So turns out that a PDF copy comes alongside the physical copy of Planet Mercenary already; if anybody wants the link to the PDF copy of the Planet Mercenary RPG rulebook that I won't be using, let me know, and it's for free I guess; MAN I've just got TOO MUCH MONEY as it is, it's the worst.
I've been dreaming almost entirely in heists lately. I was only mildly psyched for King Arthur, but with the Guy Ritchie and all, and my dreams lately (seriously the plot of every single one of my dreams lately has taken the form of a caper) I knew I had to go see King Arthur: Legend of the Sword in theaters; it's okay I guess? There were a few heisty type elements as far as that goes, but overall in terms of movie quality... I can usually pretty easily "script doctor" the precise problem a story has that keeps it from being good*, but this one's got me baffled. Guy Ritchie movies tend to do that to me...
I mean, for sure the whole Lady in the Lake thing is easy to pinpoint as something that could have been pushed better, but that's near the end and the film clearly was already from the beginning not all it could have been. Character investment, for one, but it's not the characters' fault as much as the structure of the narrative the characters are seen in. Needing to throw up text at us in the beginning explaining some crucial such-and-such, as this film does, is generally a pretty bad sign. So does Star Wars, so there's not really a problem with the text intrinsically so much as what the text means: Star Wars, after the opening crawl, launches straight into action, and deftly gets us to care about the characters we encounter in the early scenes; bad opening-narrative-text movies start off with telling us exposition... followed immediately by showing us more exposition. Like the expositions couldn't have been consolidated for some reason. And we the audience, still not knowing the things we need to know to appreciate the situation at hand because there's still crucial information being explained, don't have time to invest in... anything. So we don't.
From nothing comes a king, is the film's tagline, right, so the problem in the movie would have to be... nothing. Nothing. The nothing bits, those are the issue. The stuff that leads up to the- oh, you know what I meant, it's obvious enough. Maybe it's the directorial style, or something, but I have a hard time getting rooted in Guy Ritchie films generally, like in general have investment problems at the beginning, and the more abstract he gets the bigger the problem is. His heist stuff, set present day or whatever, is easy enough to latch onto early on; Sherlock Holmes movies, a bit further removed, and so it's harder to seep ourselves into**; King Arthur, meanwhile, is, set in a fantasy version of medieval England where one of the very very very first things we encounter are war elephants the size of castles. So.
*I hate reviewers. Critics are okay, though "critic" seems more like a generalized term for both, I'm delineating a difference here. Rule of thumb which I'm articulating only now, realizing it earlier having seen way too many stupid amateur "how to improve this crappy movie" videos and script rewrites in my life...: a reviewer flies off into fantasy land, "fixing" the script by replacing it wholesale with their own fanfic, whereas a critic, y'know, critiques, y'know, what they see before them.
**It helps if we've got a familiar face like Robert Downey Jr to root us; one of the issues of Ghost in the Shell was that fellow Avenger Scarlet Johansson was too familiar, in a story dealing with subjects such as alienation, so there's no one magic bullet I guess. It was Howard Tayler's review that points the ScarJo thing out (I'm trying to be transparent in my disclosure of opinions that I didn't come up with; if I haven't been doing that yet it's because the list of people whose opinions I listen to in the first place tends to be embarrassingly small. CIP: Yeah, the same Howard Tayler as writes the Schlock Mercenary thing; he's just a pretty darn insightful dude.)
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