09 Feb Gamer (2009)

Controlled Iris

The story is that insipid kind made fun of even by Robert Rodriguez. The characters are not worthy of the concept. But never mind that.

What interests me in these projects is how the cinematic vocabulary is pushed, and how we adapt our ways of building narrative structure through what we see. Now I readily concede that most elements of this vocabulary are economically driven: the transition frequency is high because it allows the producers to get by with less expensive effects. And these techniques exist because there is a market for thrilling violence rather than introspective nourishment.

But that doesn’t take away from the effectiveness of what these guys are doing. These are the ‘Crank‘ guys, where the story was an even more incidental parade of stereotypes. What I perceive here is an editing technique that I did not see in the Transformers movies. In those films — especially the first — small incomprehensible snippets of action were unified by the motion across the snippets. That’s why you had a lot of horizontal destructive actions. The editor clearly used reversed right for left frames when it helped with these assemblies.

But here the composition is more noisy in terms of the images. The structures instead are compositions of phrases with rhythmic signature. I presume these rhythmic tropes really do come from the game industry and have evolved over time to fill the gap between the action the player makes and the displayed consequence. So it may not be as intelligent a design as I suppose, merely a splice.

Nonetheless, though it doesn’t directly nourish, it does expand and stretch, and that makes it partially worthwhile.

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Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

IMDB