Geek Culture
Orc Training Day: A Review of Netflix’s Bright
Bright is Netflix’s newest and most ambitious title to date, it melds a gritty buddy cop genre with high fantasy similar to the worlds of Lord of the Rings and Warcraft. This in itself is enough reason to take interest in Bright, such an ambitiously different idea could never go wrong. Well, it goes very wrong because the film is just plain bad. David Ayer (Suicide Squad) is at the Helm of the film and he teams up once again with superstar Will Smith. Smith plays a LAPD cop named Daryl Ward and he is partnered with Nick Jakoby, an Orc portrayed by the fantastic Joel Edgerton (Warrior). The film’s screenplay was written by Max Landis (Chronicle).
These two mega talents go to waste as the film is a messy take on a buddy cop action-adventure flick. One immediate problem with the film is there is virtually no world-building, as we get dropped into this cool, alternate fantasy version of Los Angeles with no real back story on events prior. All we know going into the film is there was a war between Orcs and humans two thousand years ago, and humans are belligerently racist towards them because of this old conflict.
Of course the film has elves as well, and they are considered the top of the race ladder, the rich Caucasian demographic of Bright’s version of America. Orcs, including Jakoby are treated like scum by the humans and especially Elves. The movie tries to force the topic of racism in many ways and I like that it has this theme throughout but it just doesn’t work when the writing is this poor and that it can’t be taken seriously.
Bright has an identity issue, it wants to be a gritty drama at times, but slips into bad buddy cop comedy territory with its cringe-worthy dialogue between Smith and Edgerton. None of the films elements mix together which causes an absolute mess. The villains are another issue I have with the movie, they keep throwing them into the film with no real indication of who they are or their motive. They just plant a random bad guy in places and let the bad writing and over-use on slo-mo shots try to carry the scenes.
The main antagonist in the film is a cool looking, yet shallow elven woman named Leilah (Noomi Papace) who is after a special magic wand so she can bring back the “Dark Lord”, in which we never get much information on who this evil lord is. The film is about keeping a magic wand away from the hands of evil which is a been there, done that situation. For a film that has such a unique premise, there is actually nothing special or different about the actual plot. It is mundane and boring to its core, which is a shame because the world they created for the film is interesting in many ways.
One positive from this film are its visuals, which is has become a staple in Ayer’s films. The makeup/costume design is top notch and the visual effects during some of these action scenes are done well. It has the same visual grit that Ayer movies are known for while mixing it with fun magical effects that truly pop out.
To put it simply, Bright is an ambitious $90 million disappointment. David Ayer and Will Smith teamed up again and made a movie that is sometimes worse than the Disaster that was Suicide Squad but here it is. Despite the well-made visuals, there is still much wrong with the film as it lets talent go to waste with its bad writing and poor use of character.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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