Metroid Dread, Michael Mann's Ferrari and the flimsy-ass excuses I tried to find to connect them
Sometimes it just takes some honesty to get lack of creativity out of the way.
This waiting thing I'm not new at, not at all. I've done it very often. The earliest I can remember I was eleven and Tron: Legacy was about to drop in theaters. You bet your ass I got the soundtrack the very second it entered record stores. It was an aesthetic-defining moment. The kind of stuff that alters your brain chemistry permanently. When some friends who were in Venice told me Ferrari was a bad movie I felt all kinds of stomach-churning. I don't mean to be François Truffaut-like and pretend like all movies made by Michael Mann are automatically good, but I do have insane amounts of respect for the man as a filmmaker, and after what happened with Blackhat - in short: a really good movie sorely mistreated by audiences, critics and box office revenue - I was kind of hoping in some sort of smash hit. I really needed a W, so to speak.
In case you guys were wondering, I kinda dig Patrick Dempsey as Piero Taruffi.
Once again it just kind of floored me for a second. It wasn't too clear-cut right away. I don't think it's one of his best - too many things just don't align: the acting feels distracted and half-hearted and the inexplicably botched adaptation/voice acting job they distributed in Italy is even worse than that laughable fake Italian accent everyone has on all the time in the original; some of the dialogue is insanely out of focus and thematically off-center in a way no other Mann movie ever allowed for; sometimes it feels like the movie itself has to take the script back onto its central theme without losing itself to agiographic intents; the photography often felt a bit too painterly for the movie to have that same electrifying visual feel as (most recently) Blackhat or (most impactfully) Miami Vice. Crucially, something still felt off in a good way. What to make, for instance, of the sunglasses symbolism that instantly connects a movie set in the late '50s with the original cyberpunk aesthetic wherein “by hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous,” like Bruce Sterling himself said? Or again the cuts to the clutch pedal and then the gear stick systematically being interpolated when someone is driving? Or yet again the sheer sense of speed, the same speed of sand slipping through one's fingers, every shot conveys? When I came out of the theater (a local monoplex, almost deserted, mostly dedicated to films d'essai - incidentally also the only theater that showed the movie without me having to go to the Big City) some people I knew asked me what I thought of it and my very honest reply was "ask me in about ten years". There's absolutely no telling what future filmmakers and film historians will make of this: everything rests on the shoulder of future Mann movies. These intuitions here, not just the communication discourse (which, once again, is pretty typical of all Michael Mann movies, starting at the very least from The Insider) but this unique omissive/breathless style of storytelling and information conveyance, might make for another cutting-edge, literally breathtaking Michael Mann thriller soon: very soon, if the voices about Heat 2 being adapted to a movie turn into a reality.
Yet ultimately at the heart of every horrifying car accident, the screaming contests, the bankruptcy threats, there sits an inconsolably pulsing heart that the movie resolves to show us exactly twice.
We were at my grandparents' for Christmas and as we drove through the town my father looked out of the car's window and saw an obituary with his last name on it. I didn't quite catch who exactly it was and how they were related to us - and rest assured they most likely were, it's an Abruzzo thing. As most of my family's deaths, as discussed on my Godflesh post, were on my mother's side, to see my father's last name on a mortuary announcement was a bit of a surprise, in that as you probably can imagine it's also my last name. It's a new experience which, in total frankness, I don't exactly hope to replicate soon.
Topically enough, right on Christmas morning my precious and beloved friends J. and A. gifted me a digital copy of Metroid Dread, a game I had basically lost any hope of ever playing. The Metroid series has always fascinated me in that, for a franchise as old and weathered and revered as Mario and Zelda, there's relatively few people - at least when I was a kid with no readily available internet access - who kept a memory of it. I first met Metroid as a middle schooler, via the Prime Trilogy collection a friend of mine had saved on his jailbroken Wii; never finished it but it stayed within me like a particularly revealing nightmare did. When I played Super Metroid at age eighteen that intro sequence burned itself on my prefrontal cortex and changed everything. It's a masterpiece that drives its main strength from the freedom to explore and delve deeper and deeper into it - and quite revolutionarily, the possibility of not doing so. To realize when enough is enough takes a special ability and knowledge of the self. To accept less than what would be enough takes either idiocy or excellently precise calculations and execution.
While preparing for this post, I annotated on my phone's notes app that "Michael Mann would make a fantastic Metroid movie that everybody would hate". I know this because something similar already happened with Miami Vice: he systematically removed almost all signifiers of the original TV series to reprocess the core concept of it into a lean, aesthetically experimental, profoundly emotional film about means of communication reshaping the way crime and crime-fighters relate to each other, and the way the individual relates to sovereign organizations. It certainly helped that Michael Mann himself, as screenwriter-turned-director-turned-producer, was the man who defined the original Miami Vice's aesthetic, and therefore was in all likelihood the most qualified to strip it down to absolutely nothing, remake it from scratch to fit a new, apocalyptic vision of a post-9/11 society of control based on telecommunication.
In discussing Ferrari with @power-chords, she immediately pointed my attention onto just how critical the figures of mass communication turn to be throughout the movie. Journalists, priests, even the movie stars the pilots are dating. Michael Mann is moving into a territory of movies not about movies, but movies about media in general, sitting at the edge of communication breakthroughs, studying the intersection between an "old world" and a modern, contemporary, fucked up world. Unsurprisingly, Metroid Fusion (and to a lesser extent Metroid Dread itself) delve into omission, falsification, breaking down of information: there's fertile grounds for Mann to work with, I think.
Most importantly, however, Metroid Dread is peak-form Metroid, combining the strength of the more exploration-based titles in the series with the thrilling combat-oriented difficulty spikes of Fusion. The new thing compared to, for instance, Samus Returns is how the game does not trivialize the enemy encounters in regular gameplay up until the very end, which by the way is nowhere close to a careless power trip. And even if it were, it'd still be more than warranted: the final boss is granted to give you unrequested cosmetic surgery to make you look like a dumbass. All the while Samus has never felt any better, movement is slick and deliberate, the 360-degree aiming is incredibly precise even taking the Joycon drift into account: and this precision eliminates almost all instances of rage-game bullshit when it comes to the EMMIs, the fighting, the jumping, the exploration, without by default trivializing any of the elements. It is, simply, a game feel miracle.
It feels about as glorious as it looks.
The deep knowledge of the gameplay mechanics of a great Metroid game is key to Mercury Steam's success with the central executives at Nintendo of Japan. Samus Returns didn't sell too bad, like most Metroid games (at least when you don't compare them to Pokémon, Mario or Zelda), but this here is just a quantum leap. All elements of the game, including the mechanical frameworks established in the 3DS game, are honed to a lethal degree: every enemy encounter, every instrument at the player's disposal turn out to be multifaceted, limited only by the player's own creativity and abilities. But the game knows how to help you, the player, hone those abilities too - it wants to be discovered. It entices you in further and further.
The game is majestic, in short. It knows itself, its players, its predecessors, even its stakeholders spectacularly well. And it is so thanks to employees who were forced to borderline inhumane working conditions, under threat to get their name scrubbed off the end credits if they didn't physically show up for work in the middle of a global pandemic.
Trabajadores de MercurySteam, que acaba de estrenar Metroid Dread, se quejan de la manera en que trabaja el estudio madrileño.
"MercurySteam employees talk about the working conditions in the studio" - Spanish article from AnaitGames
During one of the earliest scenes in Ferrari, Enzo (Adam Driver) goes to Mass in the factory's own chapel, and together with all the racing department's higher-ups he proceeds to not give a damn about the function, keeping his eye on a stopwatch instead, monitoring the times Maserati's drivers are doing on the Modena racetrack. As the execs do this, the priest starts waxing poetic: "If Jesus was born today he would not be a carpenter. He would be a mechanic, like you are," says the uncaring bastard in a long dress to alienated, broken working men, facing - unbeknownst to them - the serious threat of bankruptcy, immediate liquidation, job loss. It took this movie about thirty years to get made, being passed from one producer to the next one, from one director to the next one, with this script that sort of tries to be a biopic with all of its strengths but is fundamentally tethered to a protagonist who's, ostensibly, Just Some Guy who happened to own half of one of the most famous car manufacturing companies on Earth. But the reason he was able to do that is, like one of my teachers points out in his Letterboxd review of the movie, his entirely-too-natural knack for timing. The precision Enzo Ferrari requires of his drivers, that quite literally lethal element of exertion, precision and composure, is what is required of him too, but this doesn't make him any better than anyone else: he's not the one dying, he's not the one crashing cars. Some of his friends did. He just got extremely lucky.
Informing the very concept of the labor of love is the idea, almost the aesthetic even, of the love of labor. Gaming culture is profoundly imbued with this. Crunch, stricter and stricter timelines: these are no news to anyone who's into gaming in an even remotely active manner, and are the byproduct of a culture based around hype - a profound affection that degenerates into pretense. Enzo Ferrari fashions himself a dictator, taking charge of the communication around his brand and purposely, painstakingly reshaping flows of information to operate according to a logistical nightmare of an inner timetable. Adalgisa Bisbini (Daniela Piperno) plainly states, with the brutal honesty that can only come with old age and immeasurable pain, that "the wrong child died", right behind her son's wife's back as they're visiting the family grave. Two graves marked Alfredo Dino Ferrari sit mirroring each other in an imposing structure in the San Cataldo cemetery, in Modena. Enzo Ferrari mourns them both, unknowingly echoing his mother's feelings. It is a circle of mutually inflicted pain where everyone already feels what they're being told, and yet it never stops: labor must ensue, so that the vestiges of love can ensue. No wonder Enzo and Laura Ferrari (Penélope Cruz) can only ever fuck on top of spreadsheets.
The importance of an ashtray cannot be overstated.
