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 Sunday, September 21, 2003
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Finished, at long last, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Very very fun. Spent a little north of 40 hours on it. It's a little uneven: some of the early planets I visited left my underwhelmed, but the later stuff (the later stuff for me, maybe you'll visit them in a different order) was great. It's so tempting to dive back and play the dark side now.
There's some great stuff in the end game that really gets across the idea that, oh yeah, you're in a fight for your life, so don't screw around trying to minmax, buster! But once again, the damn final boss is a big ludicrous over-powered jump over everything up to that point -- boo hiss! Thankfully, by using all of the stims & shields I had so far not yet bothered to try out, I was able to dispatch his Sith ass back to, y'know, wherever Sith asses go.
OK, OK, now back to work :). 5:56:00 PM () 
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The Salon review of Underworld ends with "The funny thing about all this is that a half-hour into Underworld I couldn't wait for it to be over. When it really was over, I couldn't wait for the next installment. Go figure." And I have to say, I think that sums it up perfectly.
Underworld is big, sprawly, overly-serious Vampire versus Werewolf movie that challenges absolutely no conventions whatsoever. It's full of Anne Rice-style eurotrash Vampires and hambone villains. And yet, strangely, because it takes itself seriously -- and because it takes its audience seriously -- it totally works. The series of revelations that occur in the back half of the movie are interesting and sometimes even surprising, and they reveal glimpses of a universe that actually has been thought out.
Cinematically, it's also intriguing. In the post-Matrix era, we're used to seeing computer-assisted sprawling camera movements that -- with no visible cuts -- show us impossible points of view to reveal every muscle flex and twist as Our Hero dodges bullets and saves the world. Underworld, for the most part, eschews this technique. It's all about the old school cut and let us fill in the blanks. So the movie ends up feeling more like a horror movie in direction, because we're often very cognizant of what it is we aren't seeing.
So yeah. Loved it. LOVED IT. Just like I love me those Harry Dresden books. Let's hear it for labors of love that take their fan audience seriously and are a little dorky. 10:30:20 AM ()
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