Quarantine Control #192: Dial and Watch for Wrath

You’ve likely heard enough about Grand Theft Auto VI by this point, mainly because mentions of the game and discussions about it are everywhere. But that’s precisely what makes the topic so interesting. Sources that don’t typically cover video games are outlining just how big of an event the first trailer (teaser, really) was, including the likes of CBS News and CNBC. The furor around it makes sense, though. The phenomenon was enough to rocket the first trailer to around 120 million hits as of this writing; it didn’t do so fast enough to top BTS’ record, but that’s still big.

Of course, it’s also brought the concerned conservatives out the woodwork. But that was bound to happen.

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Geoffrey Barnes

I watched all four of the Steven Spielberg-directed Indiana Jones films last year to prepare for this moment. The moment of destiny’s dialing… or something like that.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
Source: Disney Plus
Episodes: 1 movie (the fifth in the series)

It’s fair to say the fix was in for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, considering how many elements were working against it. The film was set to feature Harrison Ford once again reprising the role of the titular Indiana Jones himself, at a spry 78 years old when filming started. Spielberg was also not set to direct the film, instead relaxing into a producer role, with James Mangold (Logan, Ford v Ferrari) taking over the director’s chair. Not to mention the franchise’s reputation of featuring someone referred to as a grave robber. The movie was going to have a tough time standing out, which meant the resulting film had to be very damn good. I’ll just say that it falls short of reaching that stature.

The primary Dial of Destiny film takes place in the vibrant 1970s, with Indiana Jones relaxing in his later life while now living in an apartment, still providing lectures to college classes on Archaeology. I say “primary” because that isn’t how the film starts off. It begins with a lengthy flashback to the 1940s establishing the film’s central tale, featuring a CG-ified Indiana made to resemble his younger self. Jones’ intent during the era of Nazi Germany is to retrieve a legendary dial said to have the power to change history, with Jones himself going toe to toe with several Nazi soldiers and Nazi Astrophysicist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) in particular. The CG to make Ford look younger is incredibly good, though it creates serious dissonance when he’s voiced by Ford in his late 70s, who sounds very different compared to his younger self.

Voller is found to have survived into the 70s, because they clearly wouldn’t use someone like Mikkelsen for a mere flashback. He still intends to use Archimedes’ Dial to realize his ambitions, and Indiana feels the need to stop him and retrieve it. He had some help, even though they weren’t entirely willing.

There were far too many rumors about Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character, Helena Shaw, taking the adventurer mantle from Indiana Jones. This, right on cue, activated the most annoying anti-feminists on the internet to complain about the movie being too “woke.” This didn’t happen, but you know what? I wish it did. The movie seems desperate to prove that all those dumb rumors that circulated ahead of its release were incorrect despite most of them starting after this movie’s filming was completed, as Shaw is initially merely in it for the money. You can perhaps predict how this goes.

The movie is fun enough overall, another nice adventure across scenic parts of the world. It’s a good film to sit down and absorb for an evening. But I don’t recommend that anyone go into this expecting more than that. It’s perhaps the best live-action Indiana Jones work starring Ford that could have possibly been released in 2023, for better and worse.

It was tempting to think that anyone mentioning how Harrison Ford was too old to play Indiana Jones was being ageist before this movie released. Now that I’ve seen the entire movie: Sorry, Harrison Ford was too old to play Indiana Jones here, at least as a main role. Ford at this age is nowhere near as capable of doing as many adventurous stunts as his older self, and the ones he tried to do had obvious consequences. This forced the movie to rely on prolonged chase sequences with horses, cars, and boats, because Ford at this age can’t do much else. This prevents the movie’s adventure from being as thrilling compared to its predecessors.

Ford’s role should have been analogous to Han Solo’s and Rick Deckard’s in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Blade Runner 2049, respectively. Both movies knew how to use his characters, as ways to bridge the classic to the new. I know that wasn’t possible with an Indiana Jones film, because Ford is Indiana Jones. But it robs the film of its potential.

I mentioned above that I wish those rumors about Helena Shaw taking over were true not only because of Ford’s incapabilities, but also how she isn’t enough of a character in the final film. Her intentions here are well established, but she gets little development over the movie’s duration, with her best moment being very abrupt at the end of the story. It feels like they were saving her for another spin-off film that could have been made in the future, one unlikely to happen now with the movie bombing at the box office and Shaw having so little impact. The producers didn’t use Waller-Bridge to the best of her abilities.

Mangold is a solid director; I very much enjoyed both The Wolverine and Logan. But I didn’t get the impression that an adventure film like this one was his strong point, and I’m wondering if he was the best choice for the job. His work here pales in comparison to Spielberg’s, a perpetually perfect fit for pulp adventure films like this one. The action sequences also lack impact and memorability, with Ford’s age once again being an unfortunate hurdle.

Trust me when I say that I still enjoyed Dial of Destiny enough. It has its qualities, including another great soundtrack from John Williams, beautiful locations, and a solid and unexpected ending. But it could have been better in clear ways. As it is, the movie is a step sideways from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, avoiding pitfalls that movie ran into while clumsily stumbling into new ones of its own. It’s a shame it didn’t do better, and it’s a shame the movie itself wasn’t better, but it works as a fine-enough ending for Indiana Jones’ legacy.

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Angela Moseley

Watchmen (2009)
Source: Amazon Prime, HBO Max
Episodes: 1 movie

Watchmen is one of those movies I vowed to watch in the late aughts, and it took 15 years to make good on that promise to myself. This series first caught my eye with the announcement of the 2009 movie and the graphic novel of the same name. Watchman topped graphic novel sales charts in 2009 for nearly a year. I even touched upon it back when I used to write Geek News Roundups. My original plan had been to buy the graphic novel before seeing the movie. I did neither, and it took me watching The Boys earlier this year to put Watchmen back on my radar. That was only after a recommendation from a friend who liked both franchises.

I finally got the swift kick in the ass I needed when browsing Amazon Prime to check out the Evangelion movies. I saw Watchmen was disappearing from the service in less than three days. (As of this writing, it’s gone now.) So I finally sat down to watch this nearly three-hour movie in chunks over a period of two days. Ultimately, I appreciate this movie more today than I would have a decade and a half ago, especially in a world where The Boys exist. A younger me might have viewed the film back then as too nihilistic. Not so much these days!

The year is 1985. The Vietnam War was ended early and decisively in the United States’ favor because of the intervention of a superhero named Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup). Nixon saw so much popularity because of it that he was elected for a third time. The threat of annihilation via nuclear war with Soviet Russia hangs heavy in the air. Edward Blake (Jeffery Dean Morgan) is a retired superhero once known as Comedian who spends most of his days watching TV. On one particular night, a masked man breaks into his home and callously murders the 60-year-old man.

Concerned that someone might be deliberately targeting masks (superheroes), Rorshach (Jackie Earlie Haley) investigates Comedian’s Murder. At the same time, the violent anti-hero goes to warn his former mask colleagues. Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) formerly Nite Owl dismisses Comedian’s murder. The same happens when Rorshach tries to warn Sally Jupiter aka Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino), Dr. Manhattan, and Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias (Matthew Goode). They all speculate Comedian’s murder likely happened because he was an asshole, a sociopath, and probably had a lot of enemies. As Rorshach continues his investigation, more masks are attacked and murdered. It turns out his hard-boiled instincts were correct, and there’s a much larger conspiracy hiding in the veil of a looming war between the United States and Soviet Russia.

Watchmen is a largely faithful adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s comics. Those comics originally ran from 1986 to 1987 for 12 issues. In 1987 the issues were all compiled into a single graphic novel. The first issue of Watchmen was penned at the end of the Bronze Age of comics, leading into the Dark or Modern Age. It serves as a deconstruction of the superhero genre. It paints heroes not as selfless do-gooders, but people with their own hangups and flaws who don’t always do the right thing. The film, directed by Zack Snyder, brings this deconstruction to the big screen.

The world of Watchmen is gloomy and foreboding, with just the right amount of grime for a movie that occasionally feels like film noir. Masks were originally welcomed like superheroes, but as time went on public sentiment turned on them. They were either murdered, arrested, went underground, or retired. Only Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan remained in the limelight doing their work in an official capacity for the government. Comedian was revealed to be a rapist, and someone who gleefully hurt and murdered unarmed people during war and domestic unrest. Rorshach went underground, and is both violent and patronizing. Watching him break a man’s fingers, then admonish him like a cop or a pastor would for using powerful painkillers is disconcerting. It’s not hard to understand why public sentiment turned on the masks.

Dr. Manhattan is somewhat of a special superhero. Unlike the other masks who are regular humans armed to the teeth with gadgets, or wealth, specialize in martial arts, or are just unhinged and violent, he legitimately has superpowers. Caught in a freak accident that disintegrates him down to the last atom, he somehow rebuilds his own body and comes back with god-like powers. He can’t be harmed at all, can phase through items, grow his body, fly, teleport, and can break down and reconstruct all organic and inorganic objects to the subatomic level. He can also see the past, present, and future all at once, all at the same time. Given his powers and perception of reality, he’s become completely disconnected from the everyday concerns of regular people. To the point where he can’t be bothered to put on clothes, and walks around for most of the film letting everything hang out. The concept of clothes is mostly beneath him. That’s how indifferent he’s become to society.

That indifference becomes his major flaw, as there are moments of time when he could have prevented violence or murder, but chose not to. In short, he’s a man capable of ending or saving the world, but is fundamentally inactive. Fortunately, for the United States his presence is the only thing keeping Russia at bay. Again, it’s not surprising that the masks in this world are more feared and/or loathed than celebrated.

Combine this gloomy deconstruction of the superhero genre, with the hyper-violence that Zack Snyder films are known for, and you have a unique film that only comes along every so often. I was surprised to learn Watchmen wasn’t highly rated and flopped at the box office, but perhaps people weren’t ready for this type of superhero movie. It’s a fascinating and bleak look into the dark aspects of human nature. Even the ending itself can leave a strong taste in viewer’s mouths.

I do recommend Watchmen especially if you’re sick of Marvel flavored superhero movies and DC offerings haven’t done much for you either. (Granted, Watchmen is set in the DC universe.) Again, if The Boys was your jam, you should feel right at home with this live-action adaptation of a hugely popular graphic novel. I suppose I’ll have to check out the HBO miniseries and Alan Moore’s original comics sooner than later.

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Joseph Daniels

One of the things I’ve noticed about fantasy RPGs, at least from Japan of late, it’s that there’s a distinct lack of playable non-human characters, despite the whole fantasy aspect of the setting.  While it’s true that most people want a surrogate character that they can relate to, you can have relatable non-human characters.  Looking at just Japanese examples that I watched and read in recent years, I’m quite fond of Beastars, Shirokuma Cafe (it has humans in the setting, but they’re not the main characters) and a one volume manga called The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms (the final chapter does have a human as one of the main characters, but the other chapters follow non-human characters).  I’m looking forward to trying Monotone Blue and Ramen Wolf and Curry Tiger the next time I put together a book order from Indigo.

For games, it feels like most of the ones I’ve been paying attention to from Japan mainly feature a fully human cast, especially in the Final Fantasy series.  The only exception seems to be Final Fantasy XIV, but I don’t think it counts because the playable characters are created by its players, not for its players.  Not only that, but most of the main character’s closest allies, who accompany her throughout her adventures, are several different flavours of human, with the two exceptions still looking mostly human but with cat ears and tails.

What happened to the games where you could recruit actual non-human characters?  Where are our Red XIIIs?  Where are our Kimahris?  Where’s Katt, Rei and Cray?  Where’s Rhett, Sgt. Joe and Wilder?  Bianca?  Koromaru?  You could point to Morgana in Persona 5, but that game came out in 2016.  Games like Cross Tails and Fuga: Melodies of Steel are very few and far between these days.  You basically have to look outside of Japan to find games like Cat Quest or the recently released Small Saga.

Sometimes, there will come along a game franchise that you would think would put some non-human characters in the player’s control, but…

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (2011)
Originally on PlayStation 3 and ported to various systems; based on an earlier version of the game originally on Nintendo DS

Ni no Kuni imagines twin worlds, called “countries” by the series’ title, where actions in one country influence the other.  The main character of this game is a boy named Oliver from the city of Hotroit/Motorville who gains the power to travel between the two countries.  Hotroit is clearly based on real world Detroit from the 1950s with the serial numbers filed off, meaning it begins in a country similar to our own before crossing over into the second country.

During the course of the adventure, Oliver befriends two human characters to fill out his party and helps many human and non-human characters in both the first and second countries, including Tom, the king of the cats in a city called Ding Dong Dell.

The game explores how helping people in the first country directly helps their equivalent soul in the second country, and follows Oliver as he tries to bring his mother back from death by saving her second country equivalent.  He is unaware of the truth of his mother’s existence, though, and finds out too late that his quest may be in vain.

Despite that there are people based on both cats and mice, the mice are mostly antagonistic towards the protagonistic cats, and none of the cats join the party, not even Purrofessor Tabitha, an archaeologist who seems to have been quite fond of Oliver in a motherly manner and who I think would’ve been welcome in my party.

Wrath of the White Witch is based on a game that originated on the DS and which expands the story greatly, but one thing I think is a missed opportunity in both versions involves the extensive list of spells that are supposedly available to Oliver throughout the game.  Many spells are unlocked which he’s never allowed to actually use, but which count towards a completion percentage.  I think it’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen someone’s available spells used for lore purposes and not for gameplay purposes.

On the plus side, the world is very well imagined and is a joy to explore, although trying to find all of the secret forests for another completion percentage is just as much of a pain as it sounds, especially since this is one of those tasks you don’t naturally accomplish through normal gameplay.  Recruiting specific familiars for battle can also feel like a bit of a grind, since it took me a lot longer than I would’ve liked to recruit an Auroralynx.  Certain materials are also pretty hard to acquire, which makes even the crafting system a grind at times.  The good news is that there is a thief in the party.  The bad news is that he’s more interested in showing off and posturing than actually trying to steal items, and it can be frustrating to watch him toss his gun around a bunch before finally trying and failing to steal something.

But that said, overall I have fond memories of this game, and so I was more than happy to play the sequel pretty much as soon as I finished the original.

Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (2018)
Originally on PlayStation 4 and PC and ported to various systems

So then imagine my surprise to find out that the game takes place in a somewhat reimagined version of the setting, with everything developed for the first game including the extensive spell list, all of the enemies and familiars, even the mechanic of crossing over between worlds thrown out in favour of a game developed from scratch.  Wikipedia tells me it actually takes place several hundred years in the future of the second country, but seems to take place in the present day in the first country, meaning less than a century has passed for us.  It begins with President of the United States Roland Crane watching New York City be destroyed by a terrorist nuclear strike, and then before he dies, he disappears and awakens in the second country.  This is pretty much the last we see of the first country until the very end of the game.  Revenant Kingdom instead takes place entirely in the second country as Roland meets and helps deposed king Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum on the day of the Mousekin coup against their Grimalkin oppressors in Ding Dong Dell.

The cat-like Grimalkin race find themselves driven underground and scattered across the entire world, but the only member of the race to actually join the party is Evan, who is only half Grimalkin on his father’s side.  His mother was human.

The rest of the game follows Evan and Roland as they try to unite the world and create a kingdom where everyone can live “happily ever after”, and names it Evermore.  Even though the game has twice the playable characters as the first, every single playable character is human except for the half-human Evan.  Despite the fact that there are Dogfolk in the city of Goldpaw, none of them join the party.  Despite the fact that the city of Hydropolis contains mainly mermaids, the citizen of Hydropolis who joins the party is pretty much the only human living there.  There is great diversity in the world, reaching levels that I hadn’t seen since Final Fantasy IX, but the Dogfolk, the Grimalkin and Mousekin characters who volunteer to come to Evermore are only there to act as NPCs to grow the kingdom, not as playable characters that help save the world.  It feels like a missed opportunity, especially since several of the playable characters in the diverse world of Final Fantasy IX aren’t human, but somehow the only people who want to help save the world in Revenant Kingdom are the humans?

In the end, by uniting the world against a threat that wants to wipe everyone out, Roland manages to erase the nuclear attack in the first country and instead, the first country is united in a way that seems to be nothing more than a pipe dream for us in the real world.

I do have fond memories of Revenant Kingdom as well, and I plan on returning to both of these games sometime in an effort to earn their Platinum trophies.  Those trophies are going to involve some grinding in order to gain the resources I need to finish them, but at least they won’t involve obscure things that the games deliberately hide from the player.  This is a Level 5 series, not Hyperdimension Neptunia.

I was thinking of these games this week when I watched the movie that takes place roughly in the same setting.  I say roughly, because…

NiNoKuni (2019)
Source: Netflix
Rabbits?: …maybe?  There’s a pole dancer with large, long ears, but their species doesn’t show up in the games.

Wikipedia claims this movie takes place, once again, centuries after Revenant Kingdom.  I’m quite fond of saying that crossing over into another world is “being Narnia’d”, and in this case, it seems to be completely true.  Time presumably flows wildly different between the first and second countries, just like how one year passes for the Pevensies between the first two books of the Chronicles of Narnia, but when they cross back over to Aslan’s world, many centuries have passed.

NiNoKuni begins in present day Tokyo, which shows no signs of the world unification that supposedly happens in the second game, but I suppose there’s no reason to think it’s not the same world.  The main characters are a pair of boys named Yū and Haru, best friends who have a lot in common with one another, despite the fact that one of them is confined to a wheelchair.  They’re both pretty fond of a girl named Kotona, and this clearly makes Haru a bit jealous because she’s his girlfriend.  So when Kotona is stalked and stabbed with an enchanted knife by a mysterious person obscured by the hood he’s wearing, Haru is especially incensed that wheelchair-bound Yū manages to find her first and drives away her attacker.

Haru selfishly carries her off to try to get her treated at the local hospital.  I should probably clarify that the manner in which he goes about picking her up and carrying her off feels a bit selfish and possessive, even if the act of rescuing someone’s life is supposed to be a selfless one.  Instead, in his haste, he charges into traffic and nearly dies, and Yū has to save them both once more.

In the heat of the moment, with traffic bearing down on both of them, they find themselves suddenly transported to the second country, where traffic of a more primitive sort surrounds them.  They’re convinced it’s a dream, but are understandably also worried about Kotona, since she wasn’t transported with them, and when they see a poster of Princess Astrid of Evermore, they wonder if Kotona somehow woke up in the castle.

Unfortunately, they’re turned away at the castle gates due to the Princess having fallen ill, unable to awaken from a curse, but they infiltrate the castle and witness the curse for themselves.  Not only does it seem to originate from the same spot on her body that Kotona was stabbed, it also kills anyone who tries to remove it.  Three such people from a foreign nation who attempt to remove the curse are instead completely erased from existence, evaporated by the curse.  However, somehow, Yū is able to interact with the curse and remove it from Princess Astrid.

During the course of the story, Yū grows close to Astrid, even as he notices that she is not, in fact, his friend Kotona.  A jealous Haru allows himself to be swayed by the whispers of the evil Galeroth, leader of the Black Banner, an army who wants to destroy Evermore.  After returning to the first country, Yū and Haru find out that although Kotona is somehow fine after the attack (and doesn’t seem to remember it), she is suddenly diagnosed with cancer, and Galeroth manages to convince Haru that because Astrid survived when she should’ve died, Kotona is going to die in her place, so when Haru crosses back over to the second country, he plans on helping Galeroth destroy Evermore and kill the princess to save Kotona.  We know that’s not how things work between the two countries, but Haru does not.

The reason I was thinking about the lack of party diversity in RPG parties of late is because in NiNoKuni, the diverse world from the games is faithfully reproduced, with Grimalkin, Mousekin and Dogfolk present as well as fairies and several unnamed races that are new to the series, but only one non-human character is actually even somewhat relevant to the plot.  Every single important character is human, including the king of Evermore, who had a half-human, half-Grimalkin king at the end of Revenant Kingdom who would one day marry a human and produce a quarter-Grimalkin heir, and presumably a full Grimalkin king is somehow descended from that quarter-Grimalkin heir in the mobile game Cross Worlds.  It’s the only part of the localized franchise that I’ve yet to try, but a quick Google search shows me a character who resembles a royal-looking lion who doesn’t have a species listed on the Ni no Kuni wiki, but who seems to be fully Grimalkin.

I wonder what the secret of Evermore is, that it can have kings that fluctuate wildly in genetics like that.  Maybe some of them were adopted into the royal family.

I enjoyed watching NiNoKuni, and maybe enjoyed it all the more because I spent some time away from the franchise after beating the two main console games in the series.  I may also look into Cross Worlds sometime, but it’s a mobile title and is bound to disappear after a while like literally every other mobile game has.  Where it fits into the timeline is dubious, as far as I can tell, but then trying to assemble the series into a coherent timeline is probably about as futile as assembling the Final Fantasy series into its own coherent timeline.  It should be noted that every time Wikipedia says that a piece of media in the franchise takes place hundreds of years in the future of the previous piece, the claim’s source is uncited.  It’s assumed that the loose retelling (with inaccuracies) of the first game’s events in the second game might suffice as a source depicting where in the timeline the games fall, but there’s nothing in the movie that suggests where it might fall in the timeline.

There’s one major thing that I did not like about the first game, but which the movie does much better.  The games were both scored by film composer Joe Hisaishi, but he seemed to compose music for the first game as if it were a movie and not a game.  Story scenes where players advanced the dialogue manually would sometimes feature the music swelling as if things were about to happen, but the characters were still sharing dialogue and it felt quite cheesy.  I don’t think Hisaishi knew at the time how to create music that would fit gameplay, and what music he did create was not always used appropriately or effectively.  I don’t remember the same problem in the second game, and although it followed a similar whimsical style, he seemed to finally know what he was doing.  Still, it probably came as a relief when the next time he was asked to score something for the franchise, it was an actual film.

There is supposedly a new game in the franchise in development, but I sort of hope there won’t be.  At the end of the second game, and at the end of the movie, the respective kings of Evermore declare that they’re going to create a world without war, and I would very much like for this to actually stick for once.  This might also be why each installment in the series takes place hundreds of years between each other, so that every time the second country starts to descend into war and chaos, someone from the first country comes and sets everything right again.  Maybe Ni no Kuni III will take place another several centuries in the future, but I’m sort of hoping it’s a prequel instead.  Maybe someone from 19th century London crosses over to the second country during a time long before even Oliver’s journey to save the world, that might be interesting.

I may one day return to these games and do a full dive analysis like I’ve been doing the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games, but for now, that’s going to have to be several years down the line.

This Week’s Short Film
Peanut Factory (2023)

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If you’re part of the group that’s already heard enough about GTAVI, don’t worry: The game isn’t coming until 2025. It’s unlikely to resurface until next summer at the earliest. Conservatives will continue their freakout about it, though. Until next week, everyone.