason: Hanzo's dragons don't hurt them, Soldier's auto-aim doesn't lock onto them, etc.

There's two types of turrets: Torbjorn puts down one big turret that has a lot of health and a pretty long range. Torbjorn can repair it, and his ultra makes it much tougher and fire much faster (and I think might instantly repair it? Not sure). As far as I can tell it can kill most characters faster than they can kill it if facing off across an open space (obviously there are exceptions).

Symmetra meanwhile has these tiny sentry turrets that she can put on most any surface. I believe she can have up to six out at any one time. They have short range and are destroyed by just about any damage at all. However, once they start shooting at you they reduce your movement and turning speed, and the effect stacks. Plus they are pretty much always going to attack you from your blind spot. This means they almost always start to damage you before you see them, and if there's three or more you'll be taking damage very quickly; since you're slowed down you can't run away easily, and since it's messing with your turning speed it becomes very hard to turn and aim at the tiny things, meaning even if you manage to destroy them you'll take a lot of damage while doing so. If you get hit by a full six of the damned things, you'll probably die before you can really do anything.

If after reading all that you're thinking that turrets might be a source of some frustration, then you'd be right. Turrets are simply annoying in a number of ways:

• They have instant lock-on, perfect aim, etc; all the things that humans don't have and struggle with in a videogame, they just do automatically. It's a slap in the face, it really is. It makes you wonder why Overwatch needs this cast of zany characters when a bunch of turrets on a remote controlled car would do the job much better most of the time. In other words, it basically destroys your immersion and invalidates your involvement in the game. It destroys the illusion.
• Turrets usually win a one-on-one battle unless you know where they are ahead of time, because by the time you've realised that they are there, spun to face them, and performed the fine aim needed to target them, you're probably almost dead already if not actually dead.
• If you know where a Torbjorn turret or Symmetra nest is (probably because it's already killed you once or more) then it still takes a lot of work to kill it one-on-one with most heroes and will still take a bunch of your health, but you're almost never going to be going one-on-one against a turret. Torbjorn or Symmetra will often be there, and that seriously tips the odds in their favour against most characters because it's a two-on-one fight against you.
• And while two-on-one fights against turrets are fairly common, what's more common is trying to clear out a zone being defended by their entire team, in which case even if you have your entire team, the enemy still outnumbers you, because Turrets are basically extra players (really good ones too).
• In any case, when trying to gun down a turret, unlike when attacking other players, you pretty much have to stand still to maximize your aim, or dodge very predictable in and out of cover to get to the same point each time for best aim (because a turret has perfect accuracy and ignores dodging you need to maximize your accuracy in order to compete); this leaves you highly vulnerable to other players taking you out while you're distracted by the turret. If you ignore the turret and try to deal with the other players, the turret kills you because dodging doesn't work against it. So you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
• After you've put all that effort into destroying a Torbjorn turret (or almost destroying it) and then died because you left yourself vulnerable to the rest of the enemy team while trying to deal with it, Torbjorn just fixes it or deploys it again a few seconds later. Symmetra nests aren't always as quick to put back up, but it's the same problem.
• This might just be my slanted perception, but I get the impression that Torbjorn builds up his Ultra very quickly, between the turret auto-hitting anyone it sees and Torbjorn himself running around shooting, fixing, and tossing out armour. Also he can tell if his turret is taking damage even if he's some distance away, as he can see it's status icon through walls and stuff. So all too often when you go in and try to face down a turret, he'll suddenly trigger his ultra and the turret will start doing a lot more damage and become basically unkillable (plus you end up with an angry nigh-unkillable dwarf running around shooting you in the back at the same time). Also, and again I could be wrong about this, but it seems like the turret gets it's health topped up to full when he trigger the ultra as well, so any damage you've already done is just erased. Considering how hard turrets already are to deal with that can be very annoying, especially when it happens over and over.
• Symmetra turrets screw up your movement and aiming, which is just annoying (especially the aiming) and leaves you highly vulnerable for other enemy players. I've talked already about how that's something you should do sparingly if at all in a game, and Symmetra turrets do it all the time; that's very, very frustrating, especially when you're trying to gun the stupid little turrets down and you can't do it because you can't aim anymore. It's basically the videogame equivalent of being repeatedly pinned to the ground and kicked in the sides by a pack of schoolyard bullies as a kid: painful, humiliating, and you can't really fight back no matter how hard you try.
• Symmetra turrets are ALWAYS BEHIND YOU. Even if there's no-one else there it's annoying for that to happen over and over, but if there's enemies in front of you then what do you do? Turn your back on them and try to destroy the turrets, or ignore the turrets and hope you can get out of their range before they do too much damage? Either way, you're probably about to die. Let's not even talk about adding Junkrat beartraps into the mix.
• They seriously screw up flanking and disrupting, which is what some characters are kind of designed to do. They also really hurt characters who depend on their speed and agility for survival. Perhaps the character who suffers most of all however is Pharah. Playing Pharah is highly depending on the environment and how enclosed it is; I at least find she only does well in some levels or areas of levels, so it can already be difficult to justify taking her. Unfortunately Torbjorn turrets simply murder her; the moment she takes to the skies she's basically signed her own death warrant if there's a Torbjorn turret around. And if you're playing an assault map, there's almost always going to be at least one Torbjorn turret. In other words, she can be very hard to use for assault. So now there's whole environments and whole game modes where she basically doesn't work. That hurts.
• They ignore (some) ultras. Look, when you've charged up and released your super-ultra-final-attack-power, it's annoying that bloody turrets don't even notice.

No, the fact that turrets are annoying isn't of itself necessarily wrong; there's plenty of good characters who can be annoying in the hands of a good player: Mei, Junkrat, Tracer, any sniper, etc can all get you red in the face - though a turret is annoying all on it's own regardless of the Torbjorn or Symmetra player's skill. I'm not saying it should never be possible to get annoyed playing against an enemy. But turrets aren't just annoying: they basically just ignore the entire game itself. There are a number of elements that form the "gameplay" in Overwatch:

• Reflexes: in a face-off, whoever reacts faster has an advantage. Turrets lock on automatically, requiring no reflexes on the part of the owning player.
• Precision: in a face-off, whoever is more accurate - meaning they are able to get the cross-hairs on target more quickly, and keep them on target as the two players move around - has the advantage. Turrets have perfect accuracy, which is automatic and takes no skill on the part of the owning player.
• Movemement: dodging around to ruin aim, using terrain to duck in and out of cover, playing games of cat-and-mouse with opposing players, is a big part of how most fights go. Turrets don't move, so the owning player doesn't need to worry about all that. Plus you can't dodge them, or fake them out, only try to use cover, so that part of the game doesn't exist for the attacker either.
• Strategy: flanking the enemy and hitting them from where they don't expect is a big part of the game. Turrets have 360 degree vision and seem to lock on just as fast no matter how far they need to spin to do it, meaning they don't try to outmaneuver or flank and trying to flank them is mostly meaningless.
• Teamwork: coordinating your movements and attacks with your teammates is a big part of being effective in Overwatch. Turrets don't coordinate with people; though teammates can support turrets in various ways, that still means that the turret owner needs to worry a lot less about how to best work with his teammates.
• Timing: when you die in Overwatch you respawn some time later back in your base, meaning you lose time travelling back to join the action. Not only does this mean that you lose time before you can contribute to the fight again, it also means you often need to wait and coordinate large pushes with your team or risk a constantly imbalanced fight as just a few member of your team face the entirety of the enemy. Turrets can be almost instantly respawned wherever the owner wishes, taking all that out of the equation.

Those are all ways in which turrets and turret owners operate outside of the normal gameplay of Overwatch. To be fair the Torbjorn or Symmetra player might not be sitting around staring at the wall while the turrets do all the work; they will probably be doing something too. Of course that's kind of an issue too, as has been mentioned, because you're now facing two opponents instead of one. It's also worth noting that Symmetra has an auto-locking weapon (so she doesn't have to aim), that is so short-ranged that she really can't do very much until the opponent gets very close (meaning she really doesn't get involved in assaulting or flanking or anything), so there's a lot of normal gameplay that she simply isn't experiencing either, while Torbjorn often spends a lot his time repairing his turret, which is not exactly skilled gameplay.

Every match of Overwatch ends with a "play of the game"; a replay of the single most effective few seconds that any character on either team had for the entire game. Depressingly often, this replay is just a view of Torbjorn repairing his turret or staring at a wall while his turret racks up a bunch of kills. Think about that for a moment, really think about it: the most effective action that anyone took in the entire game is very often just staring at a wall while the computer plays the game for him! That's not OK, right? There's no denying that that's a problem, right?

Think I'm exaggerating? Consider for example these amazing displays of skill:

So far I've talked about how turrets are always very annoying and how turret characters ignore the gameplay, which I consider a big problem, but originally I said that turrets were actually broken. In some ways this is more subjective, but the way I see it there's a number of things they do that aren't just overpowered or annoying, but they fundamentally break the rules of the game as they apply to most other characters:

• Turrets have 360 degree vision. I'm not sure what the actual viewing angle is for regular players, but let's just say it's 90 degrees. So players can be blindsided from the sides or back, but turrets cannot.
• Turrets have instant response times. Their lock-on times are extremely fast, but once they are locked on they move in the same rendered frame that you move (at least as far as I can tell): they have 100% accuracy from that point on. That's something that humans cannot do because even if we had perfect reflexes, we can still only react after we've seen the rendered frame. Obviously we don't have perfect reflexes, and as previously mentioned the controls aren't even perfectly responsive, so it takes us a while to adjust to what happens in game.
• Turrets have perfect aim. On consoles, no matter how fast you are it takes time to maneuver your crosshairs over your target because of the limitations of the control system. Turrets do not have that problem.
• Turrets can track at any speed. When a player tries to turn to confront an enemy behind him or track a fast-moving opponent at close range, they are limited by the sensitivity of their control scheme; as mentioned above more sensitive controls means faster turns but lower accuracy and longer aiming times. Turrets have perfect accuracy and very fast aiming times, but without the disadvantage of long turning times; in fact they turn at amazing speeds.
• There are meant to be six characters on each team, for a fair fight. Turrets change those odds: they are typically as dangerous and hard to kill as a human opponent (if not more so), while not counting as a player, meaning you're effectively facing seven or more opponents rather than six. It might be argued that the turret owner is not very effective, but in fact Torbjorn and Symmetra are decent combatants; not as powerful as some front-line fighters, but not weak either. Symmetra can reliably kill many fast characters who are normally hard to kill thanks to her auto-lock weapon; in fact I'm terrified of her when playing as Reinhardt as she can stay out of my melee range while ignoring my shield. She's also probably one of the best characters to take on Lucio as he can be very hard to hit for most people. Also her teleporter is game-changing, actively tipping the balance of the attrition situation. Torbjorn has good close-range and long-range fire modes, good health (and he can buff his own armour), and is a little harder to hit thanks to his small size. Plus his ultra is pretty decent. Both characters can also support their team by giving them armour buffs.
• Turrets ignore a number of ultras. Why? I don't know, it doesn't really make sense "fluff-wise". For example, Soldier's aiming visor doesn't lock onto them. That can actually be incredibly frustrating, since it means he actually can't hit a turret while his ultra is on and there's any other enemies nearby, while the turrent can often be the more dangerous threat that needs to be neutralized first. And think about that for a moment: Soldier's aim-bot (which is an ultra, and ultras are supposed to be powerful game-changing abilities that take a long time to charge and only last for a few seconds) can't lock onto Torbjorn's aim-bot, but Torbjorn's aim-bot (which is available all game and lasts until something kills it, at which point it's instantly available again) can lock onto Soldier.

These may sound like similar points that I'd already made, but before I was talking about ignoring gameplay, here I'm talking about things that turrets do which normal players actually can't do. Ignoring gameplay is counter-intuitive since you're diminishing the depth and richness of the game, but breaking the game rules is even worse because it feels unfair. The discussion of whether games should be fair or not is probably a big one with lots of special cases, but in an online multiplayer game when it's being unfair on behalf of one player and penalizing another, I think things are a little more cut-and-dried. And yes, a lot of things can feel unfair in any game, including this one, but I believe I've made some pretty good points for why turrets are objectively unfair in this case.


And while it might be super-salty overkill, I'd like to illustrate my point with an analogy. Imagine you are playing in a football tournament, which you are quite invested in. You play against a great team; it's a hard-fought game full of great sportsmanship that both sides enjoy and feel proud of. Then the next team comes up, and for some bizarre reason there's 22 players walking onto the field rather than 11. Then the game starts and a player runs up and kicks you between the legs as hard as he can, when you fall over in pain the ref comes over and gives you a card for "faking it" and gives the other team the ball. Turns out this team is made up of the children of the tournament organizers, the tournament rules have been written in bizarre ways to favour them, while the ref has basically been paid off and always rules in their favour, no matter what. Every time you get near their goal, the ref calls a foul and gives them the ball, you touch them and it's a penalty. They just push, shove, punch and kick your team without a care. Is this fun for you?

To give a more reasonable comparison, imagine you start a game of Overwatch. You have six players, the other team has six players. Then suddenly six more people join the other team. These six players have aimbots active all the time so they never miss, you can't flank them, they ignore your ultras (but you don't ignore theirs), and if you kill them they respawn nearby almost instantly rather than respawning later somewhere far away and having to waste time traveling to where the action is. Also they can teleport around the map as long as a member of their friendly team is there. Does this sound fair?

Yes, it's an exaggerated example, in fact in a real game six Torbjorns is probably not actually as good as, say, three Torbjorns and some support. Athough, as you might have noticed in one of the videos I posted above, I was in a game against four Torbjorns, a Symmetra, and a Junkrat. That's five turret users and a guy who throws beartraps that locks you in place making you easy prey for the turrets. Also a teleporter so if you actually do manage to kill a Torbjorn somehow, it doesn't take them long to get back to the point. That was a very frustrating game in which we lost badly and which left a bad taste in my mouth.

But anyway, the reason why I'm exaggerating is to better illustrate the point: When you're up against a turret, you're not playing against another player, you're playing against the computer itself, which has sided with the other player against you. The computer is supposed to be the impartial medium in which we play against each other, but when one player picks Torbjorn or Symmetra that very medium becomes your enemy.

Which is very screwed up. Basically, PLAYING AGAINST TURRETS DOESN'T FEEL FAIR. When I'm killed by a turret, it feels like I was cheated. When I lose to a team that plays well, I can relax and admire their skill, telling myself I'll get better and I'll win the next one. When I lose to a bunch of turrets, I get so frustrated that I just wonder why the hell I'm wasting my time on this nonsense.


So why are turrets in this game if they are so bad for the game? I have a few theories. One is that there are turrets in Team Fortress (not a very good reason to my mind). Another is that they aren't as big a problem on the PC thanks to the superior aiming abilities of the mouse and keyboard, they simply haven't been balanced properly on consoles (although I'm not sold on that to be honest). But perhaps the strongest argument for their inclusion is that some game modes might favor the attackers.

There are a couple of game modes where defenders have to defend a point. No matter how many times the defenders wipe out the attacking team, the attackers only really need to clear off the defenders once to win the game (at least in the later stages). This seems to favor the attackers. Which is why there are specific defensive characters who seem to have been balanced in such a way that they are very powerful, but primarily when defending a static location. Clearly that includes the immobile turrets, but also Junkrat's traps (and his grenades, which are great when you have to come towards him but not as much when he has to come towards you) and Bastion's super high damage output in his immobile form.

So that would explain why turrets are quite powerful, and in that context even their immunity to offensive ultras makes sense, since an offensive ultra can completely clear out a whole team and give you the point, handing you the win; at least having a turret there can potentially reduce the impact a little. Although having said all that, I have seen turrets used to some level of success in offense as well, though only rarely.

So yes, in that context the advantage turrets give defenders can make sense, but I believe that the execution is flawed. It would have been possible to make turrets that give the defenders an advantage without feeling as unfair, mainly by reducing the ways in which they break the game:

• Increase the lock time to something a bit more reasonable, like a human would need.
• Reduce it's reaction times so it isn't completely locked on to a player, it has to try to chase and even lead them, just like a real human would.
• Reduce it's maximum turn speed so that there is an advantage to trying to attack it from the side or alternating attacks from different sides.
• Introduce an element of randomness (same as all games have been doing for all time to all their bots) so it doesn't perfectly lock-on as quickly or as consistently, just like a real human.
• Reduce it's field of view to 180 degrees or less so that flanking does give you an advantage against it (but of course it will react to being shot in the back so it's not completely helpless), same as it would against a human.
• Perhaps reduce it's immunity to ultras? Maybe not, I'm willing to concede this point for balance reasons.
• Prevent Symmetra turrets from interfering with movement, or at the very least with aiming. Seriously, not letting me aim is just too much.

Now I've heard that a new patch is about to be released that will reduce the damage that Torbjorn turrets do by 30%. This shows that even Blizzard has had to admit that there is a problem with the current balance, but personally I don't think that a damage nerf is the right move, since it doesn't change the fact that turrets ignore basic game rules and gameplay elements. I honestly think the best thing they could have done was to reduce turret's aiming perfection: do that and they would feel more like just another player and less like the computer itself hates you and wants you to die. Still, it's a step in the right direction I suppose.

Paul Impressions

I'm a big fan of the Pegg and Frost, and I had just started working in a company that had done some of the vfx for this movie when it came out (to be clear it was done by the time I joined; I didn't work on it myself), so I eagerly went to watch it in the cinema. I thought it was very funny, but it seemed to have a strong anti-religion sentiment which left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

Well, I was just thinking about this movie, and I realised something. Perhaps this is already common knowledge and I completely missed it until now, but it only just clicked for me: the story itself mirrors the story of Jesus.

Paul entered this world differently to the rest of us. He brought knowledge to the human race. He has a small band of followers whom he teaches about the larger universe. He performs many miracles, including raising the dead. He is being hunted by the oppressive authorities. He sacrifices himself for the sake of his "flock", only to rise again a short while later. Finally he ascends to the heavens, never to be seen again, leaving his disciples to write down his story and distribute it to the masses.

While none of these story elements alone mean very much, I just find it funny that the story as a whole has so many parallels with the story of Jesus even though the film itself is so dismissive of religion. I wonder if the writers realise it themselves? Perhaps it was deliberate act of "meta-humour"? I mean, Paul himself is even wearing sandals!

Batman v. Superman review

I enjoyed the Man of Steel, even though there were parts that I thought were stupid. But when I heard of this one, well, right off the bat (ha ha) it did not sound promising. And as time went by details gradually emerged that more often than not only served to lower my expectations. It just didn't sound like DC knew what they wanted to do with this film; other than that they somehow wanted their own billion-dollar-grossing Avengers movie but didn't know how to get there. The early teasers only reinforced my negative predictions, I avoided the trailers, but I got the impression that at least some people were optimistic about it. I was not.

Well, I saw the Batman-Superman movie (or "the B.S. movie", as I thing we should start calling it...), and it was somehow worse than I had expected. Strangely enough it was better than I expected in some areas while being terrible in ways I hadn't anticipated. The overall effect was to leave me not angry or upset or disappointed, but actually depressed. Somehow the very fact that this movie exists depresses me, and I don't quite know why.

I suspect the reason why I found it so depressing comes down to the fact that Superman and Batman are, in some ways, two of the most fundamental superheroes there are, so it's kind of important (well, to me at least) that they be written well. Many heroes have interesting stories, but these two embody two of the most central ideas of the superhero mythos. Superman is possibly the oldest, most well known, and most obvious character embodying the power-fantasy aspect of superhero comics. Meanwhile Batman is probably the most popular character representing the idea of every man's capacity to rise above his surroundings and do great things through hard work and determination. In my mind they represent the two opposite ends of a spectrum that encapsulates the entire superhero genre.

I believe that people are often drawn more to one character or the other depending on what they enjoy or what they are looking for in their fiction; if you like the idea of waking up one day with the power to do anything you want, you probably like reading stories about characters like Superman, especially origin stories. If you're not a fan of people being born with "unfair advantages" and you wish life was fair, that people were rewarded for what they've earned through hard work rather than just luck of birth, then you probably want to see Batman beat Superman's fat smug face into the ground.

To be clear I don't mean that people can only like one or the other, but I think the fact that these two are in some ways polar opposites (well, in at least one way; if you really look at them they are far more alike than you might realise) representing two different realities makes the question of "who would win" (as if virtue was measured by combat ability, but that's another topic I think) a more compelling one than it is for, say, Thor and the Hulk. Personally I suspect that at the end of the day most people want Batman to win, but some people are more willing to believe it's "possible" (within the context of a fictional universe) than others.

So I see the appeal of matching the two against each other, but I never believed that it was a good idea to base a movie on that one conflict between two "good guys". Or rather, I didn't think that DC could make a good movie about such an idea within the framework that they created in the Man of Steel movie. Perhaps if they'd started from scratch, but the Man of Steel established a world where Kryptonians were insanely powerful and Earth just didn't have the magic or technology to act as a sufficient equalizer for Batman, especially with the strange way that they treated Kryptonite (it was just something in the air of their spaceship or something?) seemingly taking it out of the equation.

Plus, you know, the writing in Man of Steel and Dark Knight Rises did not lead me to believe that DC would be able to handle the real issues at stake in such a conflict, namely the fundamental fairness of the universe itself. Especially not when their primary concern seemed to be introducing a bunch of different heroes in order to set up the Justice League movie. Some surprising casting decisions did not inspire confidence either.

In case it isn't obvious at this point, I was not looking forwards to this one. However my friends wanted to watch it and when I checked IMDB the day before it had something like a 9.2 rating (it's down to 7.5 now, I wonder how far it will go...), so I tried to abandon my preconceived notions and went in to the cinema with as open a mind as I could muster.


Five minutes in I was turned off, by then ten minute mark I felt exhausted. I found the whole movie so oppressive that several times during the show I considered leaving the theater under the pretense of using the washroom, even if it was just for a few minutes so I could get catch my breath. The only thing that stopped me was that I felt so drained that I couldn't even muster up the energy to escape. By the time the credits rolled I just felt empty; I was just glad it was finally over.

Be warned, the next two paragraphs contain descriptions of events occurring during the first ten or fifteen minutes of the movie. Personally I reckon it's far less spoileriffic than the average trailer for the film, and I feel it's worth reading to help understand my complaints. Your choice (obviously).

Right from the very start, every single scene was trying so hard to impress on us that EVERYTHING IS SO IMPORTANT!!!! The dialogue, the music, the cinematography, it's all so heavy. We start off by seeing the death of Bruce's parents yet again, the entire scene not only shot in SUPER DRAMATIC SLOW MOTION ULTRA CLOSEUP!!!!, but also interspersed with scenes of little Bruce at his parents' funeral, falling down a deep hole... AT THE SAME TIME AS HIS MOTHER'S PEARLS FALLING ACROSS THE STREET!!!!, only to be surrounded by bats and... levitated bodily out of the hole and into a bright light? Yeah, it was a dream. They actually cut back and forth between his parent's death and a stupid dream. A dream that served no purpose that I could discern except to create DRAMA!!!!11!!1!!!!!. And possibly to start hitting us with the Jesus imagery I guess.

Neither the melodrama nor the Jesus imagery ended there. The next thing we see is Bruce racing into Metropolis while dramatically yelling over the phone at some guy we don't know. Then they guy dies in the wake of Superman's fight with Zod. We don't know who this guy is or what his relationship is to Bruce other than the fact that he's an employee, and we're supposed to care about his death? We're supposed to feel for Bruce and understand why he's so angry because some guy who's name he knew died? The movie is two and a half hours long and yet they didn't have time to spend setting up Batman's motivation properly?

That might actually be the biggest problem with this movie; it's all style over substance. There's a whole lot of very impressive visual imagery which has so little impact because it feels so empty. I genuinely believe that the whole production was driven, not from a desire to tell a strong story, but from a desire to show dramatic imagery, and I think that's why it all falls flat: the things we see lack a strong foundation. At least that's how it feels to me.


Let's start by talking about Superman. I suspect it's the writing more than anything else, but I can't quite seem to see Henry Cavill as Superman. It's probably just because he spends the whole movie pouting and brooding. He never really seems to want to be Superman; or perhaps I should say that Superman never seems to really want to be a superhero in this movie (I'm not sure he did in the last one either). He never seems to take joy or satisfaction from what he's doing, never seems to have any real conviction that he's doing the right thing, he never even seems to have any personal desire to be a hero. The only time he mentions why he's doing it, he indicates that it's just what his father wanted. I just... I feel like Superman should at least want to help people, even if he has doubts. This version is just too sullen.

Also, he does a whole lot of hovering around above people, staring down at them, instead of just flying over and saving them. I think it's that whole "Jesus" thing again. It just felt really weird to see him posturing like that, it really didn't jive with how I think of the big blue boy-scout (and I'm one of the people who was OK with the whole neck-snap in the Man of Steel, so I'm not exactly the most ardent Superman purist).


When I heard that Ben Affleck was being cast as Batman I just couldn't see it. I just feel that Affleck has a bit of a goofy smile, which works great for a lot of characters but doesn't quite fit the Dark Knight in my mind. Well, I guess that wasn't going to be a problem since it's not like Batman was ever going to be doing much smiling in this movie. But I jest. To be honest, I think Ben Affleck did a great job as an older, angry and bitter Batman. No, Ben isn't the problem.

So I've talked before about how Batman is called "The World's Greatest Detective", right? The point is he's supposed to be kind of smart. Well, I didn't see it here. Without going in to too much detail, I didn't see much intelligence in the way he fought any of his fights, but what's worse is that I felt his motivation for the whole feud was just very stupid. OK, he came up with a passable justification (by a very very "us or them" type of logic) for fighting Superman later, but his real reasons for fighting were, well, not something that I would expect from and intelligent and logic human being. OK, Batman dresses up in a bat costume and picks fistfights with large groups of armed men, so maybe objectively he's not the most well-adjusted fella around, but it still just doesn't fit with the Batman that I know.

Neither does the fact that he straight up kills people in this film. Oh, it more or less happens off-camera, but I'm fairly certain no-one in that car that he blew up survived. Do I really need to talk about how out-of-character it is for Batman to run around killing people? Yes, I know, he's based on the "Frank Miller Batman". Look, I've seen Batman in many shades, from Adam West to the Dark Knight. Frank Miller's Batman was grittier and rougher around the edges than most, but he was neither a psychopath nor an idiot. Zach Snyder's Batman, in my eyes at least, is both.


Another casting decision that I didn't agree with was Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor. And yes, "Lex" has always been short for "Alexander", this isn't supposed to be someone else, this is just a different take on good old Lex. And once I warmed up to the idea of this different, arguably more modern version of the evil businessman, I realised that Jesse was a great casting decision. I reckon he perfectly captures the character as written.

The problem is that I think the "character as written" just isn't as intimidating as the classic "cool and in control" Luthor. Even though he's much better as a criminal mastermind than the version from Superman Returns, he's just not scary. So while I don't inherently object to the attempt at a different take on Luthor, I think it doesn't quite work overall. Especially since I felt his motivations were not really clear; he isn't trying to take over the world, he doesn't have any personal history with Superman, and he doesn't seem to be inherently opposed to super-powered beings he has no control over running around the planet (well, the film is a little contradictory on this point at any rate)... I dunno, maybe I missed something. Having said that, his verbal sparring with Senator Finch was one of the few entertaining parts of the movie.


It seems a lot of people weren't sold on Gal Gadot being cast as Wonder Woman. I have to admit I was one of them; the thing is that Wonder Woman is an Amazonian warrior: tall, strong, and a skilled fighter. Personally I had thought that they should have cast Gina Carano; she's a large, strong-looking woman who has proven she can shoot a fight scene. Honestly though, I don't think it would have made a big difference; the only fight scene she was in was just a load of fast-paced quick-cut CGI anyway. I will say that she didn't sound like I normally expect Wonder Woman to (based on the cartoons and stuff), but that's my fault for expecting a Themysciran to sound like an American. I'm not saying that Gal's accent was Greek, and I'm not saying that it wasn't; I'm just going to say that I can't complain about Wonder Woman having an accent, and I can't complain about how Gal handled the role, even if I still don't think she was the best choice.

I can't really say much else about Wonder Woman since she really didn't matter at all. She showed up a few times during the movie, but none of these scenes served the overall plot or told us anything much about the character or anything; she was just there to be there, and you could have completely cut her from the entire movie without making any difference. She did handle herself very well in the one action scene she got, which I thought was a big deal since Wonder Woman often gets the short end of the straw in this sort of thing in the comics.


I did not realise that Jeremy Irons had been cast as Alfred. It was a pleasant surprise; while he played the character a little differently than usual, I enjoyed his performance to the extent that think this is my favourite Alfred ever. I just wish he'd been given a bigger role; Alfred really doesn't do much more than provide a few jokes and a bit of exposition here, while in the Nolan movies for example he's a much more central character.


I've talked about how most of the characters were quite different from what I recognize as the "traditional" (dare I say "correct"?) versions, but one character who much more closely matched previous appearances was Lois Lane. Which is unfortunate, because she is so often poorly written. Mild spoiler warning: she needs to be saved by Superman not less than three times this movie, and basically doesn't actually contribute in any real way - in fact I maintain that she actively makes things worse at times. Although I guess the only times Superman manages even a small smile is when he's looking at her, so there is that. The sad thing is I thought she was much better written in Man of Steel.


In case it isn't obvious by now, I didn't think that the plot worked very well; most of the characters' motivations were either vague or didn't really make much sense to me, and there wasn't really any depth to the story despite how hard the cinematography tried to convince you otherwise. Oh, the cinematography was really nice though; Zack Snyder does shoot a pretty picture, that's for sure (well, as pretty as something can be with so little colour).

I feel as if there was less action than I might have expected, but none of the action scenes were bad. Batman's fights were much better than anything he did in the third Nolan movie, though obviously not nearly as impressive as something out of the Raid or Man of Tai-Chi - but then I don't think that was really ever on the cards to begin with. Superman really only had one big fight, and while it was pretty good if you like entirely CG battles, it was nowhere near as impressive as the fights in Man of Steel. Overall I can't complain about the action, but I wasn't impressed by it; there was nothing new or smart or particularly impressive or skillful going on.


The thing that I remember most from watching the movie is just a sense of tiredness and depression. The fact is, this movie is dark. Not just at the start or at the end, but the whole way through. There's just no sense of optimism or positivity at all. I don't know, it was all just too gloomy for me.


The plot is bleak, the characters felt wrong (it's not just that they weren't the heroes I know, it's that they didn't really feel like heroes at all), and the movie has an over-inflated sense of it's own importance. Having said that, it has good acting, decent action, and great cinematography. I'm going to give it 5/10: if the idea of Batman killing people doesn't feel wrong to you and you like watching desaturated CGI characters hitting other desaturated CGI characters in dark gritty desaturated urban environments for no good reason, then yeah, enjoy.

#####SPOILER WARNING#####

Most superhero movies end on some sort of a note of triumph. The B.S. Movie starts on a scene of tragedy, is mostly full of insane people trying to kill each other, and ends with a funeral. It's just dark and gloomy, start to end. Which makes me wonder: is Zach Snyder feeling suicidal? Obviously I hope not, I just have to wonder. Maybe they're just playing the long game; like this is supposed to be the "Empire Strikes Back" of the Superman movies, and the next one is going to be the Return of the Jedi and end with everyone throwing a big party? I guess I could buy that, however Empire didn't leave me feeling drained and depressed.


Did anyone notice that the characters had access to info in dreams that they shouldn't have had? Like Pa Kent's story, or Lois Lane's name (Batman didn't know that Lois was important to Superman; if he did he probably would have known about Martha, right)? Although I think that dream with Lois' name was not a dream and is actually foreshadowing something they have planned for the sequels, but if so it doesn't seem to fit in since Batman never saved Lois or anything. Perhaps she's going to die in the sequels and Superman will turn bad unless they go back in time and stop it, but that doesn't quite make sense since we've already seen the dream, meaning that they've already gone back in time and tried to stop it, so if they failed this time then that's it, right? Or it is just another meaningless dream that's just there to look good and make the movie feel important? Maybe they're trying to emulate the Marvel trick of filling their movies with little easter-eggs that only the real comic book fans will pick up on? I kinda feel like they should probably concentrate on making their main characters recognizable to the real comic book fans first, you know?

Speaking of old man Kent's story, did Clark already know the story - in which case the way it was told was weird (was it supposed to be a memory or something? Because it didn't start off like one!) - or did he just... make it up in his own head? Also, WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? What the hell was the point of that story? OK, so he felt guilty over the negative consequences of a well-meaning action, that's fine, it happens, it's good to talk about it. So what was the solution, what ultimately eased his suffering conscience? Learning to accept that we as humans have limitations? Learning to forgive himself? Why no silly, women! Ugh, look, I get that love is a great thing, but it really isn't an instant solution to every problem in life. A better message here would be to tell him that nobody is perfect, we all make mistakes and we just have to learn to accept ourselves, learn from our mistakes and keep moving forwards, rather than getting stuck and dwelling on the past. Or something like that.

Instead we get this stupid and meaningless "lesson", and the worst part is that the movie doesn't seem to realize how meaningless it was. It makes me sad to think that something so shallow and devoid of understanding could take itself so seriously. On the other hand, since it's all just a dream (it was a dream, right? We aren't supposed to believe that daddy Kent's ghost visited Superman just to impart that nugget of stupidity, right?), perhaps the point was to show how shallow and stupid Superman is? Not that that would have been much better.

And while we're on the topic of dreams, was the point of those bizarre bat-filled nightmares to show us that Batman was psychologically tortured, or to establish that he was actually insane? Because I'm leaning towards actually insane. I wouldn't have hated them so much if they didn't seem so meaningless. I realise that I might have just misunderstood them, if so then I apologize, but... I dunno, I'm just not seeing it.

The first one has Bruce levitating up to a white light (coughIAMJESUScough) that he describes as a lie while surrounded by a swarm of bats; meaning what? Was the light the catharsis of dressing up in a batsuit and hitting people, and it was a lie because it didn't actually make him feel any better? The second one has a giant bat creature jumping out of his parents' graves to attack him. I guess that means his parents' deaths created a monster that is consuming him; a madness that compels him to dress up as a bat? See, all I'm getting is "Batman is insane and needs to stop dressing up as a bat". Which I can't really argue with, at least not the way he behaves in this movie, but then he doesn't actually stop does he? OK, the last dream was pretty much a straight-up nightmare about a future that he fears might occur if Superman is not stopped (and there's some flying dudes who might be bat-themed attacking him, so again a generally negativity associated with bats), which is fair enough, although it does lead to a bizarre time-travel thingy that comes out of nowhere and really doesn't fit in.

Actually, the more I think about that last dream, the more I think the whole double-dream sequence might be my favourite part of the movie. It's a hint at a different, strangely alien world, followed by this jarringly surreal and out-of-place moment. Plus it has probably the best action sequence in the movie. I think it would almost work better as a short film divorced from the rest of the movie, then it wouldn't be dragged down by the film's baggage.


Let's talk motivations in more depth now that we can discuss specifics. What was Luthor's motivation? He's not trying to take over the world. He mentions something like he learned from his father that power makes people evil or something, so... Superman must be evil? Does that mean we're supposed to believe that he's trying to save the world from what he believes is an evil alien? Well, he's clearly not; otherwise he wouldn't have gone ahead and created an even more powerful, more evil, and more uncontrollable alien without any contingency plan for how to stop it.

By that same token the other potential motivation - that he has an unexplained problem of some sort with any super-powered being, as evidenced by the way he's collecting info on them - is clearly not the case, else he wouldn't have created the powerful, evil, uncontrollable monster. Also, he seemed unnaturally attached to Zod's dead body, so clearly he isn't exactly repulsed by Kryptonians. So... yeah, I dunno.

What we do see is Luthor acting progressively more insane. Which is a terrible motivation and still doesn't actually explain very much; even the Joker usually gives us a reason for what he's doing, even if that reason is just "for fun". And Luthor is not the Joker, or at least he's not supposed to be. And he shouldn't be, if only because we already have a Joker: he's called the Joker. We don't need Superman's nemesis to just be Batman's nemesis again. Although we shouldn't really be surprised since the Superman movies have been borrowing so heavily from the Batman movies that they've basically just turned Superman into Batman with powers (seriously, watch the Nostalgia Critic review of Man of Steel).

Don't get me wrong, I can certainly come up with a bunch of reasons why Lex would want Superman dead if I wanted to, but the point is we're not given any of those reasons in this movie! We're not clearly given any reason, at least none that I was able to understand. Am I just stupid? Is Zack Snyder just operating on a whole other level than me? Honestly, I really don't think so.

I mean, I understand Batman's motivation: some guys he kinda knew died while Superman was saving the whole planet. Clearly this means Superman deserves to die, right? Hmm, perhaps I should clarify: I understand what Zack Snyder is trying to say that Batman's motivation is, unfortunately it only makes sense if you believe that Batman is a moron and/or insane. An no, I refuse to believe that Batman is somehow unaware of the fact that Superman saved the planet; Lois Lane was RIGHT THERE the whole time, she knows the whole story, and she's a damned reporter: it is an established fact that that Superman saved the planet, as evidenced by the way they built a monument for him in the middle of Metropolis and they worship him and stuff.

Oh, he talks later about how "if we believe there's even one percent chance of Superman going bad, then we have to kill him now", or something like that, but that's clearly a justification for his actions and not what's driving them; if it really was his motivation then it would have been fleshed out more. What we did see fleshed out was his horror at the damage caused by the fight with Zod. I might argue that we also get a glimpse of his own feeling of helplessness during that fight, which could have been another motivating factor, but again this wasn't developed (except I suppose briefly in that one abstract dream sequence) so I'm not going to count it. I admit that it's a more sensible reason for his hatred, but I still wouldn't accept it as being enough to drive Batman to want to murder an innocent man; at least not the Batman I know and not any Batman that I want to watch movies about.

In theory we're already supposed to know Superman's motivations since we already had a whole movie about it. But then this movie has him question why he's trying to be a superhero, and then no-one ever really answers the question. I mean, one minute he seems to have decided not to be a superhero anymore and traveled up north, then he has a dream where his father tells him that Lois will cure what ails him, and suddenly he's back in Metropolis. Even then, he's fighting because he's being forced to, in order to save those he loves. In fact if he hadn't played superhero to begin with they would never have been in danger, so... I dunno, as far as I can tell the question of why wear the cape is never answered.

I think for that narrative arc to be concluded satisfactorily, they really needed for Superman to make the decision at some point to do what was right because it was right - that's kind of the essence of Superman's character, isn't it? But I don't really feel like that's what actually happened in the end; instead he fought Luthor because his women had been kidnapped: he did it for his own personal benefit, not because it was the right thing to do.

OK, you can argue that fighting Doomsday wasn't personal, but... well, what was the alternative? Sit back and let him trash the planet? It doesn't really sound like the kind of thing you can realistically choose to ignore. Besides, some people are stubborn; once they start a fight they see it through, doesn't necessarily mean that they are doing it for good reasons. Yes, you could say that he chose to sacrifice himself at the end, but, well, he'd already been stabbed through the heart, I think he knew he was dead either way and just chose to redouble his efforts to make sure he took Doomsday with him. I mean, when he flew in with the spear he was attacking a tied-up and weakened-by-kryptonite Doomsday who'd already lost a hand. Yes, attacking while weakened was a risky and difficult thing to do, but there was really no reason for him to believe that he was actually committing kamikaze.

About the only real thing he did that I would categorize as making a difficult decision to do what was right, was saving Luthor from Doomsday. Which was the correct "Supermanian" thing to do, but the moment lacked the gravitas to signify that it was a big decision for him, that it was representative of the direction he had chosen to take his life in or anything like that.

But to be honest, one of the things that bothered me the most about the writing for Superman was why he got so obsessed with Batman. He's in the middle of an existential crises, questioning his own actions and motivations, then suddenly he's like "look, there's some guy risking his life to stop crime, but he doesn't always obey the letter of the law while doing it? HE MUST BE STOPPED!". Nevermind all the wars and genocides and crap happening every damned day, nevermind the mass starvation, rampant terrorism, drug, gun, and slave trade that is alive and well in many parts of the world; STOP THE DO-GOODER IN THE BAT SUIT!

Fair enough, right? No-one should break even the tiniest law, right? Like, say... flying without a pilot's license and approved flight plan? Or how about flying across country borders without going through passport control? Or, I don't know, invading people's privacy with x-ray vision and super-hearing, or all the other little laws I'm pretty sure Superman just conveniently ignores when he's running about playing hero. I mean, is it even legal to run into a burning building that the authorities have cordoned off while the fire department is trying to extinguish the flames and evacuate the occupants? I'm just saying, while Superman is currently being accused of acting without oversight and potentially killing a whole bunch of terrorists (which apparently Americans are unhappy about? Really?), he's angry at some other guy who's accused of sometimes breaking the law to do good? Glass houses much? Yes, hypocrisy is a real thing, but still, the hostility he felt towards Batman just felt like it came out of nowhere and didn't really make sense to me.

Wonder Woman's motivation never really comes up, but we see that she fought in World War II (I think), and when Doomsday shows up she appears to fight, so I guess it's safe to infer that she's a warrior who sees it as her duty to fight evil / protect the innocent. Which is kinda why superheros are supposed to fight, and is therefore arguably the least stupid motivation of any of the main characters in this film. Kinda sad that the characters with the least development have the clearest and most sensible motivations.


Luthor seems to be claiming that it was his plan to get B&S to fight each other so B would kill S? So how exactly did he get the two to hate each other? Or is he just trying to claim credit for something that he didn't do? If he deliberately allowed Batman to learn of the Kryptonite and get his hands on it, then why? Isn't Lex the kind of guy who would have wanted to kill Superman himself? Perhaps it was for plausible deniability, to keep his hands clean, but he was doing a pretty crappy job of that if Lois Lane was so easily able to figure out what he was up to. Also, when Superman saved her and dropped her off right outside Lex's building, Lex didn't seem to make any effort to try to recover her despite the fact that she knew everything and he had even admitted stuff to her face. So I just don't feel as if he was trying that hard to keep his involvement low key.

Plus of course he kinda went and created a bloody Doomsday monster; I don't think anyone would have had any difficulty figuring out that was him. Besides, he did it before knowing whether Batman would succeed in killing Superman or not. So what if Batman had pulled it off, what then? "Oh, hey, guess I don't need this monster after all"? I mean, he'd given away the Kryptonite, the only thing he had that might have been able to stop the monster. Let's face it, his plan was a complete mess.


By the way, how did Luthor know Superman's secret identity? I'm not saying that he shouldn't have know, I just don't understand how come he knew and Batman didn't, despite Batman studying Superman for two years. Also, how did Luthor know Batman's secret identity? I feel like Batman is supposed to be smart enough to keep that kind of a thing a secret. Either way, these kind of details might have been worth showing? Ah, hell, Luthor just knew a whole lot of stuff Batman didn't, guess Batman wasn't supposed to be very smart this movie; actually, that was pretty obvious.


Wonder Woman was so pointless in this movie, she basically just gets forced into the scenes without contributing anything or doing anything that helps the plot or establishes her character or motivation or anything; she's just there to be there, then she joins in the big fight at the end. We don't know who she is,  why she's there, what she wants or why she does... whatever she does. At least she handled herself very well in the fight, so that's something.

By the way, why the hell was Wonder Woman even getting on a plane? SHE CAN FLY! Besides, I don't think there's planes to Themyscira, so where was she even going? I mean, she was leaving to escape Luthor and/or the world finding out about her, right? So where would you go to escape that? Back home to Themyscira, right? Maybe she was just going to Mexico or Hawaii or something. Also, was she in economy class? The way she was prouncing around Luthor's party, I figured she was rich or something - she still is a princess, right? What kind of princess travels economy?


The fight between Batman and Superman was terrible. They were both SO VERY STUPID, and it was slow and plodding and I hated it. I guess Batman's plan was to control the fight to lead Superman to where he had left the spear? So he stands there in the open and waits for Superman to get the drop on him rather than setting up a situation that he knows Superman will respond to where he can ambush him. Then he screws around a bunch with weapons he knows won't work, finally gassing Superman with a Kryptonite grenade. And after he spent so long being stupid that Superman started to recover, and he just manages to gas him a second time (which I reckon Superman should have been able to avoid since he knew about the gas now), he STILL took his time tying a rope to his leg and dragging him around, in a really slow setup for a stupid "spinning him on a rope" attack that was not worth the time they spent setting it up. I just hated the whole thing.

And I have to ask: why not just keep the spear on him and use it the first time he managed to gas Superman and weaken him? I guess you could argue that he though Superman might know that it could hurt him and not get close, but then why not shoot him with Kryptonite bullets since Superman wasn't dodging anything anyway - his plan was to hit him with a Kryptonite gas grenade, so why not bullets, which are smaller and faster and easier to carry? Or how about some kind of remote controlled bat-gadget that would bring the spear to him, like having his remotely controlled bat-plane bring it to him when he was ready for it? Planning to move the fight to where he left the spear is just so stupid; how could he possibly guarantee that he could control the fight against someone who outclasses him so severely? It's worth mentioning that the only way his plan had any chance of success was for Superman to be actively avoiding trying to kill him, which makes his argument that "Superman must be stopped" even stupider.

So Batman won? Yeah, it's what the fans wanted, but let's take a look at this "victory" shall we? He spent two years preparing for the fight, while Superman was told five minutes ago "go fight that guy" - a guy who he could have taken down earlier with the utmost of ease if he had wanted to. Batman had intended to kill Superman right from the start; he continued to attack Superman despite the fact that Superman was trying to talk rather than fight. And of course, Batman basically sucker-punched Superman with a weapon that he didn't know existed. If Superman had been there to fight he simply could have incinerated Batman before he even got close enough for the Bat to know he was there (telescopic vision, x-ray vision, heat vision) or killed him with the first blow he landed (which was intended as a warning blow). So sure, Batman won the fight, but Superman was the moral victor by far. Still, I admit it was cathartic watching Batman punch Superman's smug face into the ground.


Ugh, Superman and Batman's mothers have the same name? That's actually kind of stupid. You know, rather than make a big deal of that, I would have done the opposite, since it's, well, kinda stupid. Oh, and the fact that Superman's mother has the same name as Batman's mother just takes all the wind out of his sails, and he does an instant 180 on his previous hardline "kill Superman" stance? Or did thinking about his mother temporarily cure his insanity or something? Bleh, whatever.


So Kryptonite is back as the green glowing crystal? Cos in the last movie it was, like, a property of the gas on the spaceship or something. Also, why did the brightness with which it would glow keep changing? Was the spear energizing the Kryptonite tip or something? I get so sick of Kryptonite in the comics that I actually liked the Man of Steel version, but I can't complain about the 180 seeing as it is such a major part of the Superman mythos.


I cannot accept the idea that the government just gave Luthor the body of an alien and full, unrestricted, unsupervised access to an alien ship, which they just left in the middle of the city. That makes not one whit of sense. The only thing I can think of is that the scene where he forces the senator to eat the sweet is supposed to indicate that he has some sort of leverage over the him and, by extension, others as well? But having influence over some senators doesn't mean the entire government bends to his will! Seriously, no-one in the military said "Hey, I'm not happy about this?".


Let me get this straight: people genuinely thought that Superman flew in and killed a bunch of people USING BULLETS? These guys were terrorists or rebels or something anyway, is it so hard to believe that some else killed them with guns? Why the hell did the mercenaries use such unique bullets anyway? That's just pure stupidity; when real people want to go somewhere and kill people without being traced, they don't use highly unique bullets that can only come from a single source.


"It sounded like the sky had split open!" What, you've never heard thunder before? Cos that's what it sounded like. Thunder. It didn't even go on for that long. Stupid melodrama. Luthor probably paid her off I guess.


So that guy who took Lois hostage for a couple of seconds, Superman killed him, right? You don't expect me to believe that he tackled him with his whole body so quickly that he didn't have time to pull the trigger and shoved him through two brick walls without killing him, do you?



By the way, it was a bit too convenient how Superman always showed up just in time to save Lois. OK, maybe the first time he knew she was going to Africa so flew around nearby, I can accept that (although personally I think this is something that should have been explained, but whatever), the second time he was supposed to be on the north pole or something, then suddenly he's just there when she screams? I'm not saying that he couldn't have been somewhere nearby, I'm just saying it's annoying that he's always there without any explanation, whether she's in Metropolis or Africa. OK, yes, the third time he was right there, fine, I'll give them that one.


So the super-advanced alien ship was fooled by Luthor's stupid dissected fingertip nonsense? Really? Fine, but what the hell was up with it just offering him command like that? Lois Lane finds her way into a Kryptonian ship early in Man of Steel and it tries to kill her, Luthor does it and it's all like "Hi stranger, would you like to be the captain?". What the hell?

The ship says it has knowledge from "a hundred thousand worlds"? Really, the Kryptonians had knowledge from that many worlds yet they completely died out when just one planet exploded? Let me guess; those "hundred thousand worlds" were all planets like Mars and Mercury. The "knowledge" was basically "that one is hot, that one is cold", etc. Besides, I would expect a computer to be more specific than "a hundred thousand", since I sincerely doubt it was exactly 100,000 planets. Wouldn't it make more sense to say something like "knowledge from ninety-eight thousand, four hundred and seventy one worlds"? Oh, but that lacks the gravitas that this whole movie is so intent on beating us to death with.

Wait, so mixing a Kryptonian corpse with human DNA in... whatever that chamber was supposed to be or do, creates a monstrosity, and the Kryptonians knew about it? Quite apart from the question of why the hell would that be a thing to begin with, my question is how the hell would they know about it? Did they mix human DNA with Kryptonian in the past? How? Why? Or does Kryptonian DNA just do that when mixed with any DNA? Does this mean that Clark and Lois' child will be a monstrous abomination? Cos we know now that's what happens when you mix these two types of genetic material, right?

And when the ship tells him that this is forbidden, he just says that the dudes who forbid it are dead, and the ship is like "OK"? Is that how computers work on Krypton? Cos it isn't on Earth. Why the hell was that even Luthor's plan? Ugh, "put blood in Kryptonian ship and let it do the work" is a little too close to the last Luthor's plan of "throw Kryptonian crystal into the water and let it do all the work". Look, Luthor is supposed to be smart, having alien tech do all the work for him with minimal effort on his part is just not impressive and does not making him a menacing or interesting villain.


Oh God, that stupid "He's coming!" rant from Luthor at the end. That was terrible and completely out of place. Why the hell would he start ranting about... whoever, Darkseid probably. When did he ever make contact with him? Let me guess; it's something he found out about from the ship somehow. How would the ship even know that? Why the hell did he care about Superman if he knew about whatever it is that was on it's way? Bleh, again, B.S Movie is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.


If Batman was so concerned about the Kryptonian punch-up happening in Metropolis at the start, why did he drive over in a car as Bruce Wayne instead of fly over as Batman? Oh, I know: it was daytime. Batman only ever comes out at night, right? Sigh.


As much as I enjoyed Alfred, I did think he was a little too passive concerning Bruce going insane and planning to murder someone who didn't deserve to die. Like, you'd think he'd protest a bit more strongly, wouldn't you? Alfred is supposed to be a bit of a trusted advisor to Bruce, isn't he?


At one point Superman calls Batman "Bruce". I assume he used his x-ray vision to peek under the mask. I do find it rather interesting that they imply Superman is using his x-ray vision at times, but never show it.


So what was that weapon Batman used against Superman that actually hurt him? Was it just a pair of giant speakers? Can we build a bigger set and use them against Kryptonians and/or Doomsdayians?


Of course the movie had to have Doomsday. Of course. Sigh. Doomsday is just not a very interesting villain, but I guess there aren't many others people remember who can really fight Superman on an equal level.

Did Doomsday really need orange lightning energy pulses? I guess they though it would look cool on-screen or something. They were wrong. It just felt to me like they were ripping off the last Godzilla movie.

"The spear is the only thing that can kill it"? Hmm, bit of an assumption, also one that I would argue was proven untrue; we saw Wonder Woman cut it's arm off, sure that means that she could with luck and skill and a good opening cut it's head off. Don't tell me it would survive that. Well, I guess the other two didn't know that at the time.

Of course Lois threw the spear away, making it harder to find. She's a woman after all, and we all know (by "we" I mean people who read my blog, all 2 of you) what DC thinks of women.

So when Superman shoved the spear all the way through Doomsday's body, wouldn't that just mean that it's going to kill him more slowly since the Kryptonite is no longer in his body?

Why did Superman not dodge the nuke? He clearly saw it coming. I thought nukes were designed to hit continents, not small fast-moving targets in the upper atmosphere. Nevermind the fact that nukes these days don't have just one big warhead. Maybe it was built specifically for that purpose, to be used against Kryptonians? Makes sense, but clashes with the idea of the government simply ignoring the existence of the Kryptonite. If they've been looking into anti-Kryptonian weaponry (which is pretty much a given really), then I have to believe they would have swept in and grabbed the Kryptonite as soon as they learned of it's existence. Yes, it was kind of stupid of them to shoot at Superman when he was clearly well on his way to tossing Doomsday into the cold dark void of space, but it's the kind of thing I can believe panicked commanders doing at the spur of the moment. It still annoyed me though, because I was pretty sick of everyone in the movie acting stupid by that point.

Doomsday was standing on an abandoned island. He had just been hit by a nuke in the upper atmosphere then fallen back to crash in to the ground; someone in Batman's position would probably conclude that there was at least a chance that he would take a minute to recover before doing anything dustructive. The spear that could kill him was in Gotham. So what does Batman do? Rather than fly off to get the spear then come right back, Batman LURED DOOMSDAY TO THE CITY? WHAT THE HELL? Yes, the docks may be deserted, but that doesn't mean the whole city is! You've seen the destructive power of a Kryptonian rumble, why lead him back to the city? To YOUR city, Gotham? Assuming you even make it back, which seems unlikely when being chased by a creature that can hold it's own against Superman. Seriously, just how stupid is this Batman?

Hell, Batman wasn't even actively looking for the spear once he got there! He very clearly wasn't looking around whenever we saw him. Shouldn't he have had some kind of tracking device embedded in it, or some way of tracking the radiation, or something? Just saying, that's the sort of thing Batman usually has.

So when Batman hit Doomsday with the weakening Kryptonite gas, why didn't Wonder Woman just fly up and cut it's head off while it was weak? Pfft.


God, I SO wish Lois had just pushed Luthor off the roof. She knew that he had murdered a whole heap of people to frame Superman, he had just kidnapped her, and he was standing right in front of her at the edge of the building. Just push him off! Plus the longer he spoke the more obvious it was the he was about to push her off in order to lure Superman there; couldn't she see that? She didn't even make any real effort to defend herself when he walked behind, her, moved in, then pushed her off. I feel like the "Man of Steel" Lois would have been less pathetic in that scene.

How did Luthor even know that Superman would show up only after Lois had been brought to the building? What if she had screamed when they first kidnapped her and Superman had popped in to save her right there? How would he have his little conversation with him then?