Grand Theft Auto 5

Video Game Review

By Louis Lalire

Video Games have come a long way since 2008. Now, in the final year before the release of the next-gen consoles, the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One,  games have reached a new maturity; something that will only get better with time as in-game AI get smarter, visuals more immersive and stories more emotionally provocative. The reason 2008, in particular, is highlighted here is because it was the year Grand Theft Auto IV, the most recent game in Developer Rockstar’s eminent open-world, action-adventure canon, was released. GTA IV (as often abbreviated) brought the series to a new generation of video game consoles, and introduced a newfound sense of realism and subtlety in both gameplay and narrative, while also maintaining the over-the-top satire the series was founded on.  Five years later comes Grand Theft Auto V, and while it enlarges and improves the game world and fine tunes the modernized driving and shooting mechanics introduced in GTA IV, it does not attempt to take the series to any new places. It is not necessarily a misstep for the series, but rather a non-step; a game that does not attempt to explore new concepts and characters, instead relying heavily on a tried-and-trued formula that, in 2013, can be at times, still exhilarating, but at others, dated.

Relying on its formula for urban chaos does not make GTA V a bad game, in fact, it is a very good game, a circumstance that speaks volumes for the formula itself. However, it does make it a safe game, and perhaps, at least within its own canon, a disappointing one.  Safe—that  is the best way to describe our second journey* into a life of crime on the streets of Los Santos (Los Angeles), and a descriptor that a series drowned in controversy for its depictions of sex, drugs and violence in the past should be uncomfortable being associated with. It is no longer pushing-the-envelope to show a character smoking a bong in a cutscene. Other games and franchises have caught up to Grand Theft Auto in these respects, and so the series, in order to maintain its highly respected position as a “groundbreaking” franchise, must break the mold in new ways. That is where GTA 5 fails.

For the first time, we have three main, playable characters, and from the onset it appeared that Rockstar missed a golden opportunity to introduce the first female protagonist in GTA history here (maybe next time). Instead, we have Franklin, a very bland African American from the ghetto, whom I turned into a metro-sexual via Suburban outfitters, one of three in game clothing stores the player can use to dress his or her character. Next we have Trevor, a larger-than-life violent psychotic, who seems like a callback to the series’ zanier days. And lastly we have Michael, a retired heist man who changed his name and escaped the game, now living out the rest of his days in upper class misery with the most annoying wife and kids you’ll ever see. While switching between characters to perform different parts of missions is very cool, I would have loved to see Rockstar try and revolve an entire game around Michael.

Michael’s mid-life crisis story is decidedly anti-GTA throughout the first quarter of the game, but he descends into the same gun-toting airhead routine that compounds Franklin and Trevor. Rockstar surely could have done more with his story had they put the same amount of focus on it as they had, say, John Marston’s, in the critically-acclaimed Red Dead Redemption. Our protagonists’ motivations are almost always completely unfounded and they are surrounded by a cast of characters that exist primarily to make you do things for them. This is a problem that has always nagged the series, but in GTA V, it stands out more than ever, because the characters present are either ones we’ve seen time and time again, like Franklin’s hood friend Lamar, or they are just, well, boring, like antagonist billionaire Devin Weston. With the exception of perhaps Michael’s family and Michael’s therapist Dr. Friedlander, the large cast of characters that surround our protagonists’ is as underwhelming as the series has ever seen. The story, meanwhile, is long and tedious, and descends to a conclusion that one could see coming within the first five hours. But by the time Franklin faces the final “decision”, the player has long since stopped caring, because they know all the characters are mere rag-dolls, and all the stories that the game nebulously dips its toes into will remain unfullfilling.

The missions, and there are a lot of them, range everywhere from being eyes-popping-out-of-my-sockets awesome to brain-numbingly terrible. The best missions revolve around heists, which are planned out by your crew’s braniac, Lester, a character who reminded me, weirdly enough, of Bentley from the Sly Cooper series, in both purpose and appearance (Bentley is a turtle, by the way).  There are two options for pulling off these heists, a more direct way and a more subtle way, but the game includes a nice “Replay Mission” feature so players can do both. These missions and the preparations you make for them are thought-out, well-paced, and most of all, rewarding. They also integrate “Hollywood” moments into the game better than most—whether it’s jumping a motorcycle onto a train, parachuting down onto the top of a skyscraper or escaping a fleet of police in an attack helicopter.

At the other end of the spectrum are the trivial missions, and, as expected, you do some pretty stupid things in GTA V, like towing cars around and hunting deer. At times you want yell at your character, “Franklin, you’re a fucking millionaire, why are you wasting your time looking around a junk yard for a dime bag of pot?” But trivial isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because, as much as we complain about doing trivial things in the real world, we do them anyways—and we choose to keep doing them, a sentiment reflected in many video game worlds––GTA V included. Trivial tasks are not leaving video games any time soon. In fact, as gamers, they are often something we cling to in search of more content.

No, what’s perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of the game’s level design is the inclusion of a Private Military Company known as Merryweather, because Merryweather simply gives the developers a means to throw us into nonsensical gun battles that go on for far too long. While Rockstar has improved leaps and bounds in terms of shooting and cover mechanics, they still remain a weak point for the series, and most of the action scenes digress into stale arena battles in which you stay in one spot as waves of Merryweather soldiers attack you. These gun battles come from a video game era past, in which enemies were not so much intelligent, scheming opponents as irritating gnats, buzzing around your head without rhyme or reason. Merryweather soldiers are just gnats.

Perhaps my inability to accept GTA V for what it is comes at the fault of its predecessors, in that I had an expectation it would be as progressive as those games were or as Red Dead Redemption was in 2010. Am I being overly critical? Perhaps, but one must be critical of a series of such stature. Was the overall single player experience a disappointment? Yes. Is it still unbelievably fun to go on a mass killing spree, then hop in your Rapid GT, weave up and down streets and ally-ways to try and escape the numerous SWAT teams and police helicopters on your tail? Hell yeah. The old ways are still there, and they’re still fun, but a series must remain active and not get too comfortable with what it has accomplished before. This is an affliction that hampers many series, but one that Grand Theft Auto had avoided until now. Unfortunately, GTA V is its first static entry, and we’ll have to wait for the inevitable GTA VI on the next generation of consoles, which will be the fourth generation the series has spanned**, to see if Rockstar is able to take this series any further.   

Grand Theft Auto V

Rated M for Mature

Playstation 3 & Xbox 360.

Developed By: Rockstar North

Published By: Rockstar Games

*The first time was in 2004’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

**The first Grand Theft Auto launched on the original PlayStation and Windows Computers in 1997

Gravity (Part 2 of Gravity Blowout Special!)

A Night at the Theater...or, uh, A Day at the 'Mike

By Matt Marion

I never saw “Avatar” in theaters. I didn't get to experience the nation-wide satisfaction of having witnessed the best 3D-movie ever. Sure, I suffered for a few months, but, eventually, it was released on DVD and luckily I have a friend who buys DVD's. I watched it on a large flatscreen and soaked it in. After I watched it I was awestruck, but without that nation-wide satisfaction.

Gravity was my second chance. Respected friends and online critics raved for Gravity. “It's a ride.” “An adventure.” “Alfonso Cuarón's space epic.”

I arrived at a movie theater that required a distant memory to recall ever being there. A shady Carmike Cinema lay undisturbed by the main road traffic, allowing its inhabitants of mostly 60-somethings a safe hole to burrow into. Exiting my Oldesmobile—driven by 60-somethings (I'm in the right place!)--gave me a sense of camaraderie given the makes and models I was surrounded by. The Carmike, or The 'Mike, as I've learned it to be nicknamed, offered a particularly casual way of doing business.

Why pay before you can come inside? It's cold out there. Come in, come in. While we fill your bucket of popcorn to the standard 5 lbs., why don't you tell me what movie you'd like to see. Oh, that rather large drink size to your right, towering above the insignificant smaller portions? Yes, it is a liter. No, the two liter doesn't come out for another month. Check back in when “Catching Fire” premiers.

After meeting with my party of 5, we entered into the hole that so many crave in order to escape. Little did I know, this hole opened into infinity.

Through my admittedly untrained eye for critiquing film, I would like to ask for forgiveness of ignorance ahead of time. With that said...

Several flashes nearly made my eyes permanently roll in the back of my head. Was this Gravity at its finest, showing an ability to literally make the body illicit a physical response? No, it turns out the source was just a few previews involving a fresh-off-the-knife Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman getting away with being a retired Oscar winner, and some other guys I don't remember (I just wanted to mention Red and Gordon). There was also Rocky VII, where Sly seems to pick a fight with his former trainer, Mick, who comes back via time travel into his 70-year-old fighting prime, played by another retired Oscar winner.

Eventually the lights dimmed, I was cued to put on the glasses, and I was transported to (I think) the Hubble Space Telescope. The rest is 100,000,000 dollars worth of 3D magic.

I can't say much for the narrative, because other than Bullock's hyperventilating and Clooney's too-cool-for-school-veteran-among-veterans-astronaut captain persona, this movie really lacked in the story department. But the graphics, whoa buddy! This movie could unleash an interactive theme park ride that'll dick slap whatever Universal Studios ends up giving Avatar in 2016.

What this movie sacrifices in plot, it more than makes up for in an emotional experience, which is something I feel only an incredibly vivid 3D movie can do. We all hang at the mercy of ZERO G's with Bullock, mutually relieved by Clooney's voice. We sympathize with her hatred for that damn space tether and its unyielding fibers. The terror of colliding space stations exists in silent screams, mouths open but only for sucking in breath. It feels like Bullock has an insurmountable speed bump every 15 minutes of the movie. Every time the audience thinks, Oh, a space station, surely there's other people she can re-group with, surely she'll have a training montage to get ready for Russian space debris, surely—All wrong! She doesn't even get to land okay.

My favorite part of the film was the ending. Not that I was waiting for it, although Gravity makes you want to get off the ride the first time because you don't know if you're ready for what Cuarón's going to do next. But that's okay, because when it is over, you're glad you did it; and you'd do it again. 

Gravity (Part 1 of Gravity Blowout Special!)

A Night at the Theater

By Louis Lalire

Alfonso Cuarón’s visually sensational Gravity reminded me of the first time I saw Jaws. It comes from the same ancestral lineage as Steven Spielberg’s classic thriller, in that its plan is to throw its main character through a series of obstacles within a terrifying, contained environment: the boat at sea in Jaws, outer space in Gravity, and says, essentially, "let’s throw a non-stop mountain of trouble at this person, and see if they have the will to survive and make it home." Gravity executes this plan with near-perfection, maintaining an edge-of-your-seat level of intensity throughout its short 90-minute run time. Like Jaws, the reason it succeeds is because it supplants an element of dread in the audience’s head so strong that even when the characters we root for are relaxing on screen, we can’t, because we always know that the giant shark is still lurking, swimming circles around their feet.

The plot of Gravity does not break any new ground, and mostly acts as a means to set up the aforementioned “obstacle course” for Sandra Bullock, who plays first time astronaut Ryan Stone. Stone has some personal issues back down on the blue planet, but those elements mainly remain arbitrary in their need to project on Stone a will to survive and a reason never to give up. George Clooney is the only other character with a face in the film, and he's the aswer to the question: “If you had to be stuck in space with one other person, who would it be?” He plays NASA veteran Matt Kowalski, who is focused on breaking the all-time space walking record, and whose super-cool and calm demeanor (also known as “Clooney-ness”) acts as a welcomed counterbalance to Bullock’s space virgin strife.

I saw the film in 3D, and while I still think this format oftentimes detracts from the visual experience, it did not bother or distract me during the aesthetically beautiful Gravity. I have never been to space, a sentiment most of us can relate to, and have little to no knowledge of how things actually “work” in space, but the scale and movement of people and objects in Gravity conveys a strong sense of realism. Despite its out-of-worldliness, Gravity isn’t sci-fi. The believability of the situation it presents, even if it’s a situation that 99.9% of the population (you know, all non-astronauts) won’t have to think about on a daily basis, changes the way the audience experiences its own dread.

The fear we would experience if a fleet of aliens with razor-sharp tentacles coming out of their stomachs attacked Ryan and Kowalski is much different than the fear we experience when Ryan slowly trots to a dot on the horizon, a space station, as the oxygen in her suit dwindles. The latter is more tangible, a claustrophobic dread that we can all connect with. Cuarón, who also co-wrote, co-produced and co-edited the film, and his crew, which includes cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, take full advantage of our own claustrophobia, filming their characters with tight frames, and pumping up the sound of each breath they take through the thin layer of glass in their helmets. The sound design, cinematography, and editing of the film are things to be marveled in their own right. Like in his last film, the apocalyptic and marvelous Children of Men, Cuarón spares cuts like the astronaut with the dwindling oxygen tank must spare breaths: don’t use them until they are absolutely, positively necessary.

It’s all very funny though, because outer space is such a vast expanse. With the exception of Earth, there are literally hundreds of thousands of miles of nothing surrounding our characters at all times, yet the audience is overcome with a sense of claustrophobia throughout the experience. Gravity is frustratingly tense, but only in the best way possible—it grabs you, ensnares you, and doesn’t let you breathe until its final shot. But in that final “hero” shot, our survival is celebrated. “We made it!” we say. And we release a huge breath and realize, that was one hell of a ride.

“Gravity”    

Warner Bros. 90 minutes. Rated R.

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón

Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney

In Theaters Now