The Myriad Ways Nostalgia Seeps In

 So I think I hit a nostalgia phase recently, and I realize now that there is a vast difference between "Nostalgia as represented by other people online," and "Nostalgia that works for me." To be more specific, I recently began thinking about what would be considered "nostalgic" for me in a sense that I understood....that is, wanted to engage with and liked in a way that felt like I was reconnecting with an old past I had all but abandoned. 

It's hard for me to feel nostalgia about D&D because, in the time I have been a gamer I have played D&D consistently across about six editions and numerous variants almost weekly now for close to 43 years. So D&D specifically isn't a nostalgia driver - its an old warhorse I can both rely on but also feel the need to give the poor old boy a break these days, as he's old and weathered.

I likewise have a lot of bygone hobbies that no longer "click" for me at least partially because the overall value of the hobby has now passed on to memory, or its dated in a unique way that makes it difficult to re-engage with. Sometimes its because the elements of the hobby that made it fun now seem a bit quaint, as I have moved on from it and developed more sophisticated tastes (for example: as a teenager I was fascinated with Transformers, but that was 40 years ago and I really don't care for them these days outside of mild amusement and perplexity at just how much that IP has polymorphed and warped over the years). 

There are sometimes hobbies I was so in to that I exhausted my interest, and now find that any rekindling of interest is mostly a mellow "reappreciation" of an old interest. I think of Star Trek this way, for example. Loved it - a lot- back in the day, will still watch any of the original movies and episodes on occasion, but otherwise have very little interest in what goes on in Star Trek now, or in seeking out, collecting, or obsessing over the Star Trek of yore. It's time has passed for me.

But, amidst all of this, I figured out what does click for me on the nostalgia scale: stuff I was really into in the very late eighties and much of the nineties, stuff I particularly enjoyed and then moved away from, often due to life circumstances, but never properly got back to. Sometimes its also because my moment of enjoyment was deep and profound, and the "thing" in question was ultimately left behind but not because I was oversaturated or done with the property, but because life conspired to take me away from it. I have managed to identify a few of these things, which I have been rediscovering lately and finding I am really enjoying getting back to these ancient, neglected interests. Specifically, here are a few:

Cyberpunk - Specifically Cyberpunk 2020, the most played game I ran in college that wasn't AD&D 2E, and easily one of the best gaming experiences I had back in the day. I moved away from it for plenty of reasons, none of which were because I was done with it, although later editions didn't tempt me back; we'll see about Cyberpunk Red which I am reading through again with an eye for seeing if it can recapture that zeitgeist of Cyberpunk gaming in the early nineties.

Image Comics from the Nineties - I jumped hard on the Image comics explosion in 1992 and stuck with it until time and money conspired to take me away from comic collecting following my move to Seattle in 1995. I have very fond memories of just how great, new and interesting it was to follow the various comic creators behind Image at that time as they constructed a new, interesting shared universe that was outdoing Marvel and DC at every turn. It fell apart eventually, but I only left it because I graduated and went off to Seattle to pursue some direction toward a career. I came back to comic collecting in 2012 and have stuck with it, but only recently did I begin to recollect various Image series from the nineties (all of my original comics have been long gone). Wildcats, Stormwatch, Grifter, Authority, Gen 13, Team 7 and many others are all a "best of" from  unique era in the nineties when creator controlled properties briefly made the entire industry quake in fear. Of these, Spawn alone is the one I have kept up with collecting so I don't need to bargain hunt at local comic shops and on Ebay for Todd McFarlane's angry hero from hell, but for the rest? It's proving to be a lot of fun to restore these lost collections, and even find the stuff that came out after I was forced to take a 17 year hiatus in comic collecting.

Unknown Armies - I played a lot of 1st edition Unknown Armies, and loved that edition. I was out of the loop by the time 2nd edition was released (it was too soon!) and now I've had 3rd edition on my shelf for ages. But that said, I think that either getting back to the original 1st edition or re-embracing the newest edition is another proper nostalgia itch scratcher for me. 

Pseudo-Nostalgia: Over the Edge - I actually loved reading all the Over the Edge books, and wanted to run it but never got the opportunity. I am now recollecting with exactly that intent!

Anyway.....these properties (and a few more I might write about in the future) have actually been ticking the nostalgia box for me. So now I think I understand how some people feel....maybe!

Borderlands Movie Review

 I saw Borderlands over the weekend with my son....it was, well, fine, but the movie clearly has so many weird little issues that it was doomed from the beginning. There's a lot of individual performances and moments that feel very right for Borderlands, but the film is stuck in a pre-Last of Us/pre-Fallout Series quagmire of the sort of lowered expectations Hollywood has had toward video game franchises from the time before someone started doing it right. Still better than the Halo TV show, but that's a super low bar. See if for free and be only slightly disappointed.

Pros on the movie:

--Looks really good for the most part; some nice effort was put in to give the world of Pandora its junky, trashed feel from the games.

--Cate Blanchett really puts it all in on a grizzled older Lilith, who is a gun-toting shoot-first lady version of Han Solo in this film.

--Jack Black really nailed Claptrap the Robot, enough so for me that he almost sounded like the game version.

--Kevin hart does a pretty good Roland circa Borderlands 1. Krieg is Krieg, though if you know him from Borderlands 2 he says a lot of crazy stuff this version in the movie barely touches on. Marcus the gun dealer works surprisingly well given he, like so many Borderlands characters are such distinct visual and audio personalities that that can make it tough for a live actor to live up to the more cartoonish elements of its source material.

And the Cons:

--Made years ago during the pandemic, this project clearly went through too many screen rewrites and edits, and the story is a mashup of bits from the games and "Save the Cat" plot elements jammed in by nervous screenwriters who didn't know what to do with the material and were worried it wouldn't appeal to a mass audience. It ignores or rewrites chunks of game plot in ways that The Last of Us and Fallout Series have shown you do not have to; it is an artifact of the elements of Hollywood that do not like video games and do not know what to do with them.

--The movie has three principle female leads, all in their fifties to sixties. In an action movie about a video game aimed at teens and twenty-somethings, featuring mostly characters also in their teens and twenties. Gina Gershon as Mad Moxxie is arguably the closest in age to her own character, but in the Borderlands universe even Mad Moxxie is still using some unholy biogenetic/cybernetic enhancements to make herself perpetually young looking (maybe, I dunno; its video game logic, okay?) But as I watched this movie all I could think to myself was, "I saw the perfect actress for Lilith earlier this year, and she was playing Furiosa." 

--Even Kevin Hart, despite playing a decent Roland (IMO, YMMV), felt a bit too old for the Roland from the game who I would have pegged at maybe 25-26 years old and fresh out of a tour of duty leading him to vault hunter as a profession. Plus, in the movie, he's actually portrayed as an AWOL crimson lance, which is....maybe what happens to him in a later game? I don't honestly know, I only got about 10 hours in to Borderlands 2 (I've played the first game start to finish 3 times, but never finished 2 or 3, sorry).

--What was with female General Knox (and why gender swap Knox when there was a perfectly workable actual female villain in the original game who filled this exact role?) and her relationship with Roland? Why was that not even remotely developed in a way the audience could see so it had some meaningful payoff? Was that stuff that was filmed and then cut in editing? 

--No skag attack? In a Borderlands game? Yeesh!

--A mishmashed ending which took more from Borderlands 2, but shifted who the characters were and made only a slight nod to the tentacle brother to Cthulhu that is the end boss of the original game. Okay but also not ideal.

--The biggest con with the movie was how remarkably little of it felt "right" and how those moments stood out when the movie did, in fact, occasionally start to feel very much like Borderands, only to then do something that felt ham-fisted and either the result of poor writing or poor editing/direction. 

--The fights lacked pizzazz. The director (Eli Roth, I believe) doesn't seem to know how to do satisfying fight choreography.

--For every region from the game that got an interesting facelift (such as Fyrestone or Piss Wash Gully) there was another location where it was just head-scratching as to why they changed it (the ending sequence, for example, where the Vault entrance is located).  

--Weird and ham-fisted "Save the Cat" plot moments felt jammed in to satisfy story beats or force emotional resonance. The entire backstory of Lilith, Tannis and Lilith's mom was just...unnecessary.

--Tiny Tina was a doomed choice of character from the start; no one was going to top the Animated Tiny Tina for sheer crazy, period.

--Tannis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis is the most out of place of all of the characters. In the game she is a late twenties/early thirties scheming psychopath driven mad by the planet in her pursuit of Eridian artifacts. In the movie she is a seventy-something savant on the spectrum who botched her friend's request to take care of her daughter and who hides away in some attic studying artifacts with no real agency. Curtis does fine, but this just ain't the game's Tannis, by a long shot.

--Why do none of the characters reflect their iconic abilities? How could the movie go at length without showing Lilith use phasing powers, or Roland using his turret machine gun? These were such easy gives for certain scenes, essentially the character's superpowers, and they ignored them. 

--The vibe of the movie is just completely off. It feels at moments like the art and FX team totally got the message, but the writers and director totally did not. Somewhere in this mix someone knew enough to crib material from the game, but not enough to understand the core appeal of the game that could translate to film.

So in short: I give the movie a C for trying, but also a C for somehow failing so badly. I don't regret seeing it, but I also hope the movie is quickly and quietly forgotten so that maybe now, in this post-The Last of Us era of films based on games, we can see a real Borderlands movie done right eventually. I wonder how much cash could be thrown at George Miller to make it? Seriously, he made a much better Borderlands movie earlier this year, called Furiosa. 

This is Probably too Clever But....

 In reference to my post yesterday about being confused as to why Robert Downy Jr. would return as Doctor Doom, the thought crossed my mind that if you wanted to have a big Iron man comeback, and didn't want to obviously give away your plans, this is the way to do it, through misdirection. Unfortunately a fellow I know with more Marvel lore than I do says the whole Iron Man/Doc Doom connection is a thing in recent Marvel comics, so maybe its just that. Who knows!