AMCAlmaron

...ugh, god damn it. Okay, let's get something important out of the way. The Vault sets and the costumes and props for this series? Spectacular stuff; they've captured the look of the games almost perfectly. Everything ELSE, though? A huge disappointment, and I'm baffled by the number of reviews out there gushing about how amazing the series is (the Guardian gave it FIVE STARS, for pete's sake). All I can assume is that people were so gobsmacked by the visuals that they didn't pay too much attention to everything else, or they let the character and story issues slide because it's a 'video game' story and expecting anything better would be too much from one of THOSE uncultured things, fnar fnar.

Anyway, I was going to write up some huge plot breakdown and try to condense the summaries I sent to some friends already, but I can't be assed. Is anybody even reading these journals anymore? In short, the story sucks (both the overall set of events and the way it's broken up), the world itself is confusing and makes it look like the characters are just wandering in circles in the same small area, characters have strange motivations and make bizarre/illogical choices constantly (Maximus takes the cake here and is easily the worst character in the show), the new lore elements are a mess and either clash with older games (or give them a giant middle finger), and it's full of fridge logic moments, notably repeated cases of strangely lax security and characters being evasive with the truth when they've got no reason to hide anything. Oh, and there's some horrendous comedy; moreso in the second half of the series when the episodes started being written by people without any Wiki pages, which is a great sign. Where are all these awful new writers coming from?

The only GOOD thing I can say is that for all the stupid shit outlined here, it'll be easy for them to write their way out the holes they've created in the lore. For instance, the bulk of the story takes place in LA, so a later entry could go 'oh right it was just THAT area that was all anarchic for a bit' and not risk pissing all over the games that Bethesda didn't make (which honestly just seems petty on their part).

...ah bugger this, I'm going to bed. Just play Fallout: New Vegas if you're wanting the wasteland experience. Or that Old World Blues mod for HOI4.

Hrm, how to begin this one…so just recently I was reminded that Rings of Power existed and that a second season was apparently on the way. I hadn’t bothered to watch the original season as it looked like it was going to be a disappointing mess for a number of reasons (and the post-release discourse confirmed that for me), but the reminder inspired me to look over the source material, and a few wiki binges later…well, I ended up with an idea for an original story that would bridge a gap in the timeline and allow for a diverse cast of characters while exploring some interesting themes…

Some context will be needed for this to all make sense, so I’ll start by briefly (hah!) summarising the events that Rings of Power was adapting…loosely. The story properly begins about 1,200 years after the defeat of Sauron’s boss Morgoth, at which point Middle Earth is dominated by Elven realms and a few minor kingdoms of Men, with the only one of note being Numenor; an island paradise that was created by the deities of Middle Earth as a reward for the humans who helped them out in the war against Morgoth. Disguised as a giftgiver named ‘Annatar’, Sauron (who’s in the process of building himself a base in Mordor) enters the Elven realm of Eregion and convinces the local leader Celebrimbor to work with him and forge a bunch of magic rings that will grant special powers to those who wear them; the end goal being to hand these all out to various local leaders and steadily corrupt them. They spend three hundred years getting the bulk of the ringmaking work done, then at the end Celebrimbor makes three rings for the Elven leaders in secret while Sauron leaves to forge his One Ring ‘to rule them all’, returning to wage war when his treachery is uncovered. Sauron kills Celebrimbor, takes the rings meant for the Dwarves and Men and begins conquering the Elven realms, but is ultimately turned back when the Numenoreans join the war - his downfall also aided by the work of two Blue Wizards who were sent to Middle Earth to travel into the eastern realms to undermine his power base. Sauron retreats to Mordor and finishes fortifying it as he plans his next move, Elrond builds Rivendell, and the Numenoreans start to become proud as a result of their victory, heralding the beginning of their downfall…

…anyway, the story doesn’t pick up until more than a thousand years have passed, by which time Sauron has handed out the rings to various local leaders (with mixed results; the Men were corrupted into Ringwraiths, but it didn’t work on the Dwarves and instead just brought them great wealth and the increased chance of monster encounters) and Numenor has become a huge seafaring empire with colonies across southern Middle Earth…and also become a hotbed of anti-Elven sentiment. Numenor ultimately meets its doom as a result of the actions of King Ar-Pharazon, who seizes the throne upon the death of his uncle and leads an army to Mordor, capturing Sauron and bringing him back to Numenor…whereupon Sauron corrupts the king and convinces him to sail west and take up arms against the deities of Middle Earth, leading to Numenor being destroyed Atlantis-style - with Sauron getting caught in the crossfire and being injured enough that he has to rely on the One Ring to take physical form. However, a family with ancestral ties to the ruling clan escapes the sinking and flees to Middle Earth, setting up the Kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor, and soon ends up at war with Sauron, leading to the battle you all remember from the opening of Fellowship of the Ring.

Now, before I continue, there’s an important thing to note about the setting of Lord of the Rings…it’s actually meant to be a fantastical ancient Earth, with Middle Earth proper being Europe, and the ending of the series marking the point where magic began to leave the world and the legendary creatures and non-human species started to vanish, thus steadily giving way to our actual history. The Shire is a Britain that’s not yet become an island, Gondor corresponds with the Roman Empire, the people of Rohan are a mishmash of ancient Germanic tribes…and everybody from outside of Europe is lumped in with the ‘Easterling’ or ‘Haradrim’ peoples who have submitted to Sauron and are participating in the big battle seen in Return of the King. Somewhat awkward, but to be expected with older texts - compare Narnia’s Calormene Empire, a very unflattering representation of the empires of the Middle East.

Anyway, for those of you who, like me, didn’t watch it, the Rings of Power series opted to merge the two time periods I mentioned together, with the main plot being less about the rings and more about a ‘mystery box’ plot where the audience is trying to figure out which of several mysterious figures is actually Sauron, with Galadriel travelling through Numenor and the ‘Southlands’ (Mordor) to try and find him, while various Elven, Dwarven and Proto-Hobbit characters are…there. On top of that, they attempted to address the setting’s lack of diversity by depicting each location as being multicultural, which…well, while I get the intention behind it, it just comes off as lazy to me, as it doesn’t feel like they’re engaging with the work; rather than exploring the non-European areas of the map and taking the opportunity to build on lore elements that were only hinted at briefly (or which come off as dated by today’s standards), they’re just doing a giant handwave and not trying to make it fit with the lore at all, and also ignoring the Fridge Logic that comes up when you try to connect it with the Peter Jackson film trilogy - i.e. since the cast wasn’t especially diverse in that, does this mean some massive ethnic cleansing event took place between the two works?

So, at long last, we come to the subject of my idea…the city of UMBAR. Located south of both Gondor and Mordor and controlling the coastal area of Haradwaith (a vast area that corresponds with the Middle East, and which is where those armies with the Oliphaunts are meant to be from), Umbar is an ancient city that got turned into a full-on Numenorean colony once their expansionist phase began, and which subsequently became the home base for the anti-Elven faction that later dominated Numenor. After Numenor’s destruction, Umbar and its settler population became hostile to the newly established realm of Gondor, and fought a number of wars with them over the centuries, ultimately submitting to Sauron’s forces and participating in the attack on Minas Tirith (the ships commandeered by Aragorn and the Dead Men of Dunharrow in Return of the King are meant to be theirs).

So, imagine a story set in that thousand year gap I mentioned earlier…there’d be a lot that could be explored;

*Numenorean Families - According to the lore, Umbar eventually became a stronghold of the anti-Elven ‘King’s Men’ faction (their rivals, the ‘Faithful’, had a stronghold in the northern city of Pelagir, which later became part of Gondor), so it’s already easy to imagine a noble family from said faction as the story’s main antagonists…but on top of that, it’s also mentioned that Numenor began expanding their colonies in this era and turning them into fortified cities, which would imply an influx of settlers moving in and upsetting the status quo of the old entrenched elites. Would our protagonists be from a ‘Faithful’ family (perhaps with a link to the royal family to provide some continuity with Elendil and Isildur centuries later) that’s just settled in the area, or would they be the established family and the new arrivals all be ‘King’s Men’? Or would both protagonist and antagonist families be long-established and the new arrivals be from a third faction altogether?

*The People of Haradwaith - What of the native population? Chances are they’re not so fond of the Numenoreans moving into their land and expanding, and given that the area corresponds with the Middle East, it’d be easy to draw parallels with crusader states like the Kingdom of Jerusalem or colonial entities like French Syria and Mandatory Palestine…and since the people of Haradwaith only really appear in the series as servants of Sauron, it’d also be easy to have a plot where people are aligning with Mordor in the hopes of driving out the Numenoreans and reclaiming their lost land. Maybe the protagonist in such a story is someone with mixed allegiances; they’re in love with a Numenorean (perhaps one of the families mentioned before, in order to tie the story together), but they have a sibling they love who’s been radicalised and/or who has gone missing. Or perhaps the protagonist starts out idealistic and ends up radicalised by the end after everything goes wrong, with them joining team evil from there, or perhaps everybody in their family joins and they have no choice but to flee…

*The Blue Wizards - Mentioned only briefly in the series, the Blue Wizards were a pair who…well, it depends on which version of Tolkien’s notes you’re reading. In one version, the two of them came to Middle Earth at the same time as Saruman, Gandalf and Radagast, and promptly disappeared off the eastern edge of the map as a part of an ultimately failed attempt to weaken Sauron’s grip on the area, but in another version they were sent to Middle Earth before everybody else, and ultimately did manage to make an impact, ensuring the armies sent against Gondor weren’t as big as they could have been. It wouldn’t be hard to include them as characters wandering the edges of Haradwaith and Mordor while investigating some mystery involving Sauron, or quietly seeding dissent against him in both regions, or serving as guides to the aforementioned Haradrim character and leading them into Mordor to find their radicalised sibling…

*Nurn - Given how Mordor is almost exclusively depicted as a volcanic wasteland dominated by Mount Doom and Barad-Dur, you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s all there is to the place. In truth, that’s just what the ‘Udun’ and ‘Gorgoroth’ regions in the northwest third of the country look like; the vast majority of Mordor is actually a fertile green area known as Nurn (which players of the Shadow of Mordor/War games might recall exploring) which is full of slave-operated farms that tend the volcanic ash-enriched soil to grow food for Sauron’s armies. So…where are the slaves coming from exactly? Are the Haradrim being tricked into travelling there by Sauron’s forces who then enslave them, or are there tribes in Harad regularly selling their own people (or captured people from rival tribes) to Sauron in return for a steady stream of goods? Is the Haradrim character’s missing relative caught up in this somehow - and if so, is he a slave or a slaver? Are some houses of Umbar secretly in on it and handing over people who oppose them to slave-traders so that they’ll never be heard of again? Are the Blue Wizards aware of what’s going on and working to get people out via some equivalent of the Underground Railroad?

*Galadriel - Initially living in Eregion, Galadriel and her family ended up being expelled from the area as a result of Sauron’s machinations while the rings were being forged, bouncing around Middle Earth for a while before settling full-time in Lothlorien, and for a while during this time, they settled in Belfalas; a future territory of Gondor to the west of the aforementioned ‘Faithful’ city of Pelagir. As such, it would be possible to include her and a group of Elven supporting characters in the story (and also use Belfalas as the main ‘Elven’ settlement of the series, allowing for distinct architecture and a forested region to contrast with the arid Haradwaith region), perhaps with her arranging for a scout party to infiltrate Mordor and report on Sauron’s actions, perhaps with her group travelling to Umbar and being welcomed by the ‘Faithful’ family but facing hostility from the ‘King’s Men’ family which would whip up the crowds against them, etc…

*The Dwarves and the Grey Mountains - While the allocation of ‘nine’ rings for men seems to be an arbitrary figure that doesn’t correspond with the number of human realms in Middle Earth (three of them were reportedly given to Numenorean lords), the ‘seven’ rings for dwarves were designed to align with the seven clans of dwarves that existed in the world. Of these clans, only three of them have been identified as living in Middle Earth itself (one initially in the Misty Mountains, and two originally in the Blue Mountains to the west), while the other four are supposed to be somewhere off the eastern edge of the map. With information that vague, it wouldn’t be hard to shift one of the four to the area near Umbar in order to have a localised dwarven clan for the story, and conveniently, one of the only things known about the lands south of Haradwaith and Umbar is the existence of a vast mountain chain known as the Grey Mountains (which some fan maps show as extending all the way to Umbar itself), which would be the perfect place for their settlement to exist. It’s not hard to imagine a massive dwarven trade empire selling to Numenor (via Umbar), Haradwaith and the lands to the south (granting an excuse to explore the area and create basically a Middle Earth equivalent of Wakanda in the process, or at the very least have visitors and exotic creatures from it cameoing in the marketplaces) and eventually falling into chaos as a result of a dragon raiding the place a la Smaug, because…well, read on.

*The Rings of Power - You thought I’d forgotten about these, didn’t you? Since the timeskip corresponds with the time when Sauron would have been giving out the rings and trying to corrupt the peoples of Middle Earth, it’d also potentially correspond with the rise of the Ringwraiths and the onset of troubles for the dwarven realms. Since three of the nine rings were given to Numenorean lords, it’d be easy to have it that a former ‘Lord of Umbar’ was given one and led the family (one of the ones mentioned before) to glory before vanishing suddenly, with their fate being revealed during the course of the season, and since four of the seven rings were reportedly destroyed by dragons, that hints at the likely fate for the aforementioned dwarven trade empire near Umbar; a dragon eventually attacked it.

…you can sort of see how a story set in Umbar could write itself, right? Tensions in Umbar begin to boil as Numenor begins expanding their control over the surrounding areas, leading to Haradrim families being screwed over while old blood clashes with the new. In the midst of this, during a visit to the area by Galadriel and her entourage, the neighbouring dwarven city gets destroyed by a dragon, causing a crisis and letting the King’s Men families use that as their excuse to secure control of the city and expand forts and stuff. Galadriel suspects Sauron and her entourage teams up with one of the Faithful families to head into Mordor, while simultaneously a Haradrim character looks for their sibling and follows them into Mordor with the help of the Blue Wizards, who lead them down a path they carved out for slaves escaping Nurn. All meet and find proof that Sauron is behind this all, see the Ringwraiths for the first time (one of whom is a lost family member), and then learn some shocking truth about how at least one of their families has a member who participated in the slave trade. After learning the truth and fleeing back to Umbar to try and warn everybody about what they’ve learned, they find the place now completely dominated by the King’s Men, who use this information as an excuse to do MORE of what they’re doing (and perhaps even continue the slave trade as a way of profiting while also getting rid of various dissidents), forcing them all to leave with Galadriel and set up shop in Pelagir, leading into a future season/show about the fall of Numenor…

So yeah, whaddya think?

Well, here's something I've not been able to do in a while...actually recommend an Assassin's Creed game! I mean, it's not a 'rush out and buy this right now' game (unless you're an old fan of the series), but it's a good return to form after the last few games, and I sort of see it as a proof of concept for what a larger game in the series could be. That's also not to say it's perfect; there are a lot of minor quibbles throughout (story's a bit weak at times, combat's a bit clunky at times, map feels a bit empty at times, etc), but looking back after finishing it, I don't think it deserves a critical savaging and would say it belongs somewhere near the high end of my rating scale, falling somewhere between 'had some really good ideas but was held back by something big going wrong' (this includes ACI, Liberation and Rogue) and 'overall good but with some issues' (this includes the entire Ezio Trilogy, ACIV, and Origins).

Alrighty, let's get into it; Assassin's Creed Mirage feels like somebody wanted to remake ACI while implementing mechanics that got introduced and refined in later games, so you're a random Assassin who's tasked with dealing with a shadowy cabal of baddies, and you take them out by travelling to a local bureau and conducting research first before getting the big assassination mission. Instead of ACI's repetitive 'research' missions, Mirage adapts the Cultist system introduced with Odyssey and FINALLY gets it right; gone are the interchangeable NPCs with generic text backstories who you can target if you really want to but which aren't crucial to actually completing the game, now it's down to full on story missions investigating one or two lieutenants serving a regional big bad, and through them you learn their identity and get an idea of what they're doing before you take them down. Not only does this fix the glaring flaw the old games had with the 'clues' system (giving you the illusion of a shortcut when you still needed to find them all) by conclusively linking them with the main missions, it's also nice that there's now an actual story and not just a boring 'here's a list of baddies who we assure you are evil; kill them eventually if you want a bonus ending clip' approach.

So yeah, unlike the more recent games where the player's a tank and it's all been about combat with lots of mooks, Mirage instead builds its missions around stealth in a Dishonoured-like way where there are multiple ways to get into a secure area, you've got multiple creative tools to deal with mooks, and the fun comes from figuring out how to do it without getting caught (although I noticed a fair few reviews from fans of the newer combat-focused games complaining about this, which was disheartening...I do hope UbiSoft doesn't abandon this approach going forwards). Refreshingly, getting spotted isn't the end of the world; in other games it'd lead to the entire surrounding area getting alerted (the 'Cock-up Cascade', as Yahtzee calls it), but here it just alerts the two or three people nearby and so it's possible to deal with them and then return to sneaking. Accordingly, combat is back to the ACI system; one button attacks, one button parries (and usually allows for an instant kill if you stun an enemy), and one button dodges, while the bow has been replaced with throwing knives (which are stupidly overpowered and can take out most foes in a single hit). It's not an easy system and I did get overwhelmed a couple of times (it didn't help that muscle memory for other games had me pressing the wrong buttons a few too many times), but I did enjoy it as a whole (and again, was reminded of ACI's system, where it was hard at first, but weirdly satisfying when you got the hang of it).

Moving onto the setting and story, I had some trouble at the start because the press releases gave me false expectations. See, Mirage takes place at the beginning of the 'Anarchy at Samarra'; a period of chaos triggered by the Caliphate's equivalent of the Praetorian Guard getting too powerful and assassinating Caliphs/causing civil wars, while simultaneously a religious uprising and a slave revolt taking place made things worse and prompted several governors of border regions to quietly declare independence. In-game, the Caliph gets assassinated early on (but not in a historically accurate way) and the leader of the slave revolt is an ally in a few of your missions, but that's about it. Had I known from the start that the focus was really on Basim and Baghdad itself was only meant as set dressing, I don't think it would have bothered me as much...but that being said, I wish they'd set the game a year earlier and just omitted the Caliph completely; everything would have still played out the same!

(Incidentally, random trivia for players of other games; the Caliph at the start of this game is the one who built the Saracen Wonder in Age of Empires II, while the son of his who occasionally shows up is the starting ruler of the Abbasids in the 867 start dates for the Crusader Kings games! )

Next, the story itself; Mirage gives us the backstory of Basim, the Master Assassin who first appeared in Valhalla. As a youth, he lived in a place north of Baghdad with his friend Nehal, making a living as a pickpocket and dreaming of one day working with the Hidden Ones (Assassins), who occasionally contracted his fellows for work. On top of that, he struggles with recurring dreams of a monstrous Jinni coming after him, which SURELY has nothing to do with what Valhalla told us about his ancestry. In the end, he gets his wish after a mission to sneak into the Caliph's Winter Palace goes awry, and the game jumps ahead to him training at the Assassin stronghold of Alamut (complete with a montage!) before sending him back to Baghdad to deal with the five figures who he saw threatening the Caliph (each dominating a different region of the city), and to slowly figure out just what their ultimate goal is...

Having finished the game, I can say the story DOES work overall, but there are a few issues with it...clunky dialogue at times, a cheesy opening, minor character beats popping in out of nowhere to the point where it feels like a scene might have been cut, and a bit of a lurch in the middle where...well, after assassinating the first of the five members of the Order, the game gives you the freedom to decide which order to take out the next three, but this kiiiinda messed up the flow of things. In my case, I did the House of Wisdom mission first, which dropped loads of tantalising hints about what the Order was up to, but then the Grand Bazaar mission after that was a self-contained story about merchants being dicked over by other merchants, and then the last remaining mission was about dealing with the military opposing the slave revolt, which in retrospect I should have completed first. After all that, though, the game picked up again, with three really interesting new figures to explore and a mystery to uncover, culminating in the Big Bad revealing just what their plan was and setting up the climax of the game, so I wonder if this would have been a problem if I'd done the House of Wisdom last instead.

Anyway, I won't spoil what happens at the end, but I will say I doubt you'll guess just where it's going...you might think you do because of Valhalla, but nope! I walked away simultaneously thinking 'that was really clever!' and 'that was REALLY stupid!', so hats off to the team for that one! I also actually found myself wondering what the experience would be if a player started with Mirage and went on to try Valhalla...in some ways I think it'd be an improvement (although I'm not sure I can recommend playing Valhalla to be honest, so perhaps not) and I kind of wish it had come out first!

So yeah, here's hoping we get more like this as time goes on, and less of the bad RPGs set in fantastical uchronias, because that's what Odyssey and Valhalla both were...look, AC games struggle with writing at the best of times (the present day storyline is a core part of the series with all the events revolving around it and it's almost NEVER been handled well) and their attempts to write compelling RPG stories just expose their shortcomings. Better for them to stick to what they're good at...or, to paraphrase Yahtzee, "Don't be The Witcher III, Assassin's Creed, be Assassin's Creed. We've already got a Witcher III, it's called 'The Witcher III'". Unfortunately I've seen the next game set to come ('Codename Red') is already being presented as a 'very powerful shinobi fantasy' set in Feudal Japan and it's being worked on by the team behind the stylish but flat Syndicate and the execrable grindfest Odyssey, so my hopes aren't high for that one...

So remember how last week I posted about how Elemental was a film that I thought was okay while my friends disliked it, and also that it was full of ideas and setups that didn't go anywhere? Well, that also applies for this Indiana Jones sequel, except this time I was the one who disliked it while my friends thought it was okay. In the end, I walked away from the film finding myself wanting to revisit the older films, especially Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which, while flawed, was never as bad as people said it was, and as such I'm curious to compare the two (especially since Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was kind of Patient 0 for the whole nostalgic rebooting of old franchises that should have stayed finished).

Our story opens with an extended flashback sequence set during the closing stages of World War II, which also happens to be the best part of the film. Indy and Dobby (no, really, that's his actor) are captured while infiltrating a Nazi base to recover the 'Spear of Longinus'. It soon turns out that the spear is a fake, whereupon visiting scientist Jurgen Voller (no relation to the villain from the old Staff of Kings video game) begins gushing about the 'Dial of Destiny' (a device which is supposed to be the Antikythera Mechanism, but which looks nothing like it) and how they should be focusing on finding the missing half of it instead. Anyway, Indy escapes his captors, fights his way through the train the Nazis are trying to flee on, and ultimately rescues Dobby and the dial, while Voller gets hit in the face by a passing sign and is knocked off the train. You'd think this would have killed him or at the very least left a scar or something, but then again Indy got slammed against a tunnel ceiling during the sequence with no harm done, plus the train somehow came to a halt at a broken bridge instead of flying through the air with all the carriages, so I guess it wasn't going that fast.

After this, we cut to the...well, 'present day' isn't quite the right word, but you get the idea. Indy's now a cranky old man living a miserable lonely life in a tiny apartment (yaaay, ANOTHER story about a sucky future for the hero of a beloved series...and also kind of a rehash of the last film's acknowledgement that he wasn't a young man anymore, now that I think about it), he's a day away from retiring, and his students are uninterested in his lectures, although to be fair the Moon Landing has just occurred so it's understandable that they're distracted. But anyway, what happened? Didn't the last film end with Indy and Marion marrying each other and him having a son to raise? Well, turns out Shia LaBeouf went off to Vietnam and got killed, and the grief of that tore Indy and Marion apart...ahh, don't you just love Happy Ending Overrides? Not to mention this just seems...well, spiteful towards Shia's character. I prefer the headcanon idea I've seen online of him actually being alive in a Viet Cong camp which a grown up Short Round will rescue him from.

Anyway, later that day, Dobby's daughter Helena Shaw intercepts him and asks for his help in recovering the Dial of Destiny, as her father had...somehow been allowed to keep it after WWII and spent the rest of his life studying it, going insane in the process and somehow concluding it would allow them to travel through time if fixed. Indy took it off him years ago and hid it in a storeroom at the school (instead of, you know, putting it in a Museum), and so he takes Helena there to get it, only for them to be jumped by a group of agents working for the still-alive Voller...

...okay, brief tangent here while I elaborate on our villains. Voller is alive and has half the backstory of Wernher von Braun; a rocket scientist who got taken to the USA as a part of 'Operation Paperclip' (aka 'let's grab all the Nazi scientists before the Soviets can') and who from there helped NASA get a man into space...but none of this is really relevant after this scene; it doesn't tie into his overall plan or end goal, and his apparent rocket science expertise isn't really used anywhere in the film. It feels like they just needed an excuse for him to be in the USA at the start and to have easy access to transport (cars, boats, planes, etc).

Adding to that, Voller is supported by a group of mooks who...actually, I have no idea what they were meant to be. Devotees of Voller who claim to be part of the CIA? Nazi infiltrators of the CIA? Neo-Nazis who defected from the CIA? At the start, Voller is clearly in the US Government's good books for his work on Apollo 11, but it's never explained why that would translate to them subsequently giving him manpower and equipment to go and steal an ancient dial from a school that's got nothing to do with his space program work. On top of that, they're accompanied by a token good person; a black lady who regularly complains whenever one of Voller's ludicriously trigger-happy mooks kills somebody and creates a mess for them to clean up. The actress noted that her role is meant to be a nod to black people being recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Black Panther groups, so if the rest of the group aren't CIA agents and she's meant to be 'infiltrating' Voller's group here (and if that's the case, who's the genius who thought sending a black person to work with white nationalists was a good idea?), why isn't she just calling in reinforcements and arresting them all for murder the second they start killing civilians? It honestly feels like this all might have made sense or actually gone somewhere in a previous draft of the film, only to get reworked to the point where it's a relic missing most of the context, as happened with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...

Well, anyway, Voller's lot confront Indy and Helena, Helena steals the Dial and leaves Indy behind, and Indy gets abducted, but manages to escape by fleeing on horseback through the parade celebrating the Apollo 11 mission, while the mooks pursue him, killing people and commandeering vehicles in the least conspicious way imaginable. In the aftermath...somehow Indy is wanted for the murders of everybody? I guess it's because his bloody handprints were at one of the crime scenes, but, like, he's the one who called the police and went 'help, murder!' and on top of that there were loads of witnesses to see him fleeing from the people causing the real trouble, so...uh, no idea how that works. The handwave seems to be that the CIA (or...not-CIA?) somehow pinned it on him for reasons when it would make more sense if it was just that he was wanted for questioning, but anyway, he hides with Sallah and his family briefly before getting on a plane to Tangier to follow Helena (Sallah drives him there and stupidly cries out 'GODSPEED, INDIANA JONES' in a scene for the trailer that really should have ended the film there and had them arrested).

Upon arriving in Tangier, Indy finds Helena and her young pickpocket sidekick Teddy (introduced pretending to fly a plane, so you know that's going to play into the climax somehow) are at an auction house selling off stolen goods. Is this some clever scheme on her part to lure out someone who's got another piece of the Dial? Nope, she's just a greedy thief looking for a quick buck (and she has apparently done this before, making her as bad as the mooks Indy was fighting in the opening of the Last Crusade) and the item that her father spent his life studying has no sentimental value to her whatsoever, even though she claims to have memorised everything he wrote down about it. Clearly someone was aiming for the Loveable Rogue trope, but they left out the 'Loveable' part, because I sure as heck couldn't stand her.

Things get complicated shortly after that, as Voller and his mooks arrive, along with a random crime lord's son that Helena apparently slept with and then abandoned, and a ridiculous chase scene ensues through packed streets (during which time she attempts to argue that her being a thief isn't bad because it's the same as what Indy did in previous films...an argument that doesn't hold up the more you think about it, but it SOUNDS clever, so it's your bog-standard Twitter 'take that' sort of line). Voller gets away, and his mooks kill the token good agent after she tries to stop them (making her completely pointless to the story), while Indy and Helena...for lack of something else to do decide to continue the search for the Dial, and so head to Greece to meet a diver friend of Indy's (introduced as if he's an old character, for some reason) and get him to help them investigate the wreck site the dial was originally found at. See, the wreck itself broke in half and archaeologists only explored the upper half, but not the lower half which was at the time too low to get to, but which is clearly visible in the water and which they now have the technology to get to, so it's unclear why nobody went back...

Anyhoo, after an emotional scene where Indy nearly breaks down saying if the Dial did work, he'd want to use it to go back in time and stop his son from dying in Vietnam, he and the others go diving, recovering a chest containing a wax slab. However, Voller's lot locate them (...somehow) and kill the redshirt accompanying them, then Indy's friend to force him to talk. Indy doesn't, but Helena does, translating the text on the wax slab and distracting Voller long enough for them to ignite some dynamite, grab the slab and the dial, and flee on Voller's boat. From there, Helena reveals she gave them false information and that the rest of the dial must be located in Archimedes' lost tomb in Syracuse, since he's the one who apparently built it (oh, and they melt the slab to find a golden disc inside, but they don't use it for anything in the end). They head there, but Voller's lot again manage to pursue them (...somehow), and they abduct Teddy when he goes off to steal a snooty kid's wallet and get some ice-cream.

Following this shocking development, Indy and Helena do...nothing about that and instead continue on with their quest, heading to an old temple that's now a tourist site and entering a cave where the instructions Helena translated lead them to...another cave! Yeah, it's not really hidden or obscured or anything, there's just a crescent-shaped hole in the ceiling that reflects light to one side signalling that's the way to go, so no idea how nobody else found it before them. They continue deep into the caverns, followed by Voller and his mooks...oh, and you know how there's a running gag of sorts where there's a really big mook that Indy can't beat conventionally who dies in a gruesome way? Well, here that guy ends up having Teddy handcuffed to him, but Teddy manages to grab the keys, escape, and handcuff the guy UNDERWATER, gruesomely leaving him to drown...yay?

Anyway, Indy and Helena reach a small room with a giant statue of Athena (identified as the God of War for some reason?), a large pool of water, and methane in the air. That last part doesn't come up again, so I'm not sure why it's there...anyway, the pool of water is the clue, and they fill it with rubble to make the water level rise and flood a mechanism which opens the door to the tomb itself. Inside, they find the missing half of the Dial...but also a frieze which depicts an eagle with propellors, and Archimedes' remains are also wearing a modern day pocket watch...

Before they can mull this further, Voller arrives and shoots Indy, while Helena escapes and regroups with Teddy. Voller reassembles the Dial and instead of finishing him off, decides to bring Indy along to witness his plan in action. Said plan? When intact, the dial acts like a magnet and points towards the location of a hole in time that will take them back to 1939, and Voller aims to kill Hitler before he can start WWII and take his place in history. Voller and his lot thus travel to an airfield and commandeer an old warplane, then switch into Nazi uniforms as they take to the air. Helena manages to climb aboard at the last minute, while Teddy flies another plane close behind (which just happens to have a pilot asleep inside so that he can take over...clearly someone decided the child pilot wunderkind idea was too much but didn't want to take it out completely?).

In the air, luggage falling over makes Indy realise Voller's made a mistake...continental drift! Confused? Well, the mathematical calculations that were used to make the device in the first place would have been flawed because Archimedes didn't know about things like continental drift (don't ask how that's supposed to make sense), and so the presumed 1939 exit point for this hole in time would be wrong. Voller realises he's correct (it also occurs to me now that this could have been intended as the payoff for the whole 'rocket scientist' thing that went nowhere; perhaps he was hired for his mathematical skills) and tries to turn them around, but it's too late, and they travel through the wormhole to...212 BC, where the Siege of Syracuse is taking place, and where Archimedes is assembling the dial!

In the past, the Nazis freak out as the Roman forces beneath them decide they're a dragon and start directing their ranged weapons at them, and instead of...you know, turning around and flying away, the trigger happy mooks decide to open fire with machine guns like idiots! Indy and Helena parachute out together, Voller and the mooks die when the plane crashes on the Syracuse shoreline (despite it being a stable time loop, the film doesn't bother to explain how none of these extraordinary events made it into the historic record, or even what happened to the rubble!), and Teddy and the pilot land to come and pick them up. Archimedes approaches and Indy guesses that the Dial was really made as a beacon for someone from the future to come back and help the Greeks defeat the Romans...but they're not gonna do that, so sorry, Archimedes, waste of your effort. Indy wants to stay behind, though, but Helena insists he needs to come back, and she ultimately knocks him out.

Now, I don't have any way of proving this yet, but I'm reminded that everybody thought they were going to go back in time to the previous films and do a Back To The Future II-style sequence, and rumours spread that this got axed due to bad test audience reception. About halfway through the film, there was a scene where Teddy stole a wristwatch off Indy's arm, and Indy angrily took it back, noting it was his father's, so when they saw the watch on Archimedes' remains, I thought it was going to be that same watch...but instead, it was Voller's, and Archimedes just grabbed it after he died. Maybe it was going to be Indy's originally? Maybe at one point he was going to go back and save Shia LaBeouf?

Anyway, Indy wakes back in his apartment, all bandaged up and recovering...apparently Helena not only managed to knock him out with a single punch, but got him on the plane, back through the portal, to a doctor, onto another plane back to America, and through customs, clearing up the whole 'wanted for murder' thing without him ever waking up. Sallah shows up too...as does Marion, and the two reconcile while Helena and Sallah leave to let them have a moment together.

...and that's that. Okay enough at the start, but becomes a mess after the America sequence...and also, sad to say, really kinda boring. The other films had all these fabulous sets and locations to visit, but here it felt like they ran out of money after the chase scenes in the USA and Tangier, and so just resorted to 'the middle of the ocean' and 'a random cave'. At times it also felt more like I was watching a poorly-disguised pilot for a spinoff series starring Indy's goddaughter, which...ugh, no thanks (on the other hand, canonically Short Round is supposed to have grown up into an adventurer like Indy AND he's even supposed to have eventually got that diamond from the start of Temple of Doom back from Lao Che...could we not give HIM a series?). Were there other scenes planned, or did this all make more sense in an older draft of the film? Guess we'll have to wait for that info to come out...

...and again, fuck what the film says; as far as I'm concerned, Mutt's alive in a camp in Vietnam, and Short Round's coming to rescue his ass. That's the real end.

These last few weeks it feels like I've been making up for years of not having easy access to a cinema...just recently I've gone out with friends and seen Across the Spider-Verse (minor pacing issues but otherwise really good!), a re-screening of Top Gun: Maverick (which I enjoyed despite not having seen the original), the Flash (bit of a mess but still...fascinating enough to sort of recommend), and most recently, Elemental...the weirdly generic looking Pixar film with a super generic looking story. I'll go into more detail about the other films some other time, since Elemental is fresh in my head right now and I think I've got more to say about it anyway.

So, the verdict...ehh, not a great film. I liked the worldbuilding (or rather, the attempts at worldbuilding; I could see someone else making a good film out of some of the stuff that was explored) and the character designs grew on me over time, but the story and events were a mess that felt like several different drafts that got squished together with all the meaty parts left out. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, but I'm already pointing the finger at Director and Co-Writer Peter Sohn, who previously helmed 'The Good Dinosaur', based on a memory of something I read at the time the film came out of how he found the basic concept of the film boring and was instead more interested in the relationship between the two leads...and it feels like something similar happened with this film.

I'll need to go over the film to summarise what works and what doesn't...and I have to say that it's a bad sign that the current Wikipedia summary of events already reads like a confused mess. Our story takes place in the simply-named 'Elemental City', a Zootopia knockoff that was founded by waves of Water, Air and Earth elemental colonists, with Fire (sort of a mishmash of South and East Asian cultures) being the newest community to arrive. Two fire elementals fleeing their homeland set themselves up in a dilapidated and abandoned district - which appears to be a former Water district, but this doesn't really get explored the way it should - open a convenience store, and raise a daughter, Ember.

A decade and a half later - during which time more fire elementals arrived and their district became a thriving 'Fire Town' - Ember is excitedly preparing to take over her father's shop while also struggling with the fact she loses her temper easily and explodes when dealing with annoying customers (it's mentioned she turns a specific shade of purple in the process, but this isn't actually building up to anything and is just a weird bit of worldbuilding). During one stressful moment, she damages a previously unused pipe in the basement and releases Wade, a council inspector who keeps getting fired (another revelation that doesn't really add anything to the story) and who was investigating a dangerous leak in Fire Town. Wade soon realises that Ember's home was built illegally and so rushes off to file a report which will get her shut down, and although he feels bad about it, it's not until he's already handed it in that he has a change of heart. Whoops.

Anyway, after that, he and Ember unsuccessfully try to stop an Earth elemental (one of only two Earth characters to feature) from passing it on to Wade's boss; a sports-loving Air elemental who gets into a fight with Ember at a Windball Stadium (the only scene in the film that really focuses on Air elementals) before warming to her and stating she'll forget about Wade's report if she helps him deal with the leak problem that brought them together (inadvertently implying the council is kind of corrupt if she's willing to look the other way in return for having her workload made easier). With Ember warming to Wade after seeing how he was able to inspire the Windball crowd briefly, the two track the leak problem to a damaged floodgate near the city docks (interestingly, the damage appears to be deliberate sabotage, and Wade even mentions tasting oil in the water, but this doesn't go anywhere).

Since Wade isn't able to get a professional team to fix the area due to a previous failed job (again weirdly making the council look super corrupt?), in the end Ember comes up with a temporary fix by using her fire to turn sandbags into glass and create a barrier, whereupon Wade's boss declares everything sorted, and with that subplot abruptly resolved, the story instead becomes about Ember and Wade's growing relationship and also a realisation that she actually DOESN'T want to take over her father's store and would instead be better off pursuing a career in glass-making, something that wasn't really explored prior to this point and which felt like it could have been built up better.

Incidentally, upon reaching this part of the film, I couldn't help but think everything beforehand had been needlessly complicated? Considering the water leak Wade was investigating threatened Ember's entire neighbourhood, couldn't the two of them have just worked together from the start? In either scenario she's got a good reason to work with Wade and to keep her unwell father from knowing lest he overexert himself (another plot point that kinda goes nowhere...noticing a theme with this film?); the entire 'retract the report' subplot just pads out the film before the story really starts, makes everybody look corrupt, and adds an uncomfortable betrayal aspect that would be looming over their relationship...

...well anyway, after that the film is a straightforward 'two people from different cultures fall in love', with Wade falling afoul of Ember's anti-water racist father (interestingly there's a part where he finds he actually quite likes Fire cuisine once he mixes Water with it, but this symbolic union never comes up again), Ember meeting Wade's parents and ultimately befriending them after a bit of accidental racism on their part, Ember winning over her mother when she determines that the two are in love, and Wade helping Ember see a super rare tree which is underwater (it flooded years ago in an accident which isn't really elaborated upon) and which she was previously kept from seeing because of aggressive anti-fire racism (basically the only time outside the opening this comes up). In the aftermath of the latter, Ember and Wade find they're able to actually touch each other without...well, killing each other, and a tender scene follows that's...almost erotic? However it suddenly ends when Wade suggests she pursue her dreams as a glazier, upon which she overreacts and dumps him before heading home so as not to disappoint her father.

After this, Ember's father prepares a big ceremony to hand the store over to her and retire, but Wade crashes it and attempts to win her back, leading to her rejecting him and her father furiously deciding not to let her take over the store after learning she damaged the pipe which brought Wade to them in the first place. A short while afterwards, though, the floodgate from before fails, sending a wave of water through Fire Town (miraculously it seems as though everybody was either inside or close to stairs, as genocide is averted), whereupon Wade and Ember reconcile as he helps her save a precious item from her flooding home, although the two end up trapped in a small room, where Wade appears to die as a result of Ember using her heat to create a barrier, but once the waters recede it turns out he's alive (he evaporated and got absorbed into the stone, but is able to reform afterwards). With that, Ember's father accepts Wade, and the two travel together to study glass-making.

...and that's about it. Two of the friends I saw this film with were incredibly disappointed and thought it was one of the most boring things they'd ever seen, and considering how simple the story was, I can understand why. It feels like this film would have benefited greatly from a more mature plot; one actually exploring the systematic racism that exists in this setting (for instance, Fire Town has an elevated transit system made favouring Water residents that regularly dumps deadly water into the community, but the implications aren't really explored) and potentially having an actual villain to add tension (the entire 'damaged floodgate' and corrupt council story elements seem like they would have worked better in a film where some racist nutjob or crime lord was looking to flood the area and then buy up the land and gentrify the district)...I wouldn't be surprised if these and everything that went nowhere were actually plot elements in older drafts of the film (which has four writers; never a good sign).

...so yeah, to close with a terrible analogy, Elemental is like a vintage car without wheels; some interesting individual parts to look at, but ultimately it's all going nowhere. Goodnight, folks!