The first trailer for Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain is here. The movie stars Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shaloub and Ed Harris. Wahlberg and Johnson star as a pair of bodybuilders in Miami that concoct a kidnapping scheme that goes terribly wrong.
Pain & Gain releases on April 26, 2013.
http://youtu.be/2aKDwLpX0Ms
Vin Diesel’s Riddick is now set to return to theaters next year. The third film in the series will release on September 6, 2013 in theaters and IMAX.
The movie has been a labor of love for Diesel and director David Twohy, who directed Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick, who have been trying to get the movie made since 2006.
A plot synopsis has the film having a very different tone than The Chronicles of Riddick sounding more like Pitch Black.
“The infamous Riddick has been left for dead on a sun-scorched planet that appears to be lifeless. Soon, however, he finds himself fighting for survival against alien predators more lethal than any human he’s encountered. The only way off is for Riddick to activate an emergency beacon and alert mercenaries who rapidly descend to the planet in search of their bounty.
The first ship to arrive carries a new breed of merc, more lethal and violent, while the second is captained by a man whose pursuit of Riddick is more personal. With time running out and a storm on the horizon that no one could survive, his hunters won’t leave the planet without Riddick’s head as their trophy.”
Along with Diesel, Karl Urban is returning as Vaako and will be joined by Katee Sackhoff and Dave Bautista.
Rejoice Game of Thrones fans! While the wait for the new season of HBO’s hit show may seem like an eternity, today’s news may make the wait a little easier.
David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who write and produce the show, have revealed that episodes for Season 3 will run around 5-6 minutes longer with most being around 56-57 minutes long.
Weiss praised HBO for giving them the time,
“There’s almost another full episode’s worth of extra minutes spread across the season. One of the great liberties with HBO is we’re not forced to come in at a specific time. We can’t be under 50 minutes or over 60, but that gives us a lot of flexibility.”
They have also petitioned the network to have the Season 3 finale run well over an hour. I for one am all for this because as anyone that has read A Storm of Swords will tell you this should be the season when the stuff really hits the fan and they need all the extra time they can get to show it.
Game of Thrones returns to HBO on March 31, 2013.
Insomniac Games, developers of the Ratchet & Clank and Resistance series, have released a new trailer for their first multiplatform game, Fuse. In it the leader of the Overstrike 9 team, Dalton, gives you some handy rules to live by in the Fuse universe. The game is still looking a bit on the bland side but I will give Insomniac the benefit of the doubt because they have never really shipped a bad game and I don’t think the company will want their first game on multiple platforms to be sub-par.
Fuse releases in March 2013.
In the newest issue of Edge Magazine new [amazon_link id=”B006YDPU48″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Dark Souls 2[/amazon_link] directors, Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, discuss how they intend to make the game instantly ready for new gamers that are not familiar with the first Dark Souls title (i.e. its soul sucking difficulty). I know a lot of Dark Souls fans are afraid that this means the sequel will be dumbed down for the masses and honestly I can’t blame them. Let’s read this quote by Shibuya:
“Accessibility to players who haven’t picked up Dark Souls is definitely a key topic.Right in the beginning when players first pick up the game is something that I will definitely focus on. To not immediately throw them into Dark Souls but provide a good introduction in terms of what the game’s about and how the game should be played.”
“Hopefully that adjustment at the very beginning of the game will help draw in players and get them addicted right away without immediately making players feel rejected by the game system itself.”
Now I admittedly have not played the first Dark Souls but I know of stories of people who have and enjoy the mind-crushing difficulty and as a fan of the Mass Effect series I can say that when reading that statement I can’t help but hear the same words coming from EA and Bioware about Mass Effect 2&3. Mass Effect 1 was a true space opera RPG that dumb down combat, leveling and almost everything else in the name of “accessibility”.
I hope I am wrong Dark Souls fans.
http://youtu.be/rPJaJ5ys_G0
Crystal Dynamics has released the first in a series of videos showcasing Lara’s upgradeable skill set and how you will be using the Base Camp feature to add skill points into different categories that will help Laura in her adventure. Watching the first episode of this shows that the developers are trying to make this more than a mere Uncharted clone.
[amazon_link id=”B004FS8LYK” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Tomb Raider[/amazon_link] releases on March 5, 2013.
http://youtu.be/dfz8S5Y_vZU
If you didn’t get a chance to see the nine minute preview of Star Trek Into Darkness over the weekend before viewings of The Hobbit (one word: amazeballs) then here is the brand spanking new trailer for the followup to the 2009 reboot.
Not to be confused with the trailer shown a couple of weeks back this trailer begins with Bruce Greenwood’s Christopher Pike giving Kirk some harsh advice which then segues into the Benedict Cumberbatch voiceover from the previous trailer. The preview ends with the scene from the Japanese trailer that looks to have a bit of foreshadowing or it could just be JJ Abrams keeping us on the hook.
Star Trek Into Darkness releases on May 17, 2013.
*This review is based off of the 24fps IMAX 3D viewing of The Hobbit*
J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic tale The Hobbit has had a more than difficult road getting to the big screen. I’m sure Peter Jackson never envisioned that making this would possibly be a more difficult task than making his The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The movie was originally planned to be released in two parts but was split into three either by Jackson’s doing or the studio is not known. Jackson also chose to shoot the film in 48fps which is dividing moviegoers from “it’s the future of cinema” all the way to “the most expensive looking home movie ever made”.
But for right now let’s wade through all the minutia and get down to what ultimately matters. Is The Hobbit a great movie? No, it is not. But it is a very good movie that could be the beginning of something great.
The Hobbit is probably the greatest fantasy book ever written. For 75 years it has enchanted readers of all ages but let’s face it, the book is only 300 pages so stretching it into three movies is going to take a little bit of Hollywood magic as well as taking what Gandalf says in the movie to heart.
“All good stories deserve embellishment.”
The plot for The Hobbit is not exactly deep. Gandalf the Grey shows up on an unsuspecting hobbit’s doorstep one morning asking if he would like to partake in an adventure. The hobbit in question, Bilbo Baggins, declines but is nevertheless visited by thirteen dwarves that night who kindly eat him out of house and home while discussing how to take back their lost gold (for the film it is changed to the dwarves wanting their homeland back, not just a greedy attempt at gold) from Smaug the dragon. All the while Bilbo is wondering why has his house been invaded by these dwarves and a wizard. He finds out that Gandalf has elected him to be the burglar of the group that is heading for The Lonely Mountain. After sleeping on it he joins the group and is on his first adventure.
Now one of the more difficult things for Jackson to try and accomplish is having thirteen dwarves each with their own unique personality. Everyone ready? OK, here’s the rundown: Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Dwalin, Balin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, Ori and Thorin Oakenshield, who is the leader of the group. Luckily readers of the book will connect easily with the characters right off the bat but where the film really helps matters is that even moviegoers who are going into the movie as Hobbit virgins will not be lost in the shuffle because every dwarf character really does come across as their own not just a xerox copy of other party members.
As far as character performances are concerned I really saw no weak points. Ian McKellan could play Gandalf in his sleep and everyone should be glad that he came back to play the role because anyone else would be a pale comparison to the wizard we know on film. Martin Freeman (who is in a race with his Sherlock co-star Benedict Cumberbatch to see who can be the bigger star of the show) plays Bilbo with affable whimsy and while he may not be pudgy in belly as Tolkien had described Bilbo and most hobbits to be, Freeman latches onto the role and make it wholly his own. With that said, the real star of this first film has to be Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield. In the Tolkien book Thorin was more of a greedy hoarder that wanted lost gold but in Jackson’s movie he is transformed into the heir to the lost dwarven throne who is seeking to reclaim the home that was stolen from his people. And with this (welcome) change in character, Thorin has to be played in a different way and Armitage breathes an indomitable spirit into the role.
The first part of this trilogy covers roughly a little over the first third of the book and at a runtime of two hours and forty minutes there is a whole lot of scenes that have been stretched out from two pages into twenty minutes of film but to me this never seemed to drag as some have complained. Now if you are looking for an exact re-telling of the novel then you are going to be sorely disappointed. Peter Jackson made plenty of changes to his The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Tom Bombadil, MIA) and you are going to get plenty of them here. Radagast the Brown, who is only spoken of in The Hobbit, is a fully fleshed out character with his own scenes complete with mushroom trips and hair filled with bird crap. His scene where he leads orcs on a chase through the open fields is used as a segue in getting Bilbo and company to Rivendell.
Moreover, the Necromancer appears to play an overall bigger role in Jackson’s trilogy. Mentioned in the book this Necromancer, a foretelling of Sauron’s return, looks to be a character of bigger import. Azog the Defiler has also been made into Thorin’s main antagonist. He was only a part of Thorin’s backstory who died long ago by another dwarf’s hand but in the film he is made into the face of the enemy that hunts the party along their travels. The addition of Azog certainly has me intrigued as to how he will be used in the follow up films. Like I said, don’t expect a book to film transfer but the additions made are forgivable and, in some cases, make the movie more interesting.
If there is one thing no one can argue about it is that Peter Jackson has the look of Middle-Earth down to a science. A lot of cynical people have called the sweeping camera shots a tourism video for New Zealand and all I can say to that is “where do I sign up to go?”. The cinematography is second to none and is accompanied perfectly by Howard Shore returning to score and compose the music. You will get hints of music from LOTR like the music of The Shire along with a stirring rendition of Far Over the Misty Mountain Cold that becomes the theme of the dwarves in the film and is interwoven throughout the soundtrack. I dare anyone not to be humming this for days after seeing the movie.
As I said earlier, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a very good movie. It goes without saying that there is slim chance that The Hobbit can recapture the magic of The Lord of the Rings trilogy but the source material should have already had you expecting that. I still have some worries about how this will be stretched into three full movies but I easily welcome the first part as a good setup for the journey into the Mirkwood and the fight with Smaug that is coming in the future.
The movie moves at its own pace and is unapologetic about it. This is fine by me. With strong performances, beautiful set pieces and a new yet familiar soundtrack I enjoyed my time being taken back to Middle-Earth. The plot changes are major in places but serve their purpose well and don’t feel like fluff meant to extend the runtime. Let’s just all be glad Peter Jackson and company decided to come back and make this movie a reality instead of leaving all of us to wonder “what if?”.
As part of Mega Man’s 25th anniversary Capcom has announced that Mega Man 1-6 will be coming to the 3DS via the Nintendo eShop for the first time in North America. The original Mega Man will be released on December 27th with Mega Man 2 following on February 7th. Games 3-6 will be released throughout 2013.
So get ready, because if you were known for throwing your controller while playing Mega Man 2 (raises hand) you better show more restraint or a new 3DS will be in your future.
Want to be a member of Seal Team Six without all the years of blood, sweat and tears? How about killing insurgents while hunting Osama Bin Laden for ‘Murica? Well EA is here to grant your wish with the Zero Dark Thirty map pack for [amazon_link id=”B0050SY5BM” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Medal of Honor: Warfighter[/amazon_link]. The new DLC is based on the part of Pakistan where the United States carried out the mission to kill the terrorist leader as well as the name of the upcoming film about the mission.
The new DLC will cost $9.99 but will be free to the people who purchased the limited edition of the game. Also, EA will donate one dollar from every map pack sold to help military and veterans families. Classy move EA.
Medal of Honor: Warfighter Zero Dark Thirty map pack will release on December 18th.