The Non-Review: Super Mario Galaxy - OR - Super Promethean Murder Spree

Mario. The world – gamers and non-gamers alike – knows and loves the squidgy mustachioed face of the world’s most diversely talented plumber. He’s been an adventurer, Dr., brawler, golfer, footballer, cleaner, tennis player, turtle thrower, occasional princess saver (never a plumber) and now an Engineer. Not one of those normal engineers with graphs and wrenches though. But one of those beefcake snowmen Engineers like what crash that ship in Prometheus.

‘Madness!’ ‘Blasphemy!’ Oh no. Read on and discover how the world’s favourite ‘plumber’ is in fact an omnipotent giver of life and granter of death - a god-like figure in space age world – as I unravel the tendrils of truth wrapped mummy like around his supposed first foray into space: Super Mario Galaxy.

Those eyes, they scream...murder.

Ostensibly Super Mario Galaxy is a platformer. Following the sunshiney wonderland of the Gamecube’s aptly named Super Mario Sunshine, Nintendo opted to send their dictatorly mascot and his sense of platforming adventure into space. And so came to pass a game filled with clever gravity-based puzzling garnished with plenty of aesthetically pleasing primary colours, a beautifully sweeping and majestic orchestral score, wacky and memorable characters and gameplay so refined that it would redefine what was meant by ‘platformer’ from there out.

But who really cares about that.

Yes it was a technically good game with visuallydelightful imagery and aurally charming music. But where do technics, visuals and…aurals really matter in a game filled to the blood-gurgling brim with genocidal brutality.

It was with blatantly child-like enthusiasm and gleeful joy that I settled into the cushioned chair of my local cinema to absorb Ridley Scott’s long-gestating Aliensort-of-prequel a few months ago. Despite the many protestations and claims of ‘it isn’t Alien’ it just didn’t matter. Anything even remotely connected to the Alien series is something that I will anticipate with avid fanaticism (including – oh lordy – AvP) and Prometheus was no different. And while it wasn’t quite what I hoped for as a complete package, it was simultaneously so much more. For it was there, as I was serenaded by angelic harmonies and heavenly light, that an epiphany falcon-punched me across the chops: Mario is an Engineer.

Question is: who's who?

Prometheus follows a team of suspiciously ethnically-diverse astro-paleontological-soldiers as they search for the secrets to the origins of life. Without spoiling too much of the gooey narrative centre, the brown-stuff hits the fan as we find out that the Engineers (great big beefy aliens-come-Squidwards) travel from planet to planet both creating life and, apparently when they see fit, taking it away.

Now back to Mario Galaxy. The player must control Mario as he jumps from planet to planet in order to collect power sources to move his magic space machine, all the while killing any indigenous life you find because they are ulterior to your divine quest and therefore evil…

The parallels are uncanny.

Suddenly the whimsical joviality of the game feels like an ominous darkness, the shouts of ‘it’sa me’ echoing like Death’s hollow cry. Darker than dark even, the abundance of colour and merriment plummeting the game in a crevice-darkness, deeper simply because it isn’t rationally, ostensibly there. It’s much the same with clowns: they look so bright, happy and harmless that, when you glimpse the inevitable evil within, they seem all the more Hellish for it.

Playing the game becomes an uncomfortable, morally torturous experience. You’re no longer a valiant hero setting out to save your kidnapped love but a genocidal beast, wiping planet after planet clean of life so that you can grab yourself even more power. Maybe there’s another allegory here then, an investigation into man and his relationship with nature: do you live harmoniously with the lesser creatures over whom you have dominion, or do you simply crush everything – pound their squishy heads into the floor – in the desperate search for more power and energy?

And yet it is absorbing, disturbingly so. Every innocent little creature that minces their way over to you is automatically an enemy, an alien to be destroyed and disposed of. But it is Mario who is the alien. He is the monster and so are you. But you can’t stop yourself. You have to get that next power-star; you must continue human domination over anything that gets in your way. It happens slowly at first but then comes in waves: joy. Pure, unadulterated joy. Joy as you ram the next Goomba back into the ground from whence it came. Joy as you callously use the discarded carcass of that Koopa Troopa to kill his brother. Joy as it all comes together under the warm, fulfilling glow of your next power-star; another trophy to add the pile, dashed by the blood of the fallen.

The light cast across Mario by Prometheus throws sinister and disturbing shadows. Before you know it you have become Mario; yet another mustachioed monster impelled only by the need for destruction and power.

And then there’s the sequel, what’s the story there? Yoshi of course. Cute, loveable, dedicated little companion/chair, Yoshi. But what is he really? A dinosaur. Those adorable, rainbow-coloured plops of loveliness are in fact brutal, barbaric, thoughtless killing machines. Remember Jurassic park? There is no doubt in my completely rational mind that that hellish T-Rex was a real-world incarnation of Yoshi himself. Just look at the dates: Jurrassic Park came out in 1993 and OH, so did Yoshi’s Safari. And what is Jurrasic Park? Only a dinosaur safari. The truth then is painfully clear: Super Mario Galaxy 2 is obviously a coded sneak-peek at Prometheus 2, where the Engineers go back in time to ride dinosaurs into extinction because of reasons.

If this all sounds stupid – or maybe just too real - then I’ll just let you get back to your superhumanly athletic, obese plumber and save his vegetable conjuring, mentally deficient, mushroom princess girlfriend from the grips of his Machiavellian, horrendously mutated, firebreathing satanic death-turtle arch-nemesis while riding atop his egg-defecating, lizard-tongued, flying dino-beast best pal.

Sarcasm.

Due to the prevailing nihilistic, genocidal retribution that this game/ moral torture thrusts upon the unsuspecting soul, it will score:

8 Stalins out of Hitler.

To celebrate it's release on DVD/ Blu-Ray, check out the trailer:

As a final note, please follow me on Twitter: @smariman. You'll get told of updates and new posts as soon as they happen as well as the odd desperate attempt at being funny, entertaining and likeable. Such is life.

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Looper Review - OR - The Wild Adventures of Honk and Baldy

Overview

It’s the mid 21^st century and time-travel hasn’t been invented yet. But it will be in 30 years. Joe (Joseph – the babe of Hollywood - Gordon-Levitt) works as a Looper, a hit man hired to execute targets sent back from the future where time-travel is under the dominion of organized crime. All goes swimmingly until one day his target is his own future self (Bruce – ‘I’m still here’ – Willis) and he fails to pull off the hit. Suddenly both versions of Joe are forced to go on the run - endangered by their previous employers - in order to save their future as they see it, culminating at the farm of single mother Sara (Emily Blunt) and her telekinetic son Cid (Peirce Gagnon).

During heavy floods who doesn't turn to their shotgun?

Review

‘Time travel s**t.’ This is how the Looper boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) summarises the film's most marketed characteristic. A sentiment echoed by balding Joe upon eating dinner with his freshly rhinoplastied younger self. ‘We could be here all day drawing diagrams with straws’ he says and from there there’s no turning back for Looper.

Looper is sci-fi done right. Clever and it knows it. But more importantly than that: clever and it’s good with it. This isn’t the sort of film that takes a complex idea – and has there been a theory more intellectually ruinous than time-travel in films? – and proceeds to spend its running time illustrating the complexity of the idea and it’s uniquely ingenious grasp of it. No. In Loopertime-travel is cool. Murderous maybe. And seemingly under the control of elusive omnipotent big-bad pseudonym ‘the Rainmaker’. But still damn cool. And this is no doubt largely down to one of Hollywood’s most exciting emerging double acts: director Rian Johnson and the industry’s man-of-the-hour Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Debuting with high-school based noir thriller Brick and following up with whimsical oddity The Brother’s Bloom, Johnson earned a deserved reputation as a convention-shirking auteur. Looper is no different. Its complicated subject matter is indeed complicated. More so even, the door for web-based speculation left well and truly open. But this doesn’t matter. Time-travel is, oddly enough, not important at all – ‘time travel s**t’ after all. What is important is the world the device of time-travel allows Johnson to craft.

Set in a post-economic-meltdown dystopia, Looper is an aesthetic smorgasbord of treats. Look, for example, at the steampunk weaponry, all gratifyingly chunky and timeless. The clash of fancy futuristic eye-drugs and old-as-the-hills secret safes. The juxtaposition of dilapidated cityscape and cosy yesteryear farmland; the home of single-mother Sara and her narrative-anchoring telekinetic son (telekinesis being another sci-fi staple delightfully subverted). Time-travel here is a device within the greater world and not the world itself. One of the most captivating scenes involves the future version of Joe’s friend Seth as he attempts to escape from Abe’s gloriously named Gat Men. Starting with never-before-seen scars appearing on his arm and progressing to harrowing mutilation as his younger self is operated on, the inherent complexities of time-travel are used to craft a gripping, original – and maybe a tad disturbing – scene. All with no intellectual waffle to get in the way too.

What’s perhaps most surprising however is that despite the slick action and clever concepts -  present and accounted for in the bucket load – where this truly impresses is on the smaller scale. Dialogue is sharp and witty and characterisations are engaging, memorable and, most importantly, complete. Nothing, or should that be nobody, feels half-finished or vapid. Take Joe himself. While not necessarily the most likeable of protagonists - except this is Gordon-Levett…so maybe – he’s still such a robust, well-rounded and ‘real’ character that, regardless of his moral afflictions (which it seems come in similar bucket loads in later life), he is still an utterly captivating creation. Drug problems, mass-mudering and metal-hoarding aside: Joe is a cinematic entity that will hopefully live long in the memory.

Where the film comes unstuck however is when it’s inherent, abundant coolness obscures the emotional gravitas so necessary for narrative fulfillment. The key dilemma for Older Joe, the chief impetus for any empathetic connection with his baldy self, is that he wants to save the life of his wife. An admirable act and one rife with potential – gratifying - emotional depth and resolution. But this is unfortunately lost in the wake of the film’s eagerness to be – oh, that word – cool. The wife, while arguably the narrative trigger and emotional crux of the film, is sidelined to the point of barely existing, a veritable cardboard cutout. Willis has some undoubtedly badass scenes and does feel genuine following a mid-way 30 year montage depicting the transformation from young-and-angry to old-and-peaceful (sort of). But it’s overcooked, overplayed. Ultimately the two Joes feel too similar as the films seeks to demonstrate more of its seminal production design and action wizardry.

Ultimately, while there may be inconsistencies of style – the opening's voice-overs are strangely absent until the climax – and tone – there were laughs during what were, presumably, serious moments of the film – Looper is a landmark production. On top of pushing the boat in terms of intelligent sci-fi narrative and the scope for world-immersion, Looper forces brutally uncomfortable moral decisions upon its viewers to a degree never before seen in cinema. Culminating, during one scene, in a sequence no one will see coming.

Verdict

Looper is a testament to the idea that in the best time-travel films the actual notion of ‘time-travel’ really isn’t that important. Look to the likes of the Back to the Future series, a cultural behemoth, in which time-travel wasn’t so much a complex philosophical paradox but something totally bodacious, dude. Or, to put in another way, ‘time travel s**t’. While inconstancies may irk, they are forgivable in a film that sets a benchmark for modern sci-fi.

5/5

Have a gander and feel the directorial love:

As a final note, please follow me on Twitter: @smariman. You'll get told of updates and new posts as soon as they happen as well as the odd desperate attempt at being funny, entertaining and likeable. Such is life.

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