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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Why Reminiscence and Westworld’s Sci-Fi Futures Feel So Real

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Lisa Joy has always been skeptical about notions of objective truth. She’s even second guessed her own memory on how key moments in her life occurred. Such admissions suggest a remarkable sense of awareness and perspective. It also marks a canny instinct for creating compelling visions of our collective future… even if we’d rather not personally go to such places.

Both Westworld, the HBO television series she co-created with writing partner and spouse Jonathan Nolan, and Reminiscence, which marks her feature film debut as a writer and director, are layered in ambiguity and the dawning realization that the world is not how we think it appears. In the case of Westworld that comes in the form of robots realizing they’re trapped in preordained loops; in Reminiscence, it is the humans themselves who must confront their own delusions, particularly the ones we tell ourselves about the past.

In the new movie, Hugh Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a man who peddles fantasies for future Americans after generations of war and climate change have left coastal cities like Miami and New Orleans on the brink. As the water literally rises around his feet, Nick and his customers get lost in imaginary yesteryear via technology that allows them to relive any memory, no matter how distorted. It’s a grim scenario that makes the robot revolution look cuddly by comparison.

Yet when we sit down to talk with Joy, she admits she really is as nostalgic as Nick: She just recognizes the lie within her reveries.

“I consider myself somebody who’s very skeptical of the objectivity of the narrator, even if I am narrating my own story,” Joy says. “Is that how it really happened or have I varnished the story over time or changed it based on the retelling? So I’m always really concerned with what was the objective truth of a memory and am I close to it or has it become corrupted?”

The concern with unreliable narration is perhaps why Reminiscence works so effectively as noir. If Westworld gave a sci-fi sheen to the black and white tropes of old Oaters, then Reminiscence inhabits the moral grayness of film noir. Joy even cites Out of the Past (1947) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as touchstones on her own vision of the future. But just as important as the ghosts of the past are the people in this moment telling their story—and thereby making new memories.

Unlike her director, Thandiwe Newton does not consider herself a nostalgic person. For the Emmy winning actress, nostalgia is the memories you obsess over because you weren’t mentally present when they occurred. And she tries to always be present for the memories she knows she’ll care about: time with her children, mainly, and fleeting moments of family.

“Everything else is not real,” Newton says. Yet she also is clearly present for relationships that matter to her, including Joy. Before being cast as Watts in Reminiscence—the assistant and former war buddy of Jackman’s character—Newton worked with Joy on Westworld, the series which won her that Emmy. And the actress paints a very vivid memory of their first meeting over a FaceTime call which was initially supposed to be just with Joy’s husband and Westworld co-writer, Jonathan.

Says Newton, “The first time we met I was breastfeeding my son, Lisa was breastfeeding her daughter. I was [initially] on FaceTime with Jonah… So we’re having such a great conversation that goes on for such a long time, and I’m like, ‘I’m so sorry, can I just bring my baby?’ So my husband brings my baby and I start breastfeeding, and literally off-camera, Lisa pokes in and says, ‘Oh, I’m here, actually, with Zoe and we’re breastfeeding!’ And I’m like, ‘Woah!’ So it ended up being me and Lisa, lactating together, talking and I’m like I’m in! I’m in, Westworld, I’m in.”

For Newton the moment crystallizes why Joy’s storytelling has such candor and prescience. Says Newton, “I give that example because it shows you we’re both aware of being a woman in this industry and what we present at face value… and right at the beginning of our relationship, we exploded that stereotype, and that’s what she and I have been doing ever since, exploding stereotypes.”

It’s also perhaps why Newton was eager to join Joy in Reminiscence for a role that’s miles from Westworld’s Maeve, a robot initially scripted to be a seductive saloon madam who’s turned into a ferocious freedom fighter. By contrast, Reminiscence’s Watts is simply a fighter, and even a sharpshooter who turns out to be far more ruthless than Jackman’s Bannister. The actress reveals to us they incorporated her own real-life capacity for sharpshooting into the role.

“Of course, I’m a great shot,” says Newton. “Every time I’m at the shooting range, I’m the one who [hits the target] every single time. And I couldn’t care less about being a good shot. In fact, it’s an embarrassment to me, I don’t want to be a good shot. I hate violence, I despise guns. But it’s ironic that one of the best scenes I’ve ever been in, in my life, was the scene where [Watts saves] Bannister’s life. I’m a badass in that scene! And yeah, I don’t like violence, but with me and Lisa Joy, it’s a whole other thing.”

Of course that dash of violence and spectacle is in service to a vision for a future rooted in the greater dissolution of American society. This is presented as the legacy of climate change, and it feels far scarier than the menace of robot cowboys taking to the streets.

Says Joy, “On Westworld, I have so much to be paranoid about in my work. Sometimes it’s the AI apocalypse and sometimes it’s nature smiting us [in Reminiscence]. I do think though it doesn’t take much of a prophet to understand the problem with global warming and the repercussions it will likely have on our lives. So the reason it’s presented as almost a backdrop to all the action in the film is because I think it’s time we just accept this is happening, and the question isn’t, ‘Is it going to happen?’ but ‘how will we adapt? How will we deal with what’s coming down in the future towards us?’”

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Daniel Wu, who plays Saint Joe in a short but pivotal scene in Reminiscence, had long conversations about exactly that with Joy. While his character has brief screen time, the New Orleans drug lord represents an ugly possible outcome of the American experiment if things continue on their current path.

“In the dialogue there’s a little bit of where Joe says to Bannister, ‘Your kind were drafted, but people like me were interned, put in camps,’” Wu recalls. “So we talked about a civil war happening and something racial happened with racial trauma, where I was put in an internment camp and that created a serious chip on this guy’s shoulder but also created this serious need to survive. So after he got out of those camps, he then slowly grows up in the ranks of the underworld of New Orleans and became this drug dealing kingpin.”

It’s a dark vision for the future, one which Joy seems to suggest could be inevitable if we continue to be so backward-looking, including to the point of embracing the racism and hate of previous centuries. Considering Westworld itself is also a series where rich elites attempt to travel back to the “good ol’ days” via elaborate theme parks, it’s worth wondering if Joy thinks we’re already doomed with crippling nostalgia as a society?

Says Joy, “I feel like what makes me more nervous is an inability to look back at a shared past. The way in which we’ve become so siloed in our experiences, and the way in which we consume media and news, and even history, the way we learn about it, that we’ve each begun to craft our own subjective narrative about history and the world. And I think that’s very, very dangerous.”

Nevertheless, the artist tries to add a silver lining, particularly in regard to how art can help bridge gaps when all else fails.

“I [have] so many cautionary tales about the future, but there is a thing that makes me optimistic,” she says. “And that is that even though we’re siloed in so many ways, and we can refute and feel immediately antagonistic to certain thoughts or concepts when we start discussing them, I think one of the greatest bridges that people have and cultures have is the arts. Because it gives you a story and allows you to live it fully in the same way that others experience it when you read from the first page to the last, or when you’re in the movie theater watching from the first moment to the last. People may draw different conclusions, but music, arts, movies, those become the touchstones of a shared cultural identity. And that to me is very important in keeping the fabric of a society healthy.”

Reminiscence is in theaters and on HBO Max on Friday, Aug. 20.

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luciusbooks-blog · 5 years

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The Dawn of Science Fiction

While scholars and critics have long discussed and disputed the actual definition of science fiction as a genre, it is undeniable that if someone says that they read a sci-fi book or watched a sci-fi film, the average person will have a good idea as to what they are talking about. Familiar science fiction tropes, concepts, and story lines have been explored and refined time and time again to the point that they are instantly recognisable, yet their popularity never seems to wane. Each new iteration brings a new perspective to the sci-fi framework, and each generation finds fresh metaphors for contemporary issues within its themes and devices.

It could easily be argued that science fiction’s history goes back hundreds, even thousands of years, a whisper of its conception to be found in the work of Ancient Greek cosmologists and philosophers, but, spurred on by the industrial revolution, science fiction as we recognise it today was largely formed in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. The term science fiction itself, though first appearing in William Wilson’s A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject in 1951, was not widely used until its popularisation in the 1920s by the hugely influential publisher Hugo Gernsback, when it became firmly recognized as its own genre.

I’d like to share with you today some of our early sci-fi titles. As a fan of the genre I find it fascinating to witness its birth through these novels, and to see just how similar some of the storylines are to those in sci-fi that is being created today. Furthermore, our separation from them in time makes it is easy to see how the political, social, and technological landscape of the period influenced these novelists, which in turn helps us to more easily see how our own lives and times influence the content of contemporary science fiction, even without the clear lens of hindsight.

THE CRYSTAL MAN

Edward Page Mitchell, edited and introduced by Sam Moskowitz, 1973 [1874-1886]

This is an anthology collection of early science fiction short stories by Edward Page Mitchell originally published in newspapers in the 1870s and 1880s. Mitchell’s stories explored human invisibility and time travel before H.G. Wells’ (undisputedly one of the most influential early sci-fi writers) The Invisible Man and The Time Machine, and it has been postulated by a number of scholars that Mitchell could have been an influence on the legendary author. Also in this collection are extremely early, formative examples of other now-popular science fiction themes such as faster-than-light travel, teleportation, mind transfer, and superhuman mutants. It would be difficult to find a modern sci-fi narrative that didn’t include a concept Mitchell touched on! After his death in 1927 he was largely forgotten until being rediscovered by leading science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz, who collected and published his work together for the first time in this volume, along with his own long and informative introduction which details Mitchell’s personal life and work.

CEASAR’S COLUMN: A STORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Edmund Boisgilbert, pseudonym of Ignatius Donnelly, 1890

Ceasar’s Column is one of the earliest works of dystopian science fiction in the English language. Compared to Mitchell’s work, Donnelly’s novel revolves less around the futuristic and fantastic technologies and occurrences of science fiction themselves, and instead focuses on the political and social struggles of the world they exist in. That’s not to say it isn’t rich in imagined technology – Donnelly’s portrayal of 1980s New York is filled with advanced tech, much of which, such as television, radio, aeroplanes capable of transatlantic flight, and poison gas really did come to exist, though not quite in the way he imagined them! The plot centres on the city’s ruthless financial oligarchy that rules over a vast, abject working class, and the secret resistance organization that opposes it.

The resemblance to modern works, particularly those created during the dramatic increase in the popularity of dystopian narratives in the late 2000s and early 2010s, is notable. When compared with one of the most popular dystopian novels of recent decades, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, it can be seen that both novels create worlds where the brutality of an oppressive state is matched in barbarity by the violence of the revolutionary resistance, with neither truly earning the moral high ground. The similarity of the climax of both novels, in which the struggle between both sides comes to a less-than-clean-cut conclusion, is particularly staggering.

THE FIRST AND LAST MEN

Olaf W. Stapledon, 1930

As science fiction matured throughout the early 20th century, more ponderous, philosophical, and cosmically-scaled narratives appeared, including the works of Katherine Burdekin that I discussed in my previous blog post, and exemplified by the groundbreaking works of Olaf Stapledon, all of which helped to form a strain of the genre that still exists today (a favorite example of mine being the 2009 film Mr Nobody, or, more recently, 2016’s Arrival). The recent and anticipated advancements in astronomy and cosmology, which Stapledon followed closely, encouraged a ‘zoomed-out’ view of humanity, and even of the very solar system in which we reside. The First and Last Men, about which Arthur C. Clarke (of 2001: A Space Odyssey acclaim) stated ‘no book before or since has ever had such an impact on my imagination’, takes on the incredible task of imagining the story of the human race all the way up to its demise billions of years in the future. Humanity makes its way through eighteen different forms or species, some of which occur through natural selection, others by human intervention, offering an early example of genetic engineering in science fiction. The narrator, a ‘last man’ residing on Neptune in the last remaining human stronghold, psychically holds the consciousness of a ‘first man’, a stroke of cyclical symmetry which is reminiscent of contemporary and later cosmological and philosophical theories such as the cyclical model, loop quantum cosmology and eternalism. The First and Last Men preceded Star Maker, in which Stapledon took his ideas a step further and traced the birth and death of an entire universe.

Look out for these early works of science fiction among many more like them (so many it was hard for me to choose which to include in this blog post!) in our upcoming catalogue of the legendary Martin Stone’s collection, which is rich in speculative and weird fiction.

Bibliography

Adam Roberts: The History of Science Fiction. Springer, 4 Aug 2016

H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man. Broadview Press, 30 Jun 2018

Ignatius Donnelly: Caesar’s Column, A Story of the Twentieth Century. Wesleyan University Press, 4 Dec 2003

Olaf Stapledon: Last And First Men. Hachette UK, 19 Mar 2012

Robert Crossley: An Olaf Stapledon Reader. Syracuse University Press, 1 Mar 1997

www.scififilmhistory.com: Karina Wilson, accessed 2 September 2019

www.sf-encyclopedia.com: Gollancz, SFE Ltd., accessed 2 September 2019

Published September 12, 2019 by Poppy Connor-Slater .

#science fiction #rare books #fiction #firts edition

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Curse of Enchantia: Final Rating

Written by Alfred n the Fettuc

Oh this is going to be a good one. Like I said in the first post, I’ve already tried playing Enchantia a very long time ago but never really got past the underwater section. Now that I’ve been forced to do so, I discovered what can only be described as a masterpiece in bad game design. Let’s see how it fares in the PISSED system. Spoiler alert: it probably won’t go very high.

Splat indeed

Final Rating

Puzzles and Solvability

This category is, in my humble opinion, one of the most, if not the most, important in the PISSED rating. After all, an adventure game can look rubbish and still be very fun to play because of its clever puzzles. Even the story can sometimes take backstage if the meat of the game (the puzzles, riddles and brainteasers) is a success. Not so much here. Almost all of the puzzles of the game feel random. I can’t count the number of times I felt like a puzzle could be solved in one way or another and ended up doing something completely stupid or counter-intuitive.

Some games contain obtuse puzzles which usually come with a funny or nonsensical world, but most of the time it feels kinda logical, even if sometimes only after the fact. Here, each section contains its own nightmare. Most of the time you just need to pick up random objects to activate a flag somewhere completely unrelated so you can make some progress. Throw a computer on a plank in a cavern literally filled with big rocks. The magician doing random things while you have no reason to think so. The blu-tack puzzle is one of the most stupid things I‘ve ever seen, if only because you have no way of telling what item is in your inventory (more on that in the inventory section). And the examples keep piling up. Even the ending section, where you actually do things that are a bit logical to advance, feels rushed and unsatisfactory.

Stupid blue rock

The only redeeming quality is the fact that you can’t be dead-ended, but putting invisible barriers to avoid that is not the best way to go. It’s the only thing that avoids this category to score a 0.

Final Score : 1. No sense at all in most of the game. Pick up random items and something might occur somewhere else.

Interface and Inventory

Different interfaces tend more often than not to be a miss than a hit. This interface might be the worst thing I’ve seen in my entire life as a gamer. Everything is overly complex and counter-intuitive. I’ve spent more hours in this game trying to do things just because the way the developer wanted me to do it was completely absurd. It’s the graphical equivalent of a bad shareware 80-something text parser, where you have to type TURN DOORKNOB instead of OPEN DOOR. Add that to the stupid puzzles and it’s no wonder I spent so much time on the game. Having so many options with verbs that seem to vary from time to time (once, you need to use ATTACK, another time you need to use PUSH to do the exact same thing) render the whole game sluggish and obtuse. I’ve actually really felt the interface working against me the entire time.

Just give me a real LOOK or WHAT IS option please.

And this inventory. If you go for nondescript items, at least make the graphics of said items look like something, not some blotch of color pixel that could literally be anything. The blu-tack, the deodorant and the golden cloth come instantly to mind. Add the random red herrings that have no purpose whatsoever and items that seem to disappear from your inventory when they want and you have a recipe for disaster.

Final Score : 0. The worst examples of interface and inventory I’ve seen in my entire gamer life.

Story and Setting

What story? I mean, Brad is captured and needs to fight the enchantress to go back home. At no point did I have any feeling of advancing through a story but more felt like I was transported from random location to random location. At no point did I feel like I was progressing toward one goal or willingly going to some place (except when you’re set on a linear path like the seabed or the cliff where you just advance on the path until the next roadblock). Even the final encounter feels like you entered the wrong room by accident.

Woops. Sorry about that, I was looking for the restrooms.

The setting suffers from the same problem where you just feel like locations have been constructed randomly, without rhyme nor reason, from some kind of graphical bank they bought wholesale. At least the scrapyard of madness is kinda funny and original but too much of your time in the game is spent in ugly locations: the grey seabed, the lookalike caves or the neverending cliff are not exactly a joy to explore.

Final Score: 1. Incoherent and random, the world of Enchantia is a chore to explore. And no story whatsoever.

Sound and Graphics

As predicted, this category is the only positive point of Enchantia. The graphics are nice and the animation can sometimes be pretty funny. A few sprites, like the yeti, the parrot or the sea dragon are really nice and well designed and a few bits of slapstick comedy are animated well enough so that they can be funny. I understand that a few critics of the time were impressed by the overall looks of the game. Add to that the little bits of digitised voices now and then (you’re pretty bored by the HELP and HI by the end of the game, but the SHUT UP and a few screams are spot on).

Really nice and big sprites now and then.

Other than that I have to insist on the fact that the music is simply unbearable. From what Laukku has said, there are multiple tracks on MT-32 and I know the Amiga version has no music, but I have to judge the version I played on. Who thought that putting a bland five notes ditty on a loop for ten hours would be a good idea? It’s infuriating very fast and completely annihilates the few moments of tension the game could have had for itself. The sound effects are nothing to write home about with a lot of sounds effects reused ad nauseam for completely unrelated things.

Final Note: 6. Let’s say it’s a 7 for the graphics, but the music only is enough to make me subtract a whole point.

Environment and Atmosphere

Meh. The atmosphere really tries to go for a medieval comedy setting à la Monty Pythons but it kinda falls short in every category. The randomness of the whole world really hurts the atmosphere and the environment alternate between the nice and the bland. There is nothing that really stand out and a few things that could have been nice don’t really come together. It’s not enough to put tutus on orcs if you just leave it at that and think “Hey, the orcs have tutus, it’s funny, that’s good enough”. What really made Secret of Monkey Island stand out in its atmosphere is that it cleverly parodies the swashbuckling tropes and runs with it. Curse of Enchantia is more akin to making a pirate fart joke and calling it a day.

The graveyard has a nice atmosphere but it’s too little, too late.

A little coherence would have gone a long way in helping the game. Seeing again one of the one-legged monsters from the beginning corridor for example, or another meeting with the giant parrot. The village streets are blocked by a roach-monster, a tutu-wearing orc shepherd and two sleeping mexicans. Not to mention the red and white road barrier that suddenly appears out of nowhere at one point to stop you from going where you want while wearing the pig disguise… What could have been a controlled and fun mess ends up being a simple mess.

Final Score: 3. Incoherent world-building and non sequitur atmosphere.

Dialog and Acting

HI. HELP. OPEN SESAME. I can add one point for the SHUT UP and another one for a few of Brad’s mimics, but that’s about it. I can dig the fact that the goal was to make a dialogue-free game so that anyone could play, but then it misses the point by adding signs and written puns. Nothing much to say here.

Behold : the quest giver.

Final Score: 2. Making a game without dialogue or written words is commendable enough but don’t stop halfway and write things anyway!

Final Score

So the final score of this masterpiece of adventuring is (1+0+1+6+3+2=13/0.6) = 22! Putting it between Hugo II and III. I won’t remove any more points because I think I already rated this game rather harshly but considering how bad the whole experience was, this score seems only fitting.

Laukku, you were the only one guessing low enough to earn some CAPs! Well done!

Thank god it’s all over now. I think I’ll play through the entire Lucasarts collection once or twice now in order to forget all about this game. I hope this blog will stay online forever and that anyone even remotely thinking about playing through Curse of Enchantia will read these words and choose instead to go for something more fun, like learning how to juggle with chainsaws. Thanks for reading!

CAP Distribution

100 CAPs for Alfred n the Fettuc

Blogger Award – 100 CAPs – For suffering through aptly named Curse of Enchantia for our perverted pleasure

50 CAPs for Ilmari

Classic Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – for playing through Secret Diary of Adrian Mole for our enjoyment

27 CAPs for Laukku

Low but not low enough prediction award 10 CAPs – for almost guessing one of the lowest scores in the blog history

Yahtzee award – 3 CAPs – For pointing a let’s play from Yahtzee

Steel Sequel award – 4 CAPs – For telling us about the Beneath a Steel Sky sequel

Blu-tack award – 5 CAPs – For giving a little bit of sense to the blue rock puzzle with the blu-tack theory

Scott Mc Cloud award – 2 CAPs – For the link to Scott Mc Cloud’s comic transitions categorisation

Spatial awareness award – 3 CAPs – For explaining to me where you end up when exiting a grave by the side.

7 CAPs for Michael

Spatial awareness award – 3 CAPs – For explaining to me where you end up when exiting a grave by the side.

FAQ user award – 4 CAPs – For trying to give a few pointers about the red herring objects in this game

5 CAPs for Alejandro Romanella AKA Alex Romanov

Enchantia master award – 5 CAPs – For knowing this terrible game like the back of his hand

4 CAPs for Deano

Obscure english show reference award – 4 CAPs – For being the first to point out the reference to Mr Benn

3 CAPs for Charles

Carpenter award – 3 CAPs – For talking about In the mouth of madness and helping me find the title of my next post

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/curse-of-enchantia-final-rating/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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