Dear Capcom: Resident Evil 5 - Lost in Nightmares

You Tube Version:

BlipTV Version with Introduction Omitted: (If you watch this one, then I can earn some mad duckets!)

Can I has a plow?

I am about tired of news companies creating (or trying to) catchy sound bite slogans for every news story. Ugh. It really irks me to no end they way they churn everything into a hype machine to gain views and hits.  Is it really  as if people who are in the affected areas are not going to check the weather? Maybe they want people in Texas to care.

Having said that, if you are in an area like I am where there is 40″ of snow on the ground with more coming then you may feel the same way I do.  After you spent 3-4 hours digging your car out, you then had to traverse the ice compacted roads that feel like you are driving on the dirt roads in back of Hazzard county.

As I bumped along in the snow I wondered what is so important that companies think they should force their employees to come to work evenwhen the government and state officials urge people to stay off the roads.  I mean, do not people already sacrifice their lives and time (Time that they will never, ever get back) in service to the CORPORATION? Is your time really only worth $7.00 USD an hour? How about $50.00? Ugh, don’t get me started on the route of workers’ rights and public education in this country . . . I am jumping off track here.

There are over 500,000 tons of snow that need to be removed. Crews are running out of places to pile it and just being another annoying chucklehead on the road is going to get in their way.

It puts it in perspective how much corporations care about you.

Of course, everyone is driving slow enough that if you hit the likelihood of death is slim, but why not put your property in danger so you can make it to work and file a TPS report, stock the shelves with the no returns of DVDs at the Blockbuster that is still open, or shlep that Ralph Lauren button down to all of the 2 people who will be dumb enough to shop at this time!Well, they make you do it! Why? Profit baby, pure profit. Granted not your profit or salary.  You will not see more money because of things like this. The profits will not trickle down or hit your .25 cent/3% raise this year. Times are tough out there you know . . .

Look, am I not anti-capitalism. (Though maybe I should be.) I understand the bottom line matters and that every penny counts in an Enron/AIG run world. I understand that it’s okay to bone over workers’ pensions and 401k’s and then take the government’s bail out tax money and run into the hills giggling with glee.  I know every penny counts, but when and where should be draw a line of common sense? I am sure you sense my sarcasm there. (And if you didn’t, then you need to go to reading skool. )

AmeriKans seem to have this notion of a “can do” attitude. And it is this blind adherence to things always working out and that leads to a lot of entries on FailBlog.  You know, maybe “Yes we can” but has anyone though that maybe sometimes we shouldn’t? I am not tying to perpetuate the idea that “it takes a villiage.” I really do not conern myself with that. For me, it is more like we are all stuck in this same stupid villiage so we should all behave in ways that do not annoy a lot of other people.

I guess if you work at a Khol’s or a Starbucks then you need to physically be there so people shell out the 2.19 for a cup of joe. If you weren’t there, then people would not buy coffee and you would be out of a job, but it just seems to me that no one is generally thinking on this one.

You know what it is? I hate snow. I hate Frosty, White Christmases, Frost Penguin’s stage in Mega Man, and Level 4 in Super Mario Brothers 2.

It is no real surprise that I am behind the curve with this one. I am generally behind the curve with things of this nature because I purposefully do not go out to see films in theaters. Yes, I know films are supposed to be “better” in theater s overall. And, yes, seeing a film the way it was meant to be viewed can be better, but overall I find theaters to suck the life out of films. The experience of going to a film is more arduous than it has been in the past and the reward for dealing with a theater is to see a sub par film back by a studio and millions of dollars. My night ruined and my wallet lighter. No thank you.

Critics, in my mind, are an elite group of effete snobs who find joy and pleasure in things that many either do not derive pleasure from in film of they take for granted . . . or was that Spiro Agnew? Bah, who knows. . . I don;t know if critiquing is in my blood. Maybe that is why I was a literature major – so I could endlessly write about shit that doesn’t matter and get infuriated not at the books I would read, but at the comments of critics, theorists and students. It is not so much that I like to rail against games, TV and film but I like to rail against what everyone else says about them. This is why I have a hard time listening to other people. They are idiots. Yes, everyone but me. Have I punted this introduction enough so that the less patient have stopped reading? Good. Now, let’s continue.

I am sure by now you know the plot of this film. If you do not know the plot then you know the general premise. Maybe you have lived on a rock or were in solitary confinement like Kevin Bacon in Murder in the First. Or maybe you just don’t care, which makes me wonder why you are reading this drivel in the first place. Oh well, go head. If you want brevity and someone else’s worthless option, then Google this som’bitch elsewhere. This is my worthless take on things and I do not do this to generate hit buzz for my website. I have never been good at manufacturing that kind of artifice.

Aliens come to earth and get put in internment camps. Interesting huh? Okay, there is more to the story than that and it really centers on the treatment of the aliens by the “evil” corporation you know – the standard rich white males. I don’t think I have seen that premise in any book, film, cartoon, or Humanities class. . . .Was it really going to be surprising that the film was going to show the dark side of humanity and the ill treatment of these things? The title of the movie was the name of the camp. What would you expect a film named Auschwitz to be like for instance? Okay, the reviews I have read call this film “gut wrenching.” There are scenes like that, but I found them a bit contrived . . . like all scenes like that. Having said that the film is good and you will probably enjoy it when you watch it.

However, I am not sure I am ready to break out the streamers and false adoration with sighs of brilliantly stunning masterpiece or instant sci fi classic – even though the film may be those things. Generally, alien races take on two forms – the we want to kill humans or the we want to save them. The aliens in this film do not seem to want to do either . . actually, I take that back. They do want to fuck things up which is how they ended up in the District to begin with. Apparently there was crime and some violence and the people of South Africa demanded them to be placed in internment camps. Since the film is set in South Africa one cannot ignore the obvious connection between apartheid and the film. I love also how they say the insult is to call them Prawn, but they never give the non insulting term for them. Alien-South-Africans?? (ASS?) Anyway, what is fucked up is that the film is trying to comment on Apartheid, but it behaves as if it never existed. The alien ship landed in 1982 and apartheid lasted until 1994. So, they put the aliens in a camp that is sort of alongside the other human areas for black South Africans? Did they look around and think . . .wow, these prawns are fucked up. Maybe we should desegregate the human population . . . I am just trying to figure out why a film that wanted to make a social comment on an issue, would place it in the era of the thing it wants to comment, but then omit it completely. It is like trying to make a film to comment on slavery in the United States, but we set the film in the 1800’s and we have the slaves be aliens and not black people. Am I the only one missing something here? Am I the only one who thinks this film actually shows how racist people are because few really gave a rat’s ass that this part of real human history was left out and unmentioned? I mean, this was not The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I do not think this was intentional on the film’s part to play sleight of hand and make us care about the aliens while forgetting the plight of the real people in that region. That is giving the film more credit than the creators intended. Though, as reader response goes the meaning is in there regardless of intention . . .damn it. And please do not get me wrong. I applaud the effort and I think such social statements as these need to be made. Though, doesn’t it seem that this is more the exception than the rule? I mean should we laud a film because it makes statements like “War is bad” or “apartheid sucks?” makes any kind of social or political statement? I suppose given the dearth of anything meaningful in Hollywood, the answer to that is yes.

Before we start breaking out the Prawn Oscars, there are a few things that confuse me in this film. The alien mother ship can not only float, but can float for 30 fucking years in the sky? I mean, was I the only one wondering what the fuck was keeping it floating and why no one worried about it? Was it made out of upsidasium? Does it have some Gulliver’s travels’ loadstone? No one thought of trying to get that technology at all? What alien DNA was making that work? Why not strap some of that shit to your shoes, and off you go!

Also, was this some kind of Alien race on the verge of extinction and they happened to wash up on the shore of our planet like some Cubans on a metal raft? Or did their whole planet explode Krypton style and they fled? If it is the latter, then why do they all seem to be less intelligent than oh, say any alien race that can build a ship? Okay, I understand if you take 100 humans and put them on a plane with some guns they couldn’t tell you jack about the principles of flight or ballistics, but they would have some kind of culture or at least learned some ways of civility? Slightly bipedal creatures would have developed some kinds of weaponry to settle disputes with each other right? Developing a stick with a pointy thing on it before civility seems logical, but developing high tech weapons before an understanding of “Don’t crash those train thingys humans ride in for your own ammusement.” 

Okay, it’s possible I am asking too may dumb questions here. I just have this sinking feeling they tossed a few million of the stupidest prawn into a boat and pushed it into the cosmos clicking “Good Luck” as the ship of Forrest Gump wanna-bes drifted into space. “Mamma always said life was like a can of cat food . . .you never know what flavor you gonna get” Or in their language - click click we are all hostile stupid aliens but one click click.

Ah, and this is where we enter with the Protagonist. You know, I don’t even recall the character’s name (Thank you Google . . .Wikus Van De Merwe . . .really? Never would have guessed that name.  Even though he is a bit of an unlikable douche. I realize this is the point because they do not want you to be able to identify too much with him at first. I suppose this is why they portray him as the everyday company man, sort of like Jay Leno except funnier.

What gets me about stories of this nature is that when they hit those gut wrenching moments (as many SF, horror/thriller stories sometimes do now) where they are hard to watch not due to the gore but the humanity. (Cant think of the movie reference I want to use.) As in the torture scene where they strap him into a seemingly premade chair and device and proceed to shock him so that his muscle contract and he pulls the trigger of the alien weapons and they test every fucking weapon with him too. . . .Even when he pleads with them and says that he will pull the trigger, they shock him. Moments later we find him taken and strapped down to a medical gurney or operating table while they confer right over him about what they should do with him. It seems that they need to kill him while he is in this perfect state so they can study him or something. Why do they confer about this right over him?.Yeah, you want the guy you just tortured and who is not totally in your control to hear you say you are going to end his life. Makes it more dramatic I suppose. Probably would be smarter to do it out of earshot so he didn’t fight and just tell him they are going to put him through surgery to fix him. It would have stopped that whole him getting away and fucking up the plans deal. To make matters even less tolerable, we find that his boss and father-in-law has been summoned to help make the decision and we get to Wikus muster a faint “help me” as the father-in-law decides that he’d rather make money off of his death than save him. And that, my dear readers, is the part of the film that is not science fiction at all. All Father-in-laws would rather make money off their son-in-laws than have them alive and stupid.

Blah blah blah Wikus escapes the government or MNU make up stories that he has some Prawn disease where he is turning into a prawn because of fucking them. Which is odd because there is a scene earlier in the film that talked of prostitution – human prostitution as the Prawn seem to be non-gender specific in the film.

So he runs into a smart prawn that he met in the beginning of the film and it turns into a buddy movie. Didn’t we learn from Aliens vs. predator that a human and alien buddy concept just doesn’t work? Okay, it worked in Enemy Mine, but Lou Gossett Jr and Dennis Quiad this isn’t.

So, Chris, the human name for the prawn that Wikus attaches himself to, tells him that he can fix his condition if he can get to the mother ship. They steal some Prawn weapons (only the two of them go to storm MNU headquarters . . .why I don’t know) and steal the fuel so they can go back to a hidden ship under Chris’ house so it can fly to the mothership and they can leave.

Got it?

Okay, so once they make it back to Chris’ house and it is in there that he tells Wikus that it will take three years to fix him. And, at this point, our main character decided to use a 2X4 to knock out Chris and steal the ship below. The whole while Chris’ prawn son is pleading about his father, and Wikus is ignoring him.

And this is really where I hate this film. I cannot stand where characters in films act stupid. Why would you knock out the only person who is your friend and can help you? In what capacity would you think you could not only fly the small craft, but get into the mother ship and fly it . . .where? You don’t know where the fuck the home planet is? Sigh. This is just something that they had Wikus do so Chris could get captured and your heart strings could get pulled at. I will not ruin the end for you but to me it was slightly satisfying but down. What can you expect from a dystopian film?

I will be having an operation on my arm in November, so my video production and writing will slow for a few months while I heal. Most of you will not notice.