Daily Archives: April 23, 2017

When The Silver Case cuts to a shot of the Moon, usually at the end of each level, it appears as a cool but benevolent onlooker. The title of the games first chapter, Lunatics, becomes a double entendre. Perpetually in conflictkilling one another on behalf of rival institutions and ideasthe characters in The Silver Case are nevertheless unified by the Moon. At the end of each day it watches over them all.

Throughout its work, Grasshopper Manufacture struggles with people. How The Silver Case details both specific crimes and the bureaucracies charged with investigating them betrays an infatuation with human experience not found in the studios later exploitation gamesby Lollipop Chainsaw and Let It Die, the developers have either given up on the rigors of our lives or become jaded to the point of nihilism. Just like how, as The Silver Case progresses, the Moon takes on different, gradually more ominous hues, Grasshopper, as it has produced more games, seems to have become first angrier at people and then dejected. In Killer7, one of the studios subsequent major works, blood and death are much more commonplace than in The Silver Case: rather than spiritually unite characters, the Moon appears to precede each sequence of mass-murder.

Killer7s characters suits and affectations suggest an interest in style rather than substance. Its deliberately convoluted, sometimes gaseous plot and many wonderful abstractions belie the presence of a single, encompassing truth. But still Killer7 has a heart. As its protagonists are murdered one-by-one, we cannot help but mourn them. And when Garcian is revealed to be a puppet of Harman and Kun-Lan, duelling gods who fight, endlessly, in service to their own egos, he seems suddenly similar to the put-upon police officers of The Silver Case, misused by the institutions that claim to protect them. At the end of Michigan: Report from Hell, after learning his employer, a huge corporation called Zaka, is responsible for creating and leaking deadly viruses, the protagonist is unceremoniously assassinated. Travis Touchdown, of the next Grasshopper staple No More Heroes, is manipulated also by a self-interested, higher power: after fighting and killing through the ranks of the United Assassins Association, he discovers the Association doesnt actually exist, and has been fabricated completely by a con-artist named Sylvia.

Since all these characters, ultimately and to varying extents, are defrauded or destroyed by organisations, its tempting to call Grasshopers earlier games adolescent or cynical. The mathematical way in which the city in The Silver Case is laid outlettered districts contain numbered wardsimplies a dehumanising totalitarianism which we automatically distrust. Harmans base of operations in Killer7, a lame trailer, also containing his assistant Samantha, who flips between eerie subservience and fiery rage, implies God is exaggerated and two-faced. When even the supernaturally cool Killer7 are helpless against the system, it impresses a belief common among angry teenagers that wealth and power crush nonconformity. But the fact we remain, despite some of these games inevitable endings, allied with the individual characters and not the organisations is precisely what saves them from irrelevance. In Grasshoppers earlier work, and before games like Haze, BioShock and Spec Ops: The Line, we are told to question instruction and admire individuality, to like the people even if we disagree or find repellent what they are being made to do. The Killer7 may murder for money, but their distinct personalities and attractiveness, contrasted with the shadiness and uncertainty surrounding the orders they receive, suggests we should root for people, not ideas.

Which is why the misanthropy or, more specifically, misogyny of Grasshoppers later games is so striking. Paula, the driving love interest of Shadows of the Damned, is also the subject of a rap by ostensibly the games most endearing character; its a contradiction, telling of how barely Grasshopper seems to regard its leading lady, when as well as beautiful, angelic and worth journeying into Hell to rescue, shes also described as a bitch whom the villain has kidnapped to help scratch his itch. Killer Is Dead seems similarly content to use its characters for any and whatever purpose. In one scene, women areperhaps in the most literal sense of the term possibleeye candy, since points are awarded for glaring at their legs and cleavage. In other scenes, they are innocent pixies, kidnap victims, bitchy traitors and grotesque monsters. If they were all given more screen time, or allowed a humanising moment each, one might argue the women in Killer Is Dead are varied, and by extension complex, above some of their contemporaries. But it uses them fleetingly and to appeal only to its assumed audiences superficial instincts. Feel sorry for them, be grossed out by them, be scared of them, lust after themthese are the only feelings Killer Is Dead wants us to have about its women.

Lollipop Chainsaw, released a year prior, is somewhat more covert: despite its pornographically proportioned protagonist, her skimpy clothes and humiliating lines like Agnes used to be hot, but now she has an intestine coming out her vagina, Grasshopper and writer James Gunn seem to almost anticipate the revisionist reviews, and keep reminding us they have a woman as their lead, shes likeable and shes dressing and doing things her own way. But Juliet Starling is an insipid materialist. Like Bayonetta, who is designed to appealalbeit via the smuggle-through-customs language of womens agencyto male dominatrix fantasies, she wears a cheerleader outfit quite literally placed on her by men. And so her enemies jeers, slut, fucking bitch, stupid cooze, seem not like barked encouragement to go and fight sexism, but genuinely disdainful: when Lollipop Chainsaw bullies Juliet, another of Grasshoppers superficial characters, it encourages us to laugh along.

The doubtfulness with which Grasshopper Manufacture once appraised systems, of any kind, seems to have evolvedor rather devolvedinto encompassing, people-hating nihilism. If The Silver Case, quite nobly, started on bureaucracy and Shadows of the Damned, Lollipop Chainsaw and Killer Is Dead moved onto women, by Let It Die, Grasshopper concludes that everyones lives are meaningless and were all not to be trusted. The very title suggests having given up; the games mechanics, whereby you die repeatedly, replace yourself using another generic body, stored inside a giant freezer like meat, and then go and kill your former self, who has since turned into a monster, suggests were disposable, similar and, in our final and definitive form, duplicitous. In its 18 years since releasing The Silver Case, Grasshopper appears to have stopped caring about its characters. Like David, the maniacal villain of Killer Is Dead, it seemingly wants to get away from peopleto observe from the Moon.

Ed Smith is a writer from the UK. You can follow him on Twitter @mostsincerelyed and find more of his work at bulletpointsmonthly.com.

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Grasshopper Manufacture's Descent Into Nihilism - Paste Magazine

By CHRISTIAN LEDFORD, Staff Writer

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origins of Species, his magnum opus and the foundation of evolutionary biology, and changed the world. While many point to the publication of Origins as the point at which religion and science began to collide, it was merely a sign of the times; humanitys descent into naturalism began earlier, in the Enlightenment of the 1700s in which scholars and scientists began to reject millennia-old Aristotelian and Biblical knowledge. Whereas, anachronistic thinkers like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, and too many others to name were devoutly religious, this age of naturalism saw a departure from theism in efforts to explain the world around us, and the universe as a whole, outside of intelligent design and outside of God.

Today, after centuries of secular scientific thought on biology, geology, and cosmology, science has left religion behind. Those who express skepticism in unproven theories of modern science are looked down upon as unintelligent. Those who advocate belief in intelligent design or even (gasp) creationism are seen as worse than unintelligent; as mentally-unsound deniers and haters of knowledge. In the wake of this abandonment, weve seen a rise of something peculiar called New Atheism, contrasted with the deistic atheism of Enlightenment men like Voltaire. This atheism couples itself directly with modern science in militant anti-theism, dedicated literally to the eradication of religious faith. This movement heralds champions like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, men whove made it their lives purposes to angrily persuade the world that life has no purpose.

Ive never understood atheism. I was admittedly raised in a devoutly Christian home and educated in church all my life, but that doesnt mean that Ive gone without my doubts and moments of existential crisis. However, every time Ive lapsed in faith or doubted God, Ive always come back to my core belief that there is a God who both created the universe and guides its fate. Nothing else makes sense. Atheism, coupled with theories like evolution and geological uniformitarianism, has always been an ideology of meaninglessness. Under Atheism, life, as well as every single other aspect of existence, is a combined result of chance, pure random, lucky chance.

Its by pure chance that the planet we live on exists perfectly in our suns habitable zone, which allows liquid water, an utter necessity for life, to exist abundantly on Earths surface. Its pure chance that our moon exists in the perfect location to secure Earths axial tilt and guarantee our necessary day-night cycle. Its pure chance that life, something we havent observed anywhere in any form in the entire observable universe, exists on Earth at all. Its pure chance that humans, intelligent life, exist and are capable of not only speech but species consciousness and advanced thought, things not seen in any other species. For all the talk of Earth as a privileged planet and humanity as a privileged species, theres equally as much equating this all to nothing more than a roll of the interstellar dice. At a certain point, does it not make more sense to attribute our monumental existence to some intention, some design, rather than pure luck? As Thomas Aquinas eloquently said long ago in Summa Theologica, Whatever is in motion must be put in motion by anotherTherefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other [than]God.

However, it isnt the scientific atheisms reliance on chance that disturbs me, but rather the natural denotation of this ideology. Specifically, if our understanding of truth in the universe can rest only on nature and its laws (i.e. gravity, thermodynamics, etc.,) then what does this implicate for decidedly non-natural phenomena, most importantly morality? It means that there is no absolute moral truth; it means that existence, deep down at its core, has no purpose, and in a universe where there is no meaning, nothing can have a meaning, least of all our short, insignificant lives. As far as Im concerned, this is the fundamental problem of atheism.

If there is no God, no absolute judge of right and wrong, no designer of our lives, no scribe of our purpose, then were all governed simply by nature, and, in natural governance, anything goes. Per the theory of evolution, the weak will suffer and the strong will survive, with no guilt or ethics required from either. Per atheism, in what position would we be in if we even attempted to ascribe some ethical judgement on the actions of either? What Im saying heres controversial; any self-respecting atheist would argue ethics developed as means to achieve communal unity to propel our species forward or that morality stems from our status as social animals. However, while perhaps making some sense on a base level, none of these attempts at explanation come close to explaining our uniquely-human species consciousness, instead only serving to promote tribalism. For example, a man in America may be implored to care for his neighbors or countrymen, but why should he care about those suffering in North Korea or Syria? A woman in Tokyo may care for her family, but why should she care if Congolese Africans starve to death? What evolutionary incentive is there in either case for compassion of the distant?

Finally: death, the great unifier. In atheistic science, death is nothingness; our deaths are but a slide into eternal oblivion, a complete failure to exist. In this sense, what hope does atheism have for children being blown apart in Aleppo? What hope is there for those forced into brutal, unending labor in Pyongyang? Under atheism, what hope is there for the downtrodden, brutalized, or broken? Their lives will not only be short but meaningless and insignificant as well.

In the end, there is no hope for man in detached atheistic science; therein lies only meaninglessness and despair. For all their vast knowledge, scientists like Richard Dawkins miss the painfully obvious, the fact that humanity needs truth and purpose, things that come only from one place: God.

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The Disheartening Nihilism of Modern Science - Michigan Journal

Starring Brie Larson. Rated 14A

U.K. director Ben Wheatley has never met a genre he couldn't mangle to his own perverse and mostly satisfying ends. This is the filmmakers bluntest crowdpleaser yet, being no more than a 90-minute shootout between a group of exaggerated '70s stereotypes.

Brie Larson gets top-billing as Justine, who brokers a tense deal in an abandoned Boston warehouse between a couple of IRA operatives, Chris and Frank (Cillian Murphy and Wheatley regular Michael Smiley), and the weapons dealer and international asshole Vernon (Sharlto Copley, who gives his preposterous would-be tough guy just enough comic shading to nearly steal the film.)

Also along for the firefight, which we see coming within the films first 20 seconds, is Vernons disturbingly unkillable partner Martin (Babou Ceesay), a too-smooth liaison called Ord (Armie Hammer, also hilarious), and a pair of grunts on either side of the deal who, it turns out, have some unrelated business to settle from a bar fight the night before. Which is why the guns start blazing.

Probably because they thought they should, Wheatley and his screenwriting partner Amy Jump fire off a few brazen rounds of plot once each of these characters is bunkered down and bleeding out in their own grimy corner of the warehouse (for instance, those snipers in the rafters that somebody apparently invited). But Free Fire really exists to let this outstanding cast have a riot with the films flip nihilism (I think we can all agree that hes gone to a better place, announces a bizarrely hale Ord, when one guy seems to take a final slug).

As a reductio ad absurdum picture of gun violence, this film might have even less of a soul than Reservoir Dogs. And yetfurther aided by a faux-King Crimson score by Ben Salisbury and Portisheads Geoff BarrowFree Fire feels wonderfully, gleefully alive. It offers not a shred of pretence toward meaning (guns are bad, I guess?) and it does fuck all with the potentially fertile notion that were watching arms dealers go to war with their clients. But that's okay. Maybe Free Fire is just about having seriously shitty aim?

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Free Fire puts the fun back into super-violent nihilism - Straight.com