Tomb Raider (2013)

An archaeological expedition is searching for the legendary kingdom of Yamatai, believed to be located in a hazardous, storm-wracked area near Japan. The expedition is shipwrecked on an uncharted island and attacked by hostile other castaways, who seem to be part of a cult following a maddened priest. When several members of the expedition are kidnapped it falls to the youngest and most inexperienced member - one Lara Croft - to rise to the challenge, save her friends and find a way of getting off the island.

Tomb Raider is a fresh reboot of the series of the same name, discarding the continuity built up over the previous eight games in favour of a fresh take on the premise and the central character of Lara Croft. Croft was very much a child of the 1990s: ballsy, confident, arrogant and a bit cartoonish. Her fresh incarnation is younger, constantly doubting herself and doesn't know how to chamber a round, let alone how to dive around dual-wielding pistols and shooting tigers. This is, much as it pains me to say it, a 'gritty and more realistic take on the character'.

Tomb Raider is a curious hybrid of several game types. It's a third-person action game with a linear story, but which keeps the map open, allowing you to revisit previous areas to find more resources and new locations, once you have unlocked new equipment later in the game which allows you scale previously-inaccessible cliffs and blast open hitherto-invulnerable blockades. It isn't an open-world game - the island is portrayed as an interlocking series of explorable zones, not a wide-open space like the recent Far Cry 3 - but it throws in enough nods at an open world structure to make for an interesting hybrid. The semi-open-world structure makes for a curious incompatibility with the game's storyline, however, which is almost always urgently demanding you rush to the next objective and complete the next mission. This urgency is diminished when Lara decides to spend 2 hours painstakingly combing a forest for GPS trackers and magic mushrooms. Doing these side-objectives is important as it gives you more experience points which you can use to improve Lara's abilities, and also gives you more salvage to upgrade your weapons and equipment with.

Lara is a fairly athletic character, able to scale vertical walls with the help of an improvised pickaxe, jump large distances and shimmy all over the place on rope bridges, some of which you create yourself by using a bow and rope-arrows. The game signposts where you can use these tools - literally by using a special view mode which highlights all usable objects in an area in bright yellow - but it can be fun seeing your destination and working out how to get there using the tools at your disposal. Tomb Raider is at its best when you have control for long periods and are given objectives without being hand-held through the whole thing. This is best exemplified by the optional tombs, which Lara has to explore (or 'raid', if you will) through her own ingenuity. Unfortunately, these tombs tend to revolve around one puzzle each and most of them about about 50 feet across in size, making them more like the 'dungeons' from Skyrim that consist of one winding passage and two rooms than substantial locations in their own right. Still, the idea is good.

There is also quite a lot of combat, initially against animals (though, sadly, not tigers) and later on against human opponents. The gaming media has gone rather overboard in praising the scene in which Lara overcomes her first human opponent, kills him and then expresses realistic feelings of shock, panic and revulsion at having to do such a thing. All of this is effective in the moment, but undercut by Lara blowing away hordes of attacking nutcases literally a minute later without any qualms at all. By the endgame, in which Lara has to taken on an entire army of attackers in a temple forecourt spanning multiple levels and featuring tons of explosive barrels you can detonate to obliterate half a dozen foes at a time, this moral disconnect between story and gameplay has become absurd. Entertaining, certainly, but the game's musings on the desensitisation of killing and possible symptoms of PTSD ultimately feel like a sop to critics of videogame violence more than any real desire to explore the issues in depth (something else it shares with Far Cry 3).

When the game stops wangsting about this stuff, it's often excellent. The freeform stuff is very good. Unfortunately, the main storyline is corncheese. It starts off trying to be grim and gritty and realistic, but by the end it's become an out-and-out fantasy involving undead creatures and spirit beings. Major story beats are transmitted through either cut scenes or particularly tedious Quick Time Events. The game's use of QTEs is obnoxious and over-the-top, taking over from the proper gameplay all too often. So do cut scenes, which are not differentiated from the gameplay either, often with the camera retaining its standard position over Lara's sholder, meaning (particularly in the first hour or so) that sometimes they end and the player has no way of knowing they're back in control until they die. Also, the game's moment of victory is in a cut scene rather than through player agency, which is a completely unfathomable decision. The less said about the supporting cast - Lara's fellow castaways who are only around to get rescued or provide awful dialogue about why Lara's next plan is going to fail despite her last three working fine and saving all their live - the better as well. From a technical standpoint, the graphics are excellent (despite the odd glitch), the controls are smooth, responsive and fully customisable (and you can remap the Enter key, which is awesome and inexplicably rare these days) and overall the game is fun to play.

The problems prevent Tomb Raider (***½) from achieving its full potential. The game's curious mixture of Far Cry freeform jungle stuff (including hunting and skinning animals), Prince of Persia style puzzle-solving using the equipment available, enjoyable combat (including one of the best and most natural cover systems I've seen in a game) and tons of bonus objectives all makes for an excellent gaming experience. But that experience is undercut by the game wrestling control away from you all too-often for indifferently-written cut scenes and repetitive Quick Time Events. When the game lets you play it how you want to, rather than how it wants to, it's superb. The game is available now in the UK (PC, PlayStation 3, X-Box 360) and USA (PC, PlayStation 3, X-Box 360).

Hasbro wins initiative round in ongoing D&D battle

The confrontation between film producer Courtney Solomon, who is developing a new Dungeons and Dragons movie with Warner Brothers, and Hasbro, the parent company of D&D owners Wizards of the Coast, has escalated futher. Hasbro have filed a lawsuit against Solomon and his Sweetpea Entertainment company, asserting that Solomon does not have the rights to make such a film. Hasbro themselves are developing a new D&D movie with Universal.

According to Hasbro, the original deal with Solomon stated that the rights would revert to the IP-holders if Solomon did not produce a sequel film every five years. According to Solomon, that requirement was satisfied by the release of the low-budget TV movie Wrath of the Dragon God in 2005 and by the release of the straight-to-DVD movie Book of Vile Darkness in 2012 (though it entered production in 2010). However, Hasbro assert that this does not satisfy the terms of their contract since straight-to-DVD movies and TV films are legally not the same entities, either as one another or as cinematic features, and as a result the film and TV rights have now reverted to them.

Solomon has come out fighting, saying that he and his company will defend their rights. However, this exchange of views has also confirmed that the previous arbitration (which Solomon was using to show the matter had already been settled) took place in the late 1990s , before even the release of the first movie, and did not address of the sequel issues. As a result of this, Hasbro's position appears to have more merit than previously thought.

Expect this one to run on for a while.

Star Trek - Into Darkness

After breaking the Prime Directive in order to save the life of a crewmember, Captain James T. Kirk is recalled to Earth and is removed from command of the Enterprise. When a rogue Starfleet agent named John Harrison carries out a devastating pair of terrorist attacks on Earth, Kirk is reinstated and given orders to track down and eliminate Harrison. This involves a dangerous journey into the heart of Klingon space...and into secrets that some in the Federation want kept hidden.

Star Trek Hyphen Into Darkness (not colon, apparently) is the sequel to J.J. Abrams's 2009 reboot of the venerable SF franchise, which is quickly closing in on its fiftieth anniversary. It picks up shortly after where the previous film left off, with a new timeline established in which the crew of the Enterprise have just started working together and need to confront a new threat to the Federation, this time in the form of a canny and intelligent Starfleet officer who knows them better than they know themselves. This enemy is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who brings presence, menace and brooding intensity to every scene he's in, even when he's given some distinctly ropey dialogue to work with. Cumberbatch rises above the limitations of the script to deliver a great performance, bringing a sense of danger to the film that Eric Bana's Nero never really achieved in the previous film.

The rest of the casting is pretty much excellent. The Enterprise crew were well-established in the previous movie, though I had niggles over Chris Pine as the young Kirk, who brought the Shatner-requisite bluff arrogance but little of his charm or sense of vulnerability in the face of his own overconfidence. Whilst that remains an issue, Pine's performance is much-improved and some of that vulnerability does come out. The other actor whom I thought didn't quite gel was Simon Pegg as Scotty, who didn't really come across as Scotty but as Simon Pegg doing a bad Scottish accent. This time around, the writing is stronger for Scotty and he gets a decent arc through the film. It's also good to see everyone having their moment in the sun: whilst the emphasis remains strongly on Pine and Zachary Quinto's Spock, we also get solid (if somewhat brief) subplots for Sulu, Uhura and Chekhov. Bruce Greenwood also returns as Captain Pike, bringing a formidable sense of gravitas and charisma to his role, whilst Peter 'RoboCop' Weller does a good turn as Admiral Marcus. Less well-served is Alice Eve as Carol Marcus, who is given little to do other than a gratuitous strip-tease scene.

So, great cast, what about the plot? It could be better. Some ideas are great, such as bringing Deep Space Nine mainstays Section 31 into the Abramsverse. Seeing more of 23rd Century Earth is cool, and we get a little bit of a feeling for how normal people live and work in this world, which adds a little bit of texture and depth to the setting. Beyond that, the film is just as rammed full of plot holes (the crew spend a ludicrous amount of time and trouble trying to secure a resource in the finale when they have seventy-two alternate sources of it sitting right next to them on the ship), technobabble and predictable plot twists as its predecessor, though it at least makes an attempt (although a rather clumsy and over-obvious one) at doing some decent foreshadowing this time around. Where Abrams sticks to action, explosions and fights, he does well, as he does with cheesy humour. Attempts at characterisation are variable, and emotion is a bit over-wrought.

Where the film falls not so much flat on its face but screaming plummeting off a cliff is its final fifteen to twenty minutes. For a film set in a rebooted continuity, promising a fresh take on the franchise and the exploration of new ideas, the movie is obsessed and indeed bogged down with paying homages to one of the original Star Trek films. Dialogue and character beats, including wholesale lifting of dialogue and even scenes, are taken from that older film to the point where you begin to wonder why they didn't simply remake the movie wholesale. The reboot becomes a pastiche, reaching farcical levels when a powerful character and emotional moment from the older film is inverted and then undone seconds later by a howlingly awful plot device.

Where Into Darkness truly stumbles is that it does not understand you have to earn your miracles. Having a miracle solve a problem is fine, as long as it has consequences and a price. In the original third Star Trek film, Kirk pulled off a miracle that was highly implausible, but it was sold because the price he paid - in the life of his son, the loss of his ship and the (albeit temporary) end of his career - was high and the consequences real. Into Darkness has a fortune-reversing twist in its ending but because we've spent very little time with this crew (as compared to the better part of two decades at the time of the original films) it does not resonate. Its resolution is cheap and easy, unearned and without apparent consequence: a sequence in which thousands if not tens of thousands of people must have died is shrugged off in a high-fiving, triumphant final scene.

Star Trek - Into Darkness (***) has early promise but its ending is disposable, fast-food storytelling, unworthy of its excellent cast. The deeply unsatisfying ending squanders the promise of some solid early action scenes and even a few effective scenes of character development which are superior to anything in the first film. Indeed, with a different set of final scenes (and much less riffing off of a far superior movie), Into Darkness would have effortlessly surpassed its forebear. Instead, the problems way it down just as much. Into Darkness remains visually impressive, fast-paced and, if you can switch your brain off, fun. But it's also derivative, unsatisfying and apparently terrified of doing anything new, which is a very odd position for a movie set in a new, unrestrained and exciting continuity to be in. The film is on general release in most countries now.

Neil Gaiman to publish a new NEVERWHERE story (with some help from George R.R. Martin)

Way back in 1996, Neil Gaiman penned the BBC mini-series Neverwhere, adapting it into a novel a year later. Almost immediately after the story first appeared, fans noted a continuity error where the character of the Marquis de Carabas recovered his coat after it had apparently vanished forever. Gaiman promised to explain all in a short story, enigmatically entitled 'How the Marquis Got His Coat Back', but got a bit side-tracked with other projects.

The Marquis de Carabas as portrayed by Patterson Joseph in the original BBC TV series of Neverwhere.

It's been a while coming, but the story will finally appear in a new anthology entitled Rogues, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Rogues - the thematic sequel anthology to 2010's Warriors - will likely be published some time in 2014.


The full story list is as follows:

George R.R. Martin “Everybody Loves a Rogue” (Introduction)
Joe Abercrombie “Tough Times All Over”
Gillian Flynn “What Do You Do?”
Matthew Hughes “The Inn of the Seven Blessings”
Joe R. Lansdale “Bent Twig”
Michael Swanwick “Tawny Petticoats”
David Ball “Provenance”
Carrie Vaughn “The Roaring Twenties”
Scott Lynch “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane”
Bradley Denton “Bad Brass”
Cherie Priest “Heavy Metal”
Daniel Abraham “The Meaning of Love”
Paul Cornell “A Better Way to Die”
Steven Saylor “Ill Seen in Tyre”
Garth Nix “A Cargo of Ivories”
Walter Jon Williams “Diamonds From Tequila”
Phyllis Eisenstein “The Caravan to Nowhere”
Lisa Tuttle “The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives”
Neil Gaiman “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back”
Connie Willis “Now Showing”
Patrick Rothfuss “The Lightning Tree”

GAME OF THRONES producer expecting seven seasons

Game of Thrones producer Frank Doelger has said that he expects the show to last for seven seasons, assuming audience figures remain strong.

Doelger was interviewed backstage at the BAFTA Awards and said the following:

"[The number of series] is being discussed as we speak. The third season was the first half of book three, season four will be the second part of book three. George RR Martin has written books four and five; six and seven are pending.

"I would hope that, if we all survive, and if the audience stays with us we’ll probably get through to seven seasons."

The potential length of the series has been much-speculated about by fans, with the need to adapt the Song of Ice and Fire novels (relatively) faithfully clashing with the realities of TV production and how long a TV audience will wait for answers and resolutions. Previously showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had spoken of 90 episodes (nine seasons), whilst Doelger's comments seem to suggest that less is more likely. Indeed, with Book 3 spanning two seasons and seven books projected, it's telling that anything less than eight seasons (assuming the remaining books can all be fitted into one season each, which is not a given) is even being considered.

At the same time, even highly successful shows like Lost have ended after just six seasons, and shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Buffy the Vampire Slayer only managed to limp to seven years with a sub-par season (or two) thrown into the mix. True Blood arguably ran out of steam after three (four if we're generous) seasons and has been running on fumes ever since. So the chances of Game of Thrones - a massively expensive and time-consuming show to make which doesn't allow its producers much (or any) time off between seasons - making it to eight or nine years without burning out seem slim, so aiming lower and writing accordingly might be the better option.

To me, this suggests that the producers are envisaging a more radical move away from the books after Season 4 (if not this season), with perhaps more focus on bringing the existing characters and storylines to a resolution rather than bringing in lots of new characters and situations. Indeed, Benioff and Weiss previously said that Season 3 will be the peak of the cast in terms of size and future seasons would feature smaller casts. That suggests that we might not be getting the hordes of new characters the later books bring in, and casts doubt on whether we'll be going to locations like Sunspear where a dozen or more new characters would need to be introduced in one hit. This may improve pacing and clarity, but could backfire if some of the other storylines (particularly in Dorne) prove critical to the overall resolution of the story and the producers have to change their minds later on.

That the show would become much less faithful of an adaptation when it hit the problematic (from a structural point of view) fourth and fifth books has largely been expected by fans, but to get to the very end of the entire storyline in just forty more episodes after this season will require more compression and rewriting of the novels' storyline than what we have seen so far. If HBO and the producers can pull it off remains to be seen.

Music Monday: David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' performed IN SPACE

NASA Commander Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' on the International Space Station.

So he's actually playing this song about the Space Race whilst IN SPACE. Awesome.

AGENTS OF SHIELD trailer

ABC have released a trailer for Agents of SHIELD, the TV spin-off from The Avengers and the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Joss Whedon is producing the new show and has directed the pilot. The show is expected to start airing in September.

The show picks up shortly after the events of The Avengers and will explain how Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) survived the apparently fatal injuries he sustained in that movie. Gregg - who appeared as Coulson in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor and The Avengers - will headline the show, which will also star Ming-Na Wen as Melinda May, Brett Dalton as Grant Ward, Chloe Bennett as Skye, Iain De Caestecker as Leo Fitz and Elizabeth Henstridge as Jemma Simmons. Former Whedon regular J. August Richards (who played Gunn on Angel) will guest star in the pilot episode.

Whedon is expected to supervise the first season before taking a back seat whilst he concentrates on The Avengers 2, which is expected to hit cinemas in the summer of 2015.

GAME OF THRONES wins a BAFTA

Game of Thrones has won a BAFTA Award. The show won the Radio Times Audience Award, the only one of the awards to be voted for by the general public. The result was a surprise, with most watchers expecting the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony to walk off with the award, but clearly GoT's motivated fanbase was able to mobilise. However, GoT did miss out on the other award it was nominated for, Best International Programme, which instead went to its HBO sister show Girls (itself surprisingly trouncing the widely-expected winner, Homeland).

Tywin Lannister finds this victory approaching his bare minimum standards of adequacy.

GoT's trophy cabinet is rather full, with the show having already notched up multiple Golden Globes, Emmies and Hugo Awards, amongst others. Congratulations to the team for their success.

Wertzone Classics: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 3 (remastered)

When Star Trek: The Next Generation entered its third season, it was in trouble. The critical reception to the show's second year had been mixed, producer and effective showrunner (under Rick Berman) Maurice Hurley had left and the cast were unhappy with the removal of Gates McFadden as Dr. Beverly Crusher. As the third season opened, Rick Berman had to hire a largely new writing team, a new showrunner and had to bring back McFadden to appease the rest of the cast (particularly Patrick Stewart). Fortunately for his show and for the fans, Berman was lucky. The new showrunner was the talented Michael Piller and amongst the new writers were the young and energetic Ira Steven Behr, Rene Echeverria and Ronald D. Moore, all of whom would go on to define Star Trek for many years to come.

Because of these changes, Season 3 was produced in a state of chaos. Scripts were being completed mere days before filming, leaving little time for pre-production. This can be seen in the reduced amount of location filming this season, with almost no time to book location shoots ahead of filming. However, there's a noticeable improvement in special effects thanks to the introduction of new, smaller and easier-to-shoot filming models of both the Enterprise and the Romulan warbird (which makes several appearances). New, considerably more comfortable uniforms are also introduced, to the evident comfort and relief of the actors.

But what really makes the season work is the superior writing. Piller was keen to introduce more scenes of character interaction and development to the show. The guest cast are moved away from being the centre of the show, with their impact on the regular characters being more important. There's more continuity, with a recurring Romulan threat throughout the season (The Enemy, The Defector, Tin Man) and Worf's Klingon background being developed more thoroughly (Sins of the Father). Having been proven to be a sentient being in Season 2's excellent The Measure of a Man, Data's evolution continues through several episodes before peaking in The Offspring, where he tries to build a new android 'daughter'. Comedy is allowed freer reign, particularly in Deja Q, Captain's Holiday and Menage a Troi, which all feature a few good laughs (Deja Q may be the funniest episode the show ever did).

But the third season's strong reputation relies on its two absolute stand-out, inarguably, stone-cold classics. Yesterday's Enterprise is a time travel story involving parallel universes which remains fully comprehensible, features one of the best space battles the show ever did and finds an intelligent and non-cheesy way of bringing back Tasha Yar. The writing is strong, with lots of moments of subtlety (the alternate Riker and Picard don't get on) and some impressive production values and details, such as the revamping of the Enterprise bridge.

At the end of the season we also get The Best of Both Worlds, the show's first season cliffhanger and still the best one Star Trek's ever done. The return of the Borg, the outstanding music, the character interplay between Riker and newcomer Shelby, the effects and the doom-laden, hopeless atmosphere combine to make for one of the franchise's finest hours.

Conversely, there are only a few weak moments in the mix. The Price, The Vengeance Factor and The Most Toys are quite dull, whilst The High Ground is a commentary on the Northern Ireland Troubles which misfires completely due to the writers' poor understanding of that conflict. Who Watches the Watchers? sabotages a good premise and some excellent Enterprise scenes with some dull guest cast performances. But it's more surprising how good the show has become compared to the first two seasons, with even minor episodes like The Survivors and The Hunted coming to life and being enjoyable in a way the smaller stand-alones of the first two years struggled with.

On a technical basis, the HD upscaling of the show is again amazing, with the same team that handled Season 1 doing the job. That means some more beautiful 3D planet renders, some outstanding effects recreations and superior reproductions of the show's colours (Season 3 is more colourful than the first two seasons). After the slightly disappointing Season 2 upgrade (the company responsible for that is not being re-used, interestingly), the S3 update is even more astonishing. For a season that was driven so much by writing changes, the extra features do a great job of focusing on the writing team and how they went about creating the best show possible and avoiding the mistakes of the first two years.

Ultimately, the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (*****) is outstanding. The writers, actors and crew are all on the top of their game, dragging the so-so show of the first two seasons up in quality to become something truly impressive. The season is available now in the UK and USA.

Hasbro dispute Warner Brothers' right to make D&D movie

Hasbro have challenged Warner Brothers' right to make a new Dungeons and Dragons movie. In a balshy statement, Hasbro have started they own the D&D IP and are developing their own movie project with Universal.

Hasbro attempts a backstab on Warner Brothers, hoping for +8 damage.

To recap, Wizards of the Coast, who acquired the Dungeons and Dragons IP in 1997 by buying the original creators of the game, TSR, had previously licensed the film rights to film-maker Courtney Solomon. Solomon produced a film in 2000 that was a box-office bomb. Solomon retained the film rights, producing two live-action sequels. Meanwhile, Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast in 1998 and they produced a Dragonlance animated movie in 2008, which didn't step on the existing film rights by avoiding any potential areas of dispute. Earlier this week it was confirmed that Warner Brothers were developing a new big-budget movie with Solomon on board as producer.

Apparently this dispute has come up before and in a binding arbitration process, Solomon's ownership of the film rights was confirmed. Clearly Hasbro didn't accept the 'binding' part of that agreement and it's likely there will be further legal shenanigans before either film project can proceed.

D&D uses a lot of fairly generic fantasy material - elves, dwarves, wizards, clerics, dragons, lightning bolts, fireballs etc - but it does have some specific elements that likely would be affected by the issues, such as drow, beholders and specific spells like Melf's acid arrow. The rumour is that Hasbro has been working to bring some of the more popular D&D worlds and novels to the screen, such as R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt Do'Urden books, but it'd be impossible to do so without treading on areas covered by the existing film deal, which means they wouldn't be able to use them. It remains to be seen how this pans out.