Old Friends, New Days - Star Wars: The Force Awakens

First the bad news.

What follows will not be profound. There is nothing I can say about what Star Wars means – has always meant – to me that will be wholly original. Litanies have been written on the topic lately, many more sublime than anything I can hope to best. Heck there's no shame in it; a lot of folks just have better stories. I wasn't alive in 1977, so I can't claim to have been there the moment the first Star Destroyer crawled (and crawled...and crawled) across the screen, changing cinema forever. I can only join the ranks of the millions around the globe who confess without shame or compunction that I love Star Wars, and like those countless millions who share that love, I faced the premiere of The Force Awakens with a mix of excitement and trepidation.

The moments before the curtain fell were to me like waiting on the platform of a train station, or in an airport, anticipating the arrival of a long-gone love. My palms were sweaty and my heart just wouldn't climb out of my throat. Nervous? About a movie? Hell, yes. We had a history, Star Wars and me, and it hadn't always been good. We grew up together, after all, but we also grew older together, hit rough patches together, and eventually, perhaps inevitably, grew apart. Sure, I'd check in on her once in a while, perhaps read a review of the latest video game or a blurb on the new season of Clone Wars, but mostly I kept my distance, twitchy about her new look, fearful she had drifted so far from the Star Wars I knew I wouldn't recognize her if I tried. Besides, we had fights; we disagreed. I told her she looked lazy in those prequels, like she had phoned in 10 years worth of hype for a quick billion and some new action figures. “Tough beans,” she said. “8 year-olds love it. And Greedo shot first.”

But a love that storied isn't so lightly tossed aside. I carried a torch for Star Wars even when it seemed to all the world like I had moved on. It was the good times, you see, that kept her tethered to me: VHS marathons; reams of comics; stacks of paperback novels, their pages compulsively dog-eared, the corners torn; not to mention endless conversations and scrupulous analyses with my fellow Star Warriors. Those moments were aging like good wine in the cellar of adolescent memory (along with SATs, driving tests, long car rides, and snowbound weekends), and the temptation was to entomb them forever, never chancing to taint them with new input. There they'd be safe from my encroaching cynicism toward the world, that metastasizing snark that comes naturally, I think, with the passage of time. There they might stay, perpetually aglow in the rosy gauze of good feelings.

It was not to be. And to have it – all of it – dragged out and thrown back on the fire was cause for more than a few butterflies. I knew it was coming. The Mouse paid 4 billion for this; they were going to get their investment back. I just didn't think it would happen so blasted soon. I'd read the stories. I'd seen the trailers. I knew the work of J.J. Abrams. It seemed as though he'd followed through on his (carefully phrased, politely worded) promise not to repeat the (hundreds) of missteps and baffling calls George Lucas made in Episodes I, II, and III. The shots carefully doled out to the public looked real-ishly gritty instead of cartoon glossy. The cast was solid. Lawrence Kasdan was back on the typewriter. The actors betrayed no hint of that anemic, glassy-eyed glaze they get when working against naught but acres of green-screen. Yes, Disney was at the helm now, and sure, they own about a quarter of the planet by now...but they didn't get where they are by making crap or alienating their audience. Right?

Still, Star Wars had broken my heart once – no, three times – and I couldn't shake the thought that The Force Awakens would be the last dagger in my pincushioned backside, already stabbed half a hundred times by grabby pretenders who mutilated my love and turned her against me. Et tu, Mr. Abrams?

Now the good news: it didn't happen.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is an excellent film. It is even a wonderful film. On its own it would easily stand as one of the most entertaining of the year, a triumph of cinematic equilibrium, balancing sensational effects and eye-popping action with grounded characters and solid story-telling. But as a Star Wars film, it is magical. Why? Because it did what many of my generation believed impossible: it returned my love – our love – to us hale, whole, and more beautiful than ever. The expression “Episode VII” was something my grade school chums and I used to say with the same buoyant fancy reserved for topics like flying cars, moon colonies, or Crusade being renewed. We'd nod and sigh and look down at the comics in our laps and think “If only...”, and knew it would never happen.

It happened. And seeing “Episode VII” crawl across the endless field of stars to the thundering cadence of the London Symphony Orchestra was something akin to transmigration, as if I were seeing another world through some cross-time analogue of myself where the impossible became real.

What a relief it turned out to be a damn good flick.

Some thoughts (caution: this constitutes very mild spoilers, but purists be warned; I dabble in some insider intel):

• The joy is back – 3-dimensional characters drink deep and – more importantly – share from a wellspring of broad and believable emotion. It contrasts so starkly with the woodenness of the prequel trilogy, it is like a gust of warm light cleaving your chest again and again. I grinned, I cried, I laughed out loud often and unexpectedly. Even in the low moments, when the heroes were heartsick or imperiled, I beamed inside because Star Wars made me feel something again, and the cumulative emotion enveloping all others was joy, utter knee-weakening joy. It stayed with me for a long time, well after I'd left the theater and resumed my day. Certain scenes replayed hourly, each time reforming in my head at a different angle, sometimes – even often – allowing for fresh insight. It's a testament to the emotional footprint the film leaves.
  
  
• Comparisons to the prequels are a fool's errand, or at best, too easy – It's true. Despite what I said above, it will be my last cheap shot. The temptation is go the easy path, the critical Dark Side if you will, and hold TFA up to Lucas's efforts from a decade ago by virtue of the fact they were 'the last Star Wars'. But just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. J.J. Abrams is not George Lucas (clearly), and these films were made almost entirely without Lucas's input. When The Man did weigh in, uncorking his whispery reticence for the first and possibly last word on the matter, he said he would have done it differently. I don't doubt it. But what of it? Love or hate them, the prequels are in the past. It's a new day; we shouldn't carry the weight of old ghosts.
  
  

• Abrams brought his A-game – While he might be accused of horsewhipping his plots along (Lord, but he does), for me Abram's frying-pan-to-the-fire style only started to grate during the second Trek film, largely because he seemed more interested in set pieces and action than the little moments in between (I still can't remember why Khan and Spock were having a fistfight on a...was it a train? Some kind of flying space train? Does it matter?). Here the character bits and quiet interims, still brief and brutally economic, flow more naturally and serve a higher purpose than to simply cleanse the palette for the next exploda-ganza. Abrams has a leg up in that the movie is filled with characters we already know and love; thus our emotions are already perched on a high dive, ready to plunge the moment our fan faves appear. But the newcomers are never sold short, either for quantity or quality of screen time. When the action kicks in, it kicks like mule but stays coherent – no easy feat for a director, even harder in a SW film. There isn't a single scene that feels wasted, tacked on, egregious, or dumb. Space battles remain a strong point for Abrams, and here he seems to have borrowed not only from his Star Trek playbook but also from Lucas's purer efforts, throwing us head-first into the cockpits for rapid-fire snapshots of the unfolding melee, then pulling back for the occasional sweeping shot sure to elicit awe.
  
  
• The cast – new and old – has exceptional chemistry – Those character moments I talked about are best when two or more of the cast are on screen at once. The actors seemed to have tapped an open circuit of mutual good feeling, feeding off one another and belting out their lines with confidence, relish, and potent humanity. An early scene in which turncoat Stormtrooper Finn and debonair Resistance pilot Poe join forces to escape a Star Destroyer creates a delightfully tenable sense of fraternity between the two men, such that you know they will remain friends for life though they've known one another for 5 minutes. Similarly, Finn's John Boyega and Rey's Daisy Ridley have an instantly authentic rapport, a throwback to the hot-blooded sword-dance Han and Leia had in the first trilogy before that kiss in the asteroid (I think poor Finn is smitten, and who can blame him?). The Originals, meanwhile, feel like they've been been frozen in amber all this time, as they jump straightaway back into the jabbing humor and cocksure banter we'd recognize in any language. Han and Chewie, well...they're Han and Chewie. Need I say more?
  
  
• The villain is the boldest choice of all – Despite a gap of 32 years, TFA elected to go bare-bones on the backstory and not dwell on what happened while we were away. Again, it's Advance the Plot or Die! Tall order, one that demanded a ready-made antagonist whose motivations were clear from the outset and who wouldn't confuse the audience with subtler things like spycraft and deceit. We got that in Kylo Ren, a Sith-wannabe whose ominous black cloak and armored fright mask leave no doubt of his loyalties or his intentions. But is he trying too hard? After all, he wields the Force like a drug and brandishes his showy cross-guarded lightsaber so frequently we wonder if it isn't some sort of surrogate safety blanket. He might have been still another flat, throat-constricting mannequin there only to growl and puff. But before long we realize things about him that turn our perception of him on its ear. Ren is a deep dude: conflicted, burdened, hesitant even – a man whose mask is less an homage to Vader than a means of hiding heady misgivings about the choices he's made. “Look how old you've become,” he says to Max von Sydow's Lor San Tekka in an attempt to unnerve the stoic hero. “Something far worse has happened to you,” Tekka replies, and we swear we feel Ren shrink a little. We're used to seeing Jedi tempted by the Dark; here we see a villain tempted by the call of Goodness, and his rage at his own weakness translates into a violence that is terrible to behold. Still, we can't help but pity him. After all, we've been there, he hasn't; we know that no matter how much death and destruction he rains down on his foes, he'll never find the solace he so badly craves. What an angle.
  
  
• Opinions will differ, but the parallels with A New Hope are undeniably intentional – Armchair critics and next-morning know-it-alls have cited the pervasive sense of sameness with Episode IV as a shortfall with this film. Yes, TFA contains dozens of similarities to the original, including the central plot, but that should not be viewed as a bad thing, nor as a lack of originality. Lucas and Kasdan speak often of their love of heroic tales, epic poems, and episodic adventure series. All of those things are sometimes called by a different descriptor: cycles. Star Wars is fantasy, and all the best fantasies spin their yarn in a cyclical fashion: Beowulf, Arthur, Gilgamesh, the Arabian Nights, Flash Gordon. Stories repeat themselves with tidal regularity, ebbing and flowing, and eventually dredging up the bones of the past again in new flesh. Why? Well, part of it surely stems from the comfort of the familiar, the easy fit of a script that feels like old sneakers, but more importantly because the themes Star Wars explores are universal and immutable: love, friendship, power, faith, redemption, good, evil. 32 years on, Han and Leia and Luke finally realize our successes are never so complete that we can hope to leave the hard lessons behind. As they wrestle with the specters of their colorful history and the consequences of their actions, we feel a thread of affinity with them, these fictitious characters in a galaxy far, far away. So yes, the Starkiller base is another Death Star. Supreme Leader Snoke? He's the Emperor. So what if it's old wine, so long as we're enjoying the company we keep while we're drinking it? But Abrams never lets us get too comfortable; he turns every convention 5 degrees off-kilter and lets the friction blow sparks in every direction. It keeps us – and our heroes – on their toes.
  
  

• The lived-in Universe is back – One of the very first things Abrams set out to do – from the first picture he teased out on his Twitter feed – was to reaffirm his commitment to conventional effects wherever possible. He delivered. TFW is rife with puppets and rubber masks (and have you heard anyone bitch about it?). But even more powerful than the return of the spit-varnish effects was the...I'll say resoiling of the SW universe. The place looks used. Ships built for interstellar flight are covered with dings and dents and patchwork paint jobs. Characters recovering from fistfights have blood on their knuckles. The denizen of Jakku have sunburns and crow's feet. Dust clogs doorways. People sweat, for God's sake. This is as it should be. The original SW was shocking because it dared to show us a galaxy that depreciated with time. It was Firefly before we saw that again to any serviceable degree. Only the fanatical First Order bothers to polish their chrome (and Brylcreem their hair), and they look the appropriate douchebags for doing so.
  
  

• Harrison Ford looks happy again – and his performance reflects this. Best Han Solo ever.
  
  
• Fate, spirituality, and unseen hands play a large role – however grounded TFA seems in the action and the emotion, an undercurrent of the supernatural is ever-present. A careful read of the events as they transpire suggests there are no “allowable coincidences” in this film (though the conventions of fiction usually allow one per script), but rather that everything is proceeding on an ordained path. Yes, the right characters are always present at just the right times, and their actions prove correct no matter how many blind plunges they take into seemingly unwinnable frays. Conversely, the bad guys, no matter how many trump cards they possess, can never quite get the job done. Bad writing, you say? Or something greater? If you're conflicted, there's a clear marker for reference: about halfway through the film, the series of unfortunate events that has tossed the unlikely heroes together takes a turn for the nigh-paranormal, in which simple scrounger Rey receives what appears to be a mandate from the Force itself to stop (literally) hiding in the sand and become something more. From then on she ceases to be a desert scavenger and becomes more Joan of Arc, even brandishing her own version of the Sword in the Stone. As Gandalf once observed: “There is more at work in this world than just the will of evil...and that is an encouraging thought.” After all, Luke never would have blown up the Death Star if he had gone to Tosche Station that morning to pick up his power convertors.

Though the list could go on, the greatest critic will be you, dear reader, when you have the good fortune to sit comfortably and watch this great film for yourself. I encourage you to be zen about it, to let the story reveal itself in the fullness of time, and to not let what I hope will be an appreciation of this movie translate into retroactive rage at Mr. Lucas. For all his foibles, he is the father of it all, and I suspect even he is privately beaming with pride at how far his baby has come.

A final note on my TFA viewing experience: there was a time, when I was a young teenager, when I had my life planned out. I was convinced I was going to move to San Francisco and live as a professional writer. I could not have known 20 years ago how ludicrously expensive San Francisco as a dwelling spot would become, nor how the following two decades of economic mutation would reshape the landscape of jobs, money, opportunity, and the arts in this country. At 14 I was crazy enough to think I might actually one day work for George Lucas, (though I was at least sane enough to acknowledge it was an outside chance). The idea that he would retire never occurred to me. The idea that he would sell Star Wars to someone else would have been blasphemous. Suffice to say, things didn't happen the way I expected, and it was no coincidence my long “break” from Star Wars coincided with the realization my 14 year-old self didn't quite have all the answers. San Francisco just seemed like a happening place, and the fact that my future employer, the creator of Star Wars, lived just a scenic commute north of there...well!

But the Universe has a strange way of bringing us to the finish line by way of the most bizarre backroads. I did go to San Francisco, and when I did, it was for Star Wars. My host was not George Lucas, but one of those dear grade school chums I mentioned earlier, who invited me into his home and into his work, which just happened to be a refurbished theater in the heart of San Fran's Mission District where The Force Awakens was the debut film. My companion for the trip was another blood brother from the old days. Together we witnessed the future, and though it was a very different future from the one I imagined long ago, I wouldn't trade a single hour of it for anything else in the world.

Ready Novel Two - Ernest Cline Deploys More Nostalgia-With-A-Twist in 'Armada'

A billions-strong alien invasion force is bearing down on hapless Earth and only an angst-ridden teen from suburban Oregon can save us.

If you're wondering why that sounds like the plot of a hundred sci-fi movies and TV shows over the years, you're not alone. Zack Lightman, high school senior and unlikely savior, wonders it, too, to the point that he almost can't take the threat seriously. The planet is neck-deep in trouble, to be sure...but why is the impending really real-world assault – and certain extinction event to follow – playing out so much like an old episode of Star Trek? For that matter, why are the aliens behaving like the classic dumb bad guys, giving the heroes ample opportunity to fight back when they could just as well – as Ellen Ripley might suggest – nuke us from orbit (it's the only way to be sure)? It is a eyebrow-tenter of a mystery that teases playfully at the edges of Armada, Ernest Cline's second novel, and keeps the intrigue on slow burn for what is otherwise a wall-to-wall alien action tale. Cline's sophomore effort doesn't quite reach the bar set by the first book, but we can hardly blame him for that given the stratospheric standard he set for himself.

Cline burst on the scene – and the New York Times Bestseller List – a few years ago with his sensational debut novel Ready Player One, an uber-geek's wet dream brought to life with a heavy dash of wistfulness for the Reagan era. It was also, as luck would have it, damn well written. Though its appeal stemmed from a hip take a classic hero's journey, the nucleus of the tale was something to which all bookish introverts can relate: escapism, spontaneous reinvention, and breaking out of life's cruelly narrow molds to sate that supernatural craving for adventure just beneath the surface. Cline, a child of the 80's raised on pizza parlor arcades and pre-CGI fantasy, makes no bones about creating heroes that are thinly-veiled versions of his younger self: book smart but socially stunted, meek, slightly self-loathing, great at video games, unfit for cliques save a perhaps a basement-based D&D club, and generally nursing a grudge with Things The Way They Are. Armada is no different, and like Wade Wells, the likeable hero of Ready Player One, Zack is suddenly and unaccountably handed an epic adventure that allows him to realize all his deepest yearnings – for good or ill. Once again there is a heavy draw on the 80's for inspiration, with a plethora of references to popular culture of the era, movies, TV, music, and a topic in which I'm convinced Cline would have a doctorate if such a thing existed, classic video games.

Zack Lightman – there's a reference right there, for you War Games fans – finds his boring life in Beaverton, Oregon suddenly turning weird when he spots a UFO hovering near his high school. That's troubling enough, but even more distressing is that the ship is identical to the alien foes of his favorite video game, Armada, a sci-fi aerial combat simulator. What might be dismissed as a stress-induced daydream by most is not so easily cast aside by Zack, who fears he might have inherited a penchant for delusion from his long-dead father. Zack's Dad was the 80's child this time, a Cline-like caricature, and before he died under mysterious circumstances he filled a few dozen notebooks with paranoid screeds about the government monitoring gamers throughout the world and allowing the film and TV industries to seed our culture with references to alien invasion. It all seems a demented fantasy...until Zack is recruited by a shadowy government agency that confirms his father was on the right track. Aliens are real, and they're really invading, and its up to every man and woman and pimply teen to take the fight to them. Thank God the worldwide sensation video game Armada was actually a cleverly-disguised training simulator...and Zack just happens to be the sixth-best pilot in the entire world.

The book unfolds at a breakneck pace from there, whisking us through the events of a decades-long fight with an implacable alien foe, a cover-up perpetuated by some of the world's greatest (and most famous) scientists, and a global effort to harness the geektastic skills of nerds and introverts everywhere for a desperate defense of Earth. Zack leapfrogs from one jaw-dropper of a revelation to another until he can no longer be certain of anything but his trigger finger, inevitably – and yes, predictably – finding himself the lynchpin of humanity's salvation. And in the great tradition of getting more than he bargained for, he discovers his life prior to the alien death force wasn't really all that terrible...even as he can't shake the sense that everything playing out before him seems a bit too convenient. The action is frequent and furious, but every time the story threatens to veer into a tad too much Top Gun – and it veers dangerously close a couple of times – Cline teases our puzzle bone with more nuggets of the alien's true motives and the sordid timeline of humanity's first contact with the other-worldly intelligence. Hint: it happened during the Nixon administration, so nothing could've possibly gone wrong with that.

One of the greatest strengths of Ready Player One was its pacing. Cline took extraordinary pains to meticulously plot his story, creating an airtight universe where not a drop of narrative mojo escaped (an observation that stood up to a second read from Yours Truly). Wade's journey is a patient one, taking well over a year to reach fruition, and the final act and action-packed climax plays out like brilliantly-crafted battle plan. Armada by comparison seems a bit rushed, as though Cline gave himself less time on the front end to hash out the details and (perhaps) suffered deadline fatigue on the back end to boot. A couple tantalizing threads laid out early on are abandoned, which wouldn't have been as frustrating if they hadn't been so intriguing. The last 50 pages fall together so fast they seem manic, and are only saved by Cline's clean, pragmatic style of writing and his (admittedly enviable) penchant for cinema-worthy reversals and sudden 'oh, crap!' moments. Indeed, a cynical reader might even think Cline stages his books in an unavoidably cinematic fashion, the better to get his stories optioned for big-budget film adaptations. An unworthy and mercenary suggestion, and I do not – let me be clear, do NOT – mean to suggest Cline is guilty of ulterior motives. But at the time of my writing this, a film version of Ready Player One is currently in pre-production, helmed by none other than Steven Spielberg himself. Geeks everywhere would kill for the honor.

Cline loves his tropes, and if you do, too, you'll find plenty to love in Armada. Many of the best-realized conventions from his first novel (themselves tropes from the movies and TV shows from which he drew inspiration) are reincarnated here – the Yoda-like mentor, the badgirl love interest, the geek sidekicks forever squabbling over comic book minutiae - but they, too, feel a tad shoehorned this time, with no element shining forth as fresh or as pure as they did the first time around. One can't help but notice there's an aspect of meta-fiction at work here, with Cline's heroes expounding at nearly every chapter on the idiomatic elements found in genre fiction while he himself is writing a book chock full of such things, tossing his hero into one 'classic' scenario after another with outcomes about on par with what we've been conditioned to expect. It's up to the reader to decide just how self-aware Cline is being with this approach, whether he's being at least partially ironic in his presentation, or whether (my take) he's having the time of his life writing stories that are just like the ones on which he was raised and not presuming to improve on perfection. There remains a very respectable attention to detail here, with oodles of half-formed questions conveniently and satisfyingly answered almost the moment they form in our heads. That's a sure sign Cline understands his audience, and though there's less here for the 80's children to love, there's still a strong, and very universal, appeal to the frustrated loser in all of us yearning to be something more.

A Knight to Remember - 'Arkham Knight' Brings the Rocksteady Trilogy to a Glorious Conclusion

Four long years after the gates swung shut on Arkham City, Rocksteady Games has returned with a vengeance to put the cherry on top of one of the greatest gaming franchises ever conceived. Batman: Arkham Knight is everything we've come to expect from a threequel – it's bigger, louder, ballsier, and DARK like you wouldn't believe – but it's also quite a bit more. Specifically, it's things a last chapter often isn't: it's smart, it's complicated, it's bold, and it refuses to coast on past successes or phone in another easy payday on naught but brand loyalty. Whether you like the damn Batmobile or not (I'll get to that), the immutable truth is that the man hours Rocksteady put into this one seeps from every immaculate pixel. To spend even five minutes playing it is to know a labor of love. And it is a beautiful thing to behold.

I gush. I do. That's because 2008's Arkham Asylum and 2011's Arkham City were, and still are, two of my favorite platform adventure titles of all time. That Batman was, and still is, one of my favorite fictional characters of all time was almost incidental to my enjoyment of those games; that's how good they were. Every element was inspired: the brooding uber-gloom of the environments, a delirious melding of gothic and art deco; the punchy, action-packed stories; the exceptional voice work; the clever, varied gameplay; and most of all, the seamlessness of the universe, the Arkham Universe, one that neither ignored nor pandered to seventy-plus years of Bat-history. Each game was a story in its own right. Now, with Arkham Knight, the disparate pieces unite into a cohesive whole, and the result is something that has every right to be called a singular, standalone epic.

It was a long wait. True, between Arkham City and Knight we had 2014's ho-hum Arkham Origins, assembled by WB Montreal and not directly tied with Rocksteady. They did a competent job telling a story that didn't need to be told, ultimately offering a modest thrill full of empty calories that added little to the Arkham mythology (a few of the more inspired elements from that game have been carried over, credit where credit is due). There was little doubt when City pulled down the numbers it did that a final, definitive chapter was coming eventually, but it was also a given Rocksteady would hold off until next-generation hardware came along to give Batman the send off he deserved. They did, and now instead of the claustrophobic walls of a psycho ward or the cordoned ant farm of an open-air prison, the lightspeed processors and extra RAM of our consoles allow us all of Gotham for a playground. And it is a beautiful thing to behold.

When last we left the Caped Crusader, he had just survived one excruciatingly long night in Arkham City, the draconian 'final solution' to Gotham's pervasive prison problem. The walled ghetto built from the dregs of Old Gotham was supposed house every loony toon in the city, but it turned into a nightmarish battleground overrun by Batman's rogue's gallery and a quartet of savage gangs killing each other Running Man-style. Hugo Strange, the enigmatic genius overseeing the gulag, turned the inmates loose on one billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, waylaid by Strange's men and tossed behind the walls like a common criminal. Batman saved the day, but not before one final confrontation with his arch-nemesis, The Joker. The Clown Prince of Crime died – actually, truly died – in the end, a victim of his own fiendish poison concocted during the events of Arkham Asylum. Now the thugs and murders, the cutthroats and wackjobs, are all free, released on a legal technicality. Gotham is back to Square One, which is when none other than Scarecrow, the fear-obsessed madman thought dead after the asylum riot, reemerges with a vengeance. In the opening minutes of Arkham Knight he unleashes a horrifying wave of delusion-inducing gas, with a promise that more will come unless the city empties itself and turns the streets back over to the armies of chaos against which the Batman so long fought. In 24 hours the Dark Knight finds himself all but alone, surrounded on all sides by thousands of vengeance-crazed bad guys, and a private army led by a mysterious armored a-hole calling himself the Arkham Knight. Cowls on, dudes and dudettes. Time to go to work.

But if you're going to work, you're going to need a car.

So, yeah, for the first time in Arkham history, you get the Batmobile. Of all the Dark Knight's iconic weapons and gadgets, nothing – not the venerable batarang, not the grappling gun, not the shark repellant – is as instantly recognizable as the matte black rocket car with the lion's roar. Though it has seen innumerable iterations through the comics, cartoons, games, and movies, here it is as close to perfect as I can imagine, essentially a hybrid of a Ferrari and an Abrams tank.

The generous play map, which divides Gotham into three huge islands, contains wide, looping roadways so you can skid, drift, flip, and blow afterburners on a straightaway to your heart's content. A feather-touch control switches the Batmobile into combat mode, causing it to sprout cannons and mini-guns for (non-lethal) crowd control and yardarm-to-yardarm exchanges with the Arkham Knight's drone tanks. 

But more than that, the Batmobile is an indispensable part of the gameplay. Many areas are inaccessible without it, many trials unwinnable, and a sizable chunk of the Riddler's puzzles cannot even be attempted without it. You'll need to make use of a power winch and electric charger, as well as the impossibly fun ejection seat, which propels the Dark Knight like a missile into otherwise unreachable spots. An extended prologue mission, the contents of which I will not describe for fear of spoilers, put you through a proving ground of car-specific challenges that help you appreciate the versatility of the Batmobile not only as a weapon but as a tool, a companion, and extension of the Batman himself. The car can be summoned (almost) any time with the push of a button, and with a little practice you find you can drive, arrive, shoot, eject, fight, and be back in the saddle in a series of seamless moves that resemble the most dangerous ballet you've ever seen.

Batmobile aside, veterans of Asylum and City will find a ton to love here. As before, the main story is sweetened with more than a dozen complex side quests and a hundred wonderful distractions. But there's a interconnectedness this time around that was missing from the previous titles. Where in the last games it was possible to pursue many quests separately (limited only by periodic advancements in the story), here several of the meatiest parts of the game are threaded together in a manner that has the Dark Knight multi-tasking with a vengeance. The Riddler is back, of course, seeding Gotham with his fiendish puzzles, but his contribution this time around is woven into the story, all but demanding you attend to his lunatic conundrums in tandem with the other tasks that face you. A few of the missions are standalone, and pay homage to choice episodes in the Batman mythology, including the 'Man-Bat' and Azrael of the Order of St. Dumas. These vary in appeal and mostly exist to test your evolving skills in one or more Bat-disciplines such as melee combat or stealth. The others are tied in with the main quest and largely involve a series of engagements with the legions of militia overrunning the city. Consequently, the tasks feel more urgent this time, and the resulting emotional impact is palpable. The villains are more proactive, too; crueler, colder and more pissed at the Caped Crusader than ever. Have they simply smelled blood in the water and rightly chosen this moment to rise from the shadows and strike back? Or perhaps, given the persistent rumor that Batman actually killed the Joker, are they truly fearful of their old nemesis and the disquieting rumor that he's breaking his sacred code in exchange for a villain-free Gotham?

Like any good closing chapter, it is ultimately a story about consequences: Batman made choices for good or ill, all of which led him to the crossroads at which he now stands. He has not gone unscathed or unscarred (and numerous side references allude to the Dark Knight's advancing age), and neither have his allies. Indeed, much of Arkham Knight is not so much about Batman as it is about his comrades and loved ones, and how his tunnel-visioned holy war for order in Gotham has caused awful collateral damage to those with whom he is closest. Has it all been worth it? Is Gotham any safer now than it was when he first donned the mask? It's difficult to comment on the specifics of those questions without ruining the plot, but I'll say this: there are twists and reversals, and a few outright shocks, in this game that play out so beautifully it puts Arkham Knight on par with some of the better graphic novels.

If I elaborate, I'll spoil, so I won't continue down that road. Instead I'll comment on Gotham's design, and the graphics powerhouse that allowed Rocksteady to craft a city worthy of the World's Greatest Detective. It isn't the largest playable environment ever – certainly not a Tamriel or the verdant hills of Witcher 3 – but it makes up for it with dense acreage of glorious architecture and oodles of detail, and a sense of depth that makes the streets and sewers as intriguing as the rooftops. You never feel constrained in this Gotham, and while, no, you can't take the Batwing over to Wayne Manor for evening tea, you certainly won't be bored with the multitude of passageways and train tracks, the statuary and the skyscrapers. And man, can ol' Bats move in this game, such that he could give Spider-Man a run for his money. From the top of Wayne Tower you can peer across Gotham Harbor to the remnants of Arkham City, which is a profound experience: the playground from the last game, so huge and so immersive compared to Arkham Asylum, looks like nothing more than an abandoned amusement park, forlorn and neglected and...and small. But looking down on it from the lofty heights of a billion-dollar high-rise, you can't help but wonder if Gotham's winged defender isn't thinking back to that delirious night and rueing some of the decisions he made.

Is this a perfect game? Nah. Some missions are repetitive and the tank combat, while fun, gets old after a while. The upgradeable skill trees feel swollen, demanding you turn in your hard-earned XP for enhancements you'll hardly ever use. Finding key items and locations, and those confoundedly elusive Riddler trophies, can be a pace-killing chore. And the henchmen with the stun sticks are back. You remember, those guys with the cattle prods whose sole function is to break your combo chains because they can only be hit from behind? Yeah, we hate them, and they have no place in this game. But quibbles in an otherwise ecstatic Bat-sperience.

So, the disc tray hasn't even cooled yet and already the fan community wonders: will there be another? Likely yes, though Rocksteady is sure to pass the torch and try something else on for size. Like Christopher Nolan, they've probably decided three in enough, and will be only too happy to let another studio stand on their shoulders and (hopefully) carry on the greatness they achieved. One thing is certain: you can't keep a good (bat)man down, and where evil lurks, so the Dark Knight shall venture.

And we'll be there to help him.

Dear Brian Williams,

You are a liar.

There. I said it. Now it's your turn.

Hmm?  Sorry, what's that?  It's easy for me to say, and hard for you?  Well, I should think so. After all, you're the one who lied, not me. Nonetheless, if you want me to consider exerting the herculean effort that would be required of me to resuscitate even a scintilla of the respect I once had for you, that is what you must do.  You must admit you are a LIAR. And this is me holding my breath, waiting for the moment when you actually do.

It wasn't too much to ask, Brian. Politicians, athletes, clergymen...they do it all the time.   Borrow a page from some of the practiced liars you've covered in your now asterisk-riddled career and just do what they did whenever they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar: hang your head, slump your shoulders, ooze contrition from every over-coifed hair on your head, look into the camera and admit you LIED. Can't do it, can you?   Yeah, I know. I saw your interview on the Today Show.  It was pathetic.  Like you.

Matt Lauer – and lord, speaking of deep-rooted inadequacies, how Matt tries! – asked you pointed questions that invited forthright answers. He encouraged you to speak plainly and came prepared with numerous workarounds should any of your answers prove evasive. But I bet even Mr. Intensity himself found his bag of quizzy tricks running dry from the slings and arrows of epic flummery you dished up. Granted, you jettisoned the 'misremembered' excuse, and there was nary a whisper of your having 'embellished' events that never actually happened, but there was not a hint of a tease that your lips were ever going to form the word “lie”, or any variation thereof, by the time that interview was over.  Every query was met with a stock, prepared litany of doublespeak pulled from your smoke-and-mirror mind, a turgid collection of memorized missives vetted better than any story you ever 'covered' in your life. Lauer spoonfed you chance after chance to clear the air, and each time when the moment arrived for you to bear your breast and be done with it all, you instead ducked into the same crock pot of rhetorical twaddle favored by the Pentagon and most of the best plagiarists I know.  You said everything but what needed to be said. Did you lie, yes or no?  No, Brian, your answer should not begin with the word “Look...”, or the phrase “You know...”.  It was a simple question befitting a simple answer, and the inclusion of one word that would salve the wound: LIE.  But you couldn't, and you didn't.  Even Lauer's perma-pained expression was inadequate to the horror of watching the waters of your ego spill over the last bulkhead to drown your integrity in a sea of self-delusion.  It was sad.  Worse than that, it was insulting.

You are – were – a newsman.  In a world where damn near every human on Earth can get custom-tailored information from a thousand thousand sources 'round the clock, you were relied upon to deliver the unvarnished Truth on a nightly basis.  Your broadcast is still one of the highest-rated half-hours of programming found anywhere on television any week of the whole year.  You were trusted to carry on the tradition of Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, and Peter Jennings, among a host of others whose shades now shake their heads at you from beyond the veil.  I almost don't have the heart to mention Tom Brokaw, your mentor, still among the living (though how he bore the news of your betrayal without dying from shame, I'll never know), who did his best to love the sinner and hate the sin, even as we couldn't ignore the quaver in his famous cadence speaking of your cowardly non-deeds.  Your job, Brian, was to shush the naysayers and the cynics and the unrepentant futurists who said the evening newscast was a relic of a bygone age.  We looked to your stoic veneer and unflappable deportment for reassurance in a world gone mad.  Every mine needs a canary.  You were ours.

Then, no thanks to you, we found out it was all bullshit.  And now you want your job back.

Now what the HELL gives you the right to think you should be allowed back?  You're not a politician (read: professional liar), Brian.  You're not a celebrity, who we'll love no matter what.  You can't tell us that Jesus forgave you (so why shouldn't the rest of us?). You were a goddamn newsman, and your one and only job in exchange for the millions you made each year was to tell the Truth.  You failed.  It comforts us not that you “blame [your] ego”. No kidding it was your ego.  You think it makes it better, finally acknowledging the elephant in the room that you were the last one to see?  That's like an arsonist blaming it on his love of warmth.  Your ego had loads of indulgences: a high-profile gig, universal respect, lucrative side jobs, a boss who catered to your every whim, and not to be repetitious but yeah, millions of dollars a year.  If your ego still raged unsated despite all that, you either have a personality disorder or fundamentally warped idea of how the universe works.  (But it definitely isn't a brain tumor).  Either way, it's not something that befits a newsman, and now your treachery has hastened the Waterloo of real news and the decay of true journalism.  When all we learn about the larger world spills from the collagen-infused lips of Kim Kardashian, we'll know it is your name we can curse.  I don't fear for you: to an overstuff ego that whores for attention and eschews context, those curses will still be like angel's song to your selective hearing.

So, since you had your one chance and proved to world that you cannot admit having lied, I offer an alternative to you, Brian.  Refuse MSNBC's perplexing and overly-generous offer and go off somewhere far away.  Lose twenty pounds; grow a scraggly, lice-infested beard, and spend your nights in a torch-lit cave pondering the difference between the Truth and a lie.  Emerge from the woods a few decades from now, haggard, reeking of pine sap and animal piss, and share with us what your years of reflection have wrought. Show us you can say the word “lie”, and use it in a simple sentence, such as “I lied about my time in Iraq”, or “I might have lied about some other stories”.  And we'll look back at you, at the shadow of the man we once took you for, and we will respond in the only way you deserve.

“Brian who?”

Sincerely,

America

The Game is Afoot - Witcher 3: WIld Hunt

There's a dearth of epic fantasy in pop culture these days. Books, movies, TV, witty Internet memes...the ceiling on sword-'n-sorcery seems boundless in a genre that used to struggle for one cobwebbed corner of the market. Ask anyone who grew up in that corner seeking refuge in magic realms – Yours Truly included – and they'll tell you this blob-like expansion is a double-edged +1 Sword of Mixed Blessings. The reason is simple: success breeds greed, greed breeds copycats, copycats breed crap (and a dwarven ton of it). Success also breeds a fish-and-houseguests closeness that eventually turns to contempt. I love Game of Thrones, but now Game of Thrones is on the lips and minds and Facebook pages of every teenage girl and fifty-something co-worker, and discussing it has become something of a chore. Take heart: this is not an “us versus them” platitude about true geekery, but a lament for the mainstreaming of a culture that has always drawn strength from scarcity. Even for all the acres of literature rightly called fantasy, the war for even a scant handful of shelves at a bookstore seemed a losing prospect weighed against crime fiction, pot-boilers, and forty magazines about cars. Now things have changed, and chainmail and dragons saturate the zeitgeist. How to keep things from going stale? More importantly, how to challenge the consumer, shock him, unnerve her, keep him coming back for more?

Video games almost more than any other popular medium have relied on fantasy as a perennial workhorse, a staple since the days of Zelda (and some Atari titles that pre-date my right to reference). Tepid efforts and ho-hum clones abound, but they're all alike in that they'll set you back in both time and cash. Finding something worth both is a dicey prospect, and game developers who actually give a damn are working harder than ever to find the magic – real magic – that puts their disc in the tray instead of the other guy's.

Which brings us to Witcher 3 – Wild Hunt, a prime example of high fantasy going the distance to stay fresh. And it succeeds. Wildly.

(Pause for polite laughter). (Realize no polite laughter is coming). (Blush, cough awkwardly, loathe self, attempt recovery).

First, a confession: I never played Witcher or Witcher 2, being a neophyte with PC games (save Starcraft, still the Alpha and Omega of PC games), nor did I read any of the novels on which the games were based. I went in cold, spurned on by early buzz and a sample of reviews from sources I trust. I don't doubt the experience is different – and yes, maybe better – if you're familiar with the earlier material, but one of the oft-repeated enticements was that this latest offering was designed with noobs in mind; you don't have to know what happened before to get the full effect. That said, it would be difficult to believe a game could unfurl such a richly detailed world without a wellspring of earlier work from which to draw. This is a universe-in-a-bottle, a patchwork of little stories, nuanced characters, meticulous detail, and organic settings that form an ornate tapestry. It is also very clearly a product of a hundred little innovations made by other games from many genres, incorporating mechanics recycled from straight action titles and other RPG predecessors, but honed into a player-driven approach that lets you maintain an active role in the proceedings. This is NOT a title for button-mashing spectators or level-obsessed completionists. Witcher 3 demands brains as well as brawn, and a patient approach to complex quests where rewards are rarely immediate and the goals never straightforward. Expect your many solicitors and hangers-on to entreat you for just 'one more thing' about a thousand times before you can cross a chore off the checklist for good and all.

That approach can be maddening to some; if you favor the straight line instead of the wide circle, this game might not be for you. But Witcher 3 is a tale that grows in the telling, and after racking up a few victories and overcoming those preliminary jitters, only the most boorish of gamers could fail to become invested. This novelty of delayed rewards, of really working for your dinner, is a big part of what makes Witcher 3 stand out from the crowd of recent titles where rewards are only a map marker away and the tasks are rote. Here you become invested far more in the means and the methods rather than the end result, and consequently your actions feel a great deal more relevant and the eventual payoff that much more satisfying.

Largely a gameplay element, this considered approach also translates to the writing, and particularly to the enormous cast of supporting characters. Without the need for mindless leveling quests, the developers were free to populate the world with three-dimensional people, and to tell their stories in thoughtful acts instead of stock soundbites. Reeling drunkards can be penitent fathers. Peasant fisherman can be good samaritans. Cringing housewives are the knowingest sages. The narrative stratum is impressive.

But what of the hero? Geralt of Rivea, a professional monster hunter-slash-medieval detective, part of a dwindling band of shadowy loners who enforce order in a world beset by extra-dimensional horrors. His realm, which on the surface would pass for Dark Ages Europe, commingled with another centuries before in a reality-shattering event called the Confluence of Spheres. Magic was birthed in the world as a result, and a bevy of monsters straight out of Brothers Grimm. Witchers were the answer to this: equal parts warrior and shaman ,wielding steel, sorcery and alchemy to protect the populace and make some honest dough. As usual, though, the worst hellspawn of the netherworld can't match humans for depthless cruelty, and Witcher 3 begins at a time when a ravenous empire of common jerks is waging war against regular folk. The monsters are incidental, a cleansing sorbet from all the bush-league vermin. But Geralt is focused on another task altogether: finding his young ward Ciri, a gifted mage/hottie who just happens to be the daughter of the dickbag emperor hellbent on domination. The bulk of the game is spent in pursuit of Ciri, though the chase takes a hundred detours. Laid end-to-end, Geralt's story is brief and uncomplicated, but the wandering road he takes to arrive at the climax will consume nearly all the playtime. As a protagonist Geralt is pleasant company, appropriately gruff and Batman-esque half the time while alternately coming off as a deservedly smug shit bemused by how badass he is. He's a less tortured tortured soul, and there again is something that keeps the formula fresh. As with the very likeable casts of the BioWare universes – Mass Effect and Dragon Age – the heroes aren't adverse to having a little fun while saving the world.

This does not bode well for the Hunt for Scented Candles...

Developers CD Projekt Red achieved a hell of a balancing act here, threading a middle path between combat and magic, story and questing, character and customization. Wanderers can lose hours exploring miles of seamless countryside (the size of two Skyrims, as the pixel travels) while players more interested in Geralt's mission will be able to pursue it fixedly thanks to a graduated challenge system, with only a minimum of risk they'll be overpowered by higher-level bad guys. Fighters will enjoy the deceptively fun combat system, but spell-slingers will love the selection of upgradeable magics. And though Witcher 3 has only one protagonist – no personalized avatars here – there is ample opportunity to tailor Geralt to a variety of play styles. That this balance is maintained throughout the game with only rare missteps is an even more commendable achievement. There is no Karma Meter, no pendulum weighing your every action for good or ill, no arbitrary metric for how much of a 'hero' or villain' you become. As in the really real world, all your choices have consequences, some obvious, others less so. Every action you guide Geralt toward – or away – will change the world somehow, resulting in a butterfly effect that may not become apparent for fifty hours or more. Here again is probably the most potent example of how the designers were going for a truly epic approach, a novel in video form, and how they turned the old formula on its pointy elf ear to create something unique. A quibble for the item management system, a casualty of the sheer volume of stuff you'll acquire in your adventure. Organizing your weapons, armor, consumables, quest items, alchemical ingredients, trophies, totems, books, letters...whew!...is a chore, and one likely to add to your frustration early on. Like everything in Witcher 3, however, it gets easier with practice.

Fair warning: this is a tough game. It gets easier once you log some hours, largely because the play style takes some getting used to, but early on it can be a discouraging slog. Being overwhelmed and outgunned is SOP, and though you're a badass witcher and your foes might be gap-toothed cockney-spewing peasants, you will frequently succumb to the sheer weight of numbers. Just as often you'll blunder into an enemy miles out of your league that will swat you down if you're dumb enough to challenge it. The game does its best to warn you when you're about to bite off more than you can chew courtesy of “suggested level” indicators before each quest, but the truly open, truly realistic mien of this reality makes no allowances for you being an unobservant knucklehead. Werewolves and water hags just sort of happen in this game, and if you aren't paying attention you'll get your sac handed to you on a platter. Mastering swordplay is a must: mere slashing gets you nowhere; you must parry, feint, dodge, leap, and apply your combat magics with precise timing. Manage that and you'll not only win but actually look forward to a five-on-one scuffle. If, like me, you're coming off of the lush-but-easy Dragon Age: Inquisition, this title will shock you with how challenging it can be on a minute-by-minute basis.

Technically, Witcher 3 connects and goes over the fences. The visuals are stunning, and a reminder of just how good we have it here in the era of 'next-gen'. The color palette is enormous, from the ever-changing skies and virtual weather to the gory detail of the inhuman foes – the fangs, the claws, the nightmarish deformities – right down to the variety of herbs, roots, and grasses that hug the rutted country roads. Even more impressive are the elements that transcend video technology: the art direction, set designs, costumes, and creature concepts. That the developers were inspired by Lord of the Rings, Excalibur, Conan, and, yes, Game of Thrones seems obvious, to say nothing of the original material harvested from the Witcher novels. You feel the muck under Geralt's feet and smell the horse crap in your nostrils, from tiny villages to tower-ringed cities. Kudos also for the voice acting, so often a misfire in these cast-of-thousands productions. Every actor (save for the blessedly infrequent narrator) does a bang up job here, with a gold star for the thespian performing Geralt, Doug Cockle, but whose name might as well be Not Troy Baker. I kid – I adore Mr. Baker and his prodigious talents – but even I was starting to worry he'd become too much of a good thing. Point is, it's one thing to have an ambitious fantasy game, quite another to follow through narratively speaking, and still another to utilize the time and money to pull off the technical chops required to make it all fall together.

Like gin, oysters, or Jennifer Connelly, Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an acquired taste. It takes time, temperance, and more than a little smarts, but you won't regret the results.  

Some Assembly Transpired: Avengers - Age of Ultron

See, and you guys laughed when I said get TWO cheese platters...

There's no great secret to Joss Whedon's success with high-octane superhero flicks, and no wonder why many others have imitated – but never quite duplicated – his idiosyncratic brand of pithy panache and ironic bravado. Whedon understands that a superhero's job is to save lives, protect the innocent, and defend the defenseless. All the cool masked cats do it: Spider-Man, The Flash, Daredevil...even Batman, stripped of his pathos and distilled down to the core of his being, is simply a man who can't bear the thought of undeserving folk being hurt. Guardians of the Galaxy's big finale contained a centerpiece moment in which the Nova Corps banded together to save a city filled with bystanders, though all the cosmos was arrayed against them. In Age of Ultron, Whedon's much ballyhooed 'genius' comes out again – as it did in the first Avengers – when he takes great pains to show superheros actually doing their job. Whole sequences are devoted to the muscled gods and armored head-crackers loading refugees onto boats, evacuating public areas, throwing themselves in the line of fire, and going out of their way to save someone incapable of saving themselves.

Boom. Instant formula for humanizing heroes. And while Man of Steel has been picked over worse than the corpse of Brain Williams' career, I'll join the ranks of the obvious and cite it, again, as a Example Prime for how dangerous and stupid it is to forget that formula. I weep for the generation whose chief reference for Superman is that joyless, monochromatic slog in which the hero committed mass murder on live television and then mopes when the military doesn't invite him to dinner. Some have even suggested that the Avengers scenes which offer such contrast were done in direct response to Man of Steel's callous take, but I doubt this. After all, Whedon's first rodeo with Cap n' Friends included many similar scenes, and that film predated MoS by a couple years. Point is, superheros – like directors making superhero films – should have priorities. Whedon gets his right in this one.

That isn't to say Age of Ultron is perfect. It ain't. But we should be mindful that while Whedon had more to work with on the outset – more money, more heroes, more talent, more hype – he had less narrative latitude and weightier expectations fouling his breeze. He not only had to reassert the merits of the original Earth's Mightiest without going stale, but also had to introduce no fewer than three new team members (and give each a fair lead-in) while providing a villain at least as compelling as the odious/delicious Loki (the sorely missed Tom Hiddleston). He largely succeeds, though it is a louder, messier party this time around, with some threads feeling rushed and others fraying a bit toward the end. James Spader's all-CGI Ultron is a good antagonist and a fine choice for where the Avengers arc now stands: riding high on past successes and enjoying a comfortable bond, the team all but inevitably screws up and incites a disaster of their own making, resulting in schisms and general blowback. The bad guy doesn't come from space or another dimension this time, but from Tony Stark's control-obsessed ego (aided unwittingly by Dr. Banner, who has control issues of his own). This holds with the theme found so often in Marvel's comic line of the 21^st century: the worst 'villains' are often the heroes who think they know better than anyone how to protect the world. The monsters, as Rod Serling well knew, were us all along. The bad guy, conversely, thinks he's the good guy, offering a 'sensible' alternative to the Avenger's black-and-white view even as he attempts to cleanse the Earth of humanity's scourge. 

Ultron was always a neat idea: a schizophrenic robot, alternately suave and manic, but the smartest guy in the room and nigh-indestructible to boot. Here he is no less than a sort of genius Frankenstein's monster, horrifying the populace with his machinations even as he tries to peddle his good intent, never quite getting why people flee in terror at his approach. He quickly unspools all of Stark's careful precautions and ponies up ample chaos for the massive third act. In the end his masterstroke turns out to be just another page from the destroy-the-planet playbook, but would we really have it any other way? In a perfect world that didn't have to worry about whether this flick hits $1 billion domestic, Age of Ultron would be resolved with a roundtable discussion about the highest attainable good for humanity and the arrogance of presumption. But that don't put butts in chairs, I suppose, so we'll settle for an orgy of bicep-flexing destruction and some science pseudo-babble to make it all right again. I'm hip.

As an addendum, I'll simply observe that my greatest frustration with this film was not the film itself but the fact that the trailers contained enough footage of enough key sequences that it was almost possible to assemble the whole thing in your head beforehand. Yes, this dead horse again, and from a guy who pointedly avoided the last trailer and several TV spots. I'm not a unique voice in that chorus, and I know the suits won't listen, but folks like Whedon really ought to have final say on what makes it into the trailers. Directors make the scenes that make the film; they also ought to have the authority to decide the scenes garner a peek and which should be held in reserve for maximum effect (lookin' at you, Hulkbuster). The marketing morlocks blow the best stuff trying to get audiences in their seats with no regard for how savvy they've made the moviegoer, who can usually predict with dependable accuracy when a tease scene is going to show up in the finished product. The result? Frustration, boredom, diminished magic. But maybe that was bound to happen anyway. I doubt Marvel can maintain this upward trajectory forever – Downey Jr. seems to be losing interest, and can somebody please give Jeremy Renner his mop and bucket back? – but there's still a long ride ahead until the (presumed) mega-climax of the Infinity War and (apparently) still money to be made. The now-expected epilogue scenes that populate the credits of every movie are taking greater and greater pains to keep the audience's appetites whetted for the Big Showdown. The one in Age of Ultron was no exception. Now if we could just get them to stop making Fantastic Four movies, the Republic might be saved.