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Secret Level (Amazon Prime)

EDIT: Yeah, sorry, went a bit '@boiled_elephant-style epic' with this one...

Overall, I'm gonna say it's about a 6/10. The CG work right throughout is absolutely top notch, there wasn't a single moment where I felt like I was 'taken out' of the experience due to poor CG or compositing. There are some real hits here, but there are also a hell of a lot of misses, which is a real shame because this had so much promise.

Spoiler tags where necessary.

S01E01: 'Dungeons & Dragons: The Queen's Cradle' - 7/10

Definitely a good start. This came in for a lot of criticism, but I think they did a good job in the ~13 minutes of screen time.

S01E02: 'Sifu: It Takes a Life' - 6.5/10

I don't really know the game, and the 'plot' felt a little generic, but I liked the art style and it was well executed.

Spoiler: S01E03: 'New World: The Once and Future King' - 7.5/10

This was a lot of fun... but it felt like Arnie really had to carry this one on his shoulders. I don't think it would have worked as well if anyone else had been cast.

S01E04: 'Unreal Tournament: Xan' - 9/10

Absolute highlight of the entire series IMO. Not particularly intellectually taxing, not particularly original, but it didn't need to be either. It's Unreal Tournament: all it needed to be was 'big dumb fun'. That brief was well and truly nailed.

Spoiler: S01E05: 'Warhammer 40,000: And They Shall Know No Fear' - 7.5/10

I felt like this could have been a lot more. Barely a word uttered, and there's absolutely no sense of character or personality at all - every one of them could have been replaced with an automaton and it wouldn't have changed much. I even had to look it up to check that it actually was Titus. That said, it's well executed and it absolutely delivers on the 'big dudes in big powered armour smashing & killing things' department.

Spoiler: S01E06: 'PAC-MAN: Circle' - 6.5/10

Now... at the time I initially watched it, I mentally gave this a 5.5/10. It made for an... er... interesting... and challenging interpretation of Pac Man. Not entirely unwelcome, but so vastly different from the little yellow ball gobbling pills that it was hard to stomach (pun not intended!). However I now know the context: this isn't someone trying to be 'artsy' with a wild interpretation of Pac Man, it's actually pretty faithful to the next Bandai Namco Pac Man game:



That gains it some points back, but at the same time it does feel like a bit of an extended trailer and therefore loses out.

S01E07: 'Crossfire: Good Conflict' - 5/10

Modern military conflict. Everyone's wearing grey. The backdrops are mostly grey. And it's in the rain.

Again, well executed, but just... dull.

Yawn.

Spoiler: S01E08: 'Armored Core: Asset Management' - 8/10

I know very little about the Armored Core games. But this is Keanu Reeves as a hard-bitten, slightly insane, but brutally and ruthlessly efficient pilot of a giant mech suit. Again, big dumb fun out of 10.

Spoiler: S01E09: 'The Outer Worlds: The Company We Keep' - 6/10

Didn't have any of the charm that I associate with The Outer Worlds, and the attempt at replicating the humour fell completely flat for me. Shame, I was looking forward to this one.

Spoiler: S01E10: 'Mega Man: Start' - 6.5/10

Having never played a single Mega Man game in my life, and knowing next to nothing about the franchise or character, I wasn't sure what to expect with this. I did enjoy this, but it left me with serious blue balls! Of the 8 minute run time, there must have been about 5 minutes of actual content, which ended right as it got really good. I know these are 'shorts', but good freakin' god...!!!

Spoiler: S01E11: 'Exodus: Odyssey' - 6.5/10

I did enjoy this, but I feel like it could have done a much better job of telling the story than it did. Constant voice-over to explain what's going on kinda makes it feel like they needed more time for this than they had. It started to feel like an extended trailer for an as-yet unreleased game.

S01E12: 'Spelunky: Tally' - 3/10

Nah, sorry, this was a total miss for me. A rogue-like platformer wasn't the best choice to start with, and I think they did a rubbish job with it.

Spoiler: S01E13: 'Concord: Tale of the Implacable' - 4/10

The actual story here was OK - if it wasn't connected to the game, I'd have said it's more like a 6.5/10. It was fun, and it was nice to see something with a lot of colour splashed about the place.

But the elephant in the room here is that this game was an utter flop: poorly received by fans & critics, pitiful sales, and it was canned two weeks after launch. Oh, and Sony killed the development studio, just to rub salt in the wound. I can't separate this episode from that context.

The game was likely still in development when this series started being made, but I feel like this should have been pulled from the episode line-up by the time the series was released. If for no other reason than out of respect for the people at Firewalk Studios, who all lost their job despite almost certainly having very little input into the decision to charge $40 for a 'live service' hero shooter when other 'live service' hero shooters are free-to-play.

Spoiler: S01E14: 'Honor of Kings: The Way of All Things' - 7.5/10

This loses a few points because it seems like the episode has almost absolutely nothing to do with the game, a MOBA that's apparently big in China...

But, I really liked the concepts in this one. The philosophical discussions are probably something that sci-fi fans have heard before, but it was interesting nonetheless. The style and the tone was absolutely spot-on for me.

Spoiler: S01E15: 'Playtime: Fulfillment' - I'm not rating this... Seriously - this utter trash doesnt' deserve to be dignified with a score.

Garbage.

Complete, total, and utter garbage.

It's a 10 minute ad for Sony and Playstation. No attempt was made to even try to hide this fact.

After a decidedly mixed bag of a series, this was a very bitter pill to swallow. It left a very bad taste in the mouth and taints the entire series as a whole.

 

Tulsa King was good, although slightly let down, there's something wrong / off with Stallone's face and it draws you away from what's happening on screen.

Yellowstone, bitter pill to swallow, dealt a crappy hand when Costner walked mid series so always fighting an uphill battle to get everything tidied up, but all ends got sorted in an acceptable, if not dark, manner, some rather good acting by folk you'd not expect to be able to pull it off.

 

I'm flattered to be the benchmark for overly long walls of text

This series wasn't even on my radar and I don't know anything about it. Is it standalone episodes? i.e. could one just drop in and watch the Unreal Tournament episode by itself? Because I feel obligated to.

We're currently working through His Dark Materials from the start, and I mostly like it. I appreciate that they actually made an adaptation so close to the books, and the production values are very high. But the acting/direction is...weird. Just intermittently weird. Ruth Wilson, in particular, is so bizarrely directed. Remember that bit in the books where Marisa Coulter flew into an animalistic rage and screamed like a bear at a locked door? Me neither. Sometimes they try to show that she's being intense or menacing by having her do a mad ventriloquist voice thing like she's impersonating the AC/DC frontman, and it's just like...why? I'm reminded of Sherlock, and the weird terrible direction of the guy playing Moriarty (who, funnily enough, is also in this). Is it a BBC thing? Do BBC studios foster creative echo chambers where nobody's allowed to say "sorry mate could you do that line again, but not like a kid playing the villain in a school play"? Or is there just one creative talent common to both these shows who thinks all villains have to act like the animated Joker, lest the audience miss that they're villains?

Anyway it's otherwise very good so far, we're into S2 and I like that they have so much of the moral ambiguity and darkness to all the characters. The witches, the magisterium, Asriel, Coulter, the panzerbjorn, they're all presented as complex and characterful, not pared down to moral simplicity the way YA/all-ages TV characters often are. It does a particularly good job of showing multiple different value sets and ethical codes being carried by different characters and coming into conflict, again without simplifying any of them. Lyra is a plucky moralist who wants to protect her friends - but she is happy to lie, steal, betray confidences, run away and save her own skin. Will is a proud, stoic family lad who wants to protect his mother - but he's also pretty pragmatic about violence and killing. The bears are intensely loyal friends and deeply hierarchical traditionalists - but once you're dead, they'll eat your corpse while it's warm, because waste not want not. The witches are reclusive, principled sages who speak poetically and risk being framed as heroic - until they go on murder sprees, stabbing random dudes and murdering their own kin to contain forbidden knowledge. The magisterium are basically Catholic Nazis controlling both a society and a war machine - but they're, well, no, okay, they're pretty basic. I'm sure they were more complex in the books, can't remember details, but they're very one-dimensional here. All basic bad dudes being basically bad in obvious ways. Hopefully that will get more subtle (ho ho) in this season.

 

Squid Game 2

 

Yeah, it's an anthology, so there's no connection between the individual episodes.

 

I've just finished The Lion in Winter with Peter O'Toole & Katherine Hepburn. By God, this is one of the greatest Christmas movies out there.

 

That defo belongs in the Movies thread, and in my to-watch list. Never seen it, but heard of it, and Peter O'Toole is ace. Always assumed it was Shakespeare from the context, but apparently not.

Still working through His Dark Materials, well into S3 now and thankfully the direction of Ruth Wilson has dramatically improved, easily one of the best characters now. The acting seems generally much better in this season - perhaps they got some feedback about how janky and weird it was in the first two seasons.

I was apprehensive in S2 when Asriel was played up as a sort of uncomplicated heroic figure - the way he was framed seemed too sympathetic and simple. No such fears now, it seems like the writers really get his and Coulter's characters. The scenes with the two of them are the best so far. Dafne Keen and Amir Wilson are really good as Lyra and Will, too. And Simone Kirby as Mary Malone is perfect.

Impatiently waiting for Malone to get to the savannah place, which was my favourite part of the third book because it's just so off-the-wall bonkers and imaginative.

The series still pales in comparison to the books, for my money, but that's hardly a fair comparison - the more I think about it, the more I don't think it's possible to capture the fairy-tale-come-classics vibe of the novels. They're thoroughly non-visual exercises and kind of poetic in tone (appropriately, given that they're primarily based on Milton) and you can't get that in live action film. Maybe in a really weird style of animation - you can imagine hybrid animation like Blue Eye Samurai getting it better, the hallucinogen sequence in that is the closest thing I've seen on screen to how you'd like to imagine some of the passages in His Dark Materials being rendered visually. The TV series is just too clean, too literal. It looks less like Milton and more like generic sci-fi action entertainment. The grandiosity and other-worldliness of the core concepts can't survive such crisp CGI light.

Since I've been dabbling in Milton for years, I've spent a long time trying to imagine how it might adapt to the screen in any way, and the problems are basically the same. It's a story full of magical thinking, allegory and themes. You can't film that. You can't film original sin, or angelic presence, or the afterlife, or Hell. They're concepts. As with cosmic horror material like Bird Box, the only way to retain the potency of the ideas is to not show them.

 

Severance as soon as season 2 airs on Apple TV on the 17th- season 1 was a doozy!

 

Started SIlo, just finished the US office, last season was a mixed bag, but im sad its done

 

Were you aware this happened yesterday?
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/othe...t-amid-busy-grand-central-station/vi-AA1xeiUQ

 

Time Gentlemen Please as I just mentioned Al Murray to someone and my brainsaid ooh yes please, not seen that series in ages .. and the dog is named after me.

 

I’ve been watching Modern Family as I missed quite a few seasons when it went out on Sky. I love it as it’s funny and easy for the aches and pains but I just watched an episode that was essentially an Apple keynote (e6 16)?! What the hell was that all about?! I’ve never wanted to scrub my eyeballs out before and I like Apple kit but whoever thought that was a good idea needs two straight knacker kicks! Yuck

 

Just finished the series off, want moar

 

Finally got around to starting Silo season 2

 

A series about a grain store…

Will the wonders ever cease?

 

Aye, just waiting for the spin off 'WaterMill'

 

Just binged Evangelion again, not seen it in nearly a decade and its still completely and utterly mesmerizing, arguably one of the finest science fiction series ever concieved by the hand of man.

 

I avoided it all these years but I may have to finally just man up and watch it. I hear nothing but praise for it.

Currently watching Goliath S1, it's okay. Well made, very well filmed, and Billy Thornton is, of course, sublime. But like a lot of middle-of-the-road TV dramas, it suffers from trope-heavy writing and a lack of likeable characters. Lots of snide arseholes at each others throats and it's hard, therefore, to get emotionally invested.

 

It can definitely be a bit marmite, but it is worth watching IMO.

That does remind me though, I can’t remember if I ever finished watching the Rebuild of Evangelion “reboot” films…

 

i never got the whole marmite thing, sure the last 2 episodes are a little controversial if you were expecting a grand ending to the opera as opposed to a psychological breakdown/reconstruction of the lead MC's psyche. the series utterly decimate the anime scene in the 90's it took the traditional mecha tropes and ran a story that didn't spoon feed you but instead brought you along for the ride as it took positivity and good will and crushed it into paranoia, conspiracy and selfishness.

it really is one of the greatest shows ever made

the first is condensed and prettier retellings of the first 6 episodes iirc but after that it just gets madder and madder, i must rewatch it myself tbh

no idea why you avoided it but just go in blind, your results may vary as you've been told its "great" where as i watching it back on vhs long before the net became common.