Media Diary

Media Diary

In what is one of the better release day stunts since Friday The 13th movies coming out on Friday the 13th, the anticipated computer animated film 9 was released on 09-09-09. It was even showing in theatre 9 when I went to check it out, undoubtedly due to some behind the scenes machinations by Focus Features. That with a sustained marketing blitz helped to create buzz, but PG-13 animation is kind of a dicey proposition.

9 may be computer animation, but it is definitely not for children. Based on director/writer Shane Acker's Oscar-nominated short film, 9 is the story of nine little clockwork ‘stitchpunk' dolls who are the only remnants of life on earth after a catastrophic war between humans and machines. Think of it as kind of a post-Terminator world in which nothing survived save the nine stitchpunks and an ominous entity known as The Beast. Little do the clockwork characters know that The Beast is the least of their problems.

There's not a whole lot of plot to 9. 9 (Elijah Wood) wakes up, is discovered by 2 (Martin Landau), and later meets 1 (Christopher Plummer), 5 (John C. Reilly), 6 (Crispin Glover), 7 (Jennifer Connelly), and 8 (Fred Tatasciore). They struggle to find their place in the new world while trying to learn about where they come from and what happened to make the world the way it is. What the movie lacks in story and dialogue it makes up for in some delirious action sequences.

9 is an incredible movie in terms of sheer visual artistry. The movie is gorgeously animated, featuring incredible textures and lots of dynamics in terms of character design. Their burlap bodies have burlap texture and there's believable-looking stitching. The copper eyes and hands even have that dulled coin appearance; It's sumptuous. Yes, the nine all look similar, but you never run the risk of not being able to tell any of them apart thanks to a number of very subtle differences.

Animated movies keep getting more and more detailed, but 9 seems to take it to a new level, even bypassing Wall-E in terms of building a post-apocalyptic world. Due to the small size of the stitchpunks, everything seems alien and monstrous to them, which makes the foreboding world in which they live even more ominous and threatening. The entire movie is pretty grim, in fact. Very dark and very devastated in a way that Wall-E didn't evoke nearly as well. There was still hope for that world, but the world of 9? Not so much.

Shane Acker was one of the special effect wizards at WETA before this movie, and his digital animation background shows. The stitchpunks chase and are chased, they fight and fly through the landscape with flair, but there's not a lot of substance to go with the style.

Still, 9 is a film with a whole lot of energy, and unlike a lot of recent movies, there's no 'fat' to speak of. 9 breezes onto the screen, tells its story, raises pulses, and departs without overstaying its welcome or attempting to pad beyond its lean 79-minute runtime. In a movie landscape where anything under 90 minutes is rare, 9 is a well-paced thrill ride.

Review

Video Game review: Overwatch  

Overwatch is a first person multiplayer game that was released in May 2016 for Xbox One, Ps4 and the PC and according to its publisher. Across all platforms, Overwatch has over 7 million players playing this game. Definitely one of the most played game in 2016. The publisher of this game is one of the most famous publisher, Blizzard which also released games like StarCraft series, World of Warcraft, Diablo etc. The game puts the players into two teams of 6s. and they have 12 heroes to choose from, each of the heroes have their individual sets of skills and techniques. From categories like Offence (Soldier 76, Reaper, Pharah, McCree, Genji, Tracer), Defence(Hanzo, Bastion, Widowmaker, Mei, Torbjorn, junkrat), Tank(D.Va, Roadhog, Winston, Reinhardt, Zarya,) and support(Lucio, Ana, Mercy, Symmertra). It also involves a level up system. This system is fairly simple, every time the player levels up and hell receive a loot-box. It basically gives the player skins, sprays and icons nothing will affect the game play only the cosmetic part.     

The game has 4 different map types such as Assault where the attacking team must capture 2 objectives in order to win. Escort: The attacking team is tasked to escort a payload before the time runs out. Hybrid: this is the combination of the two modes above, capture the objective then escort it to the delivery point, obviously the defencing team will have to try and stop them. The last mode is control where both teams tries to take control of an objective until the percentage reaches to 100%. There are four different modes in this game, Casual mode, Practice mode, custom game and competitive mode.  The tactic continued up on the map as your teammates must be present in order for an easy win because in the game you'll have to support each other in order to proceed the payload for example. However whenever I attack the objective I feel like  the offence side is slightly weaken comparing to defending and some of the heroes such as Hanzo and Bastion are too over powered which causes unbalanced teams and  

Overall Overwatch is an incredible achievement in multiplayer shooter. It might seem like a simple first person shooter game but it involves a deep, tactical game where timing is the key to winning matches. Unless Blizzard do something very wrong, Overwatch will only get better and better with upcoming updates and dlcs. However currently it is the most addictive game on the market and if you haven't picked this up yet. You should hurry and pick it up from your nearest store!