Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh | Tagged:

Look! It Moves! #44 by Adi Tantimedh: The Decade Of The Percussive Thriller

Published Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:02:37 -0500

Bought and played SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION last weekend. Good fun, especially if you like your action shooter games focused on commanding your hero to shoot two or three enemies in the head with a single button-push. What I found most striking was the plot, which pretty much expresses the culmination of the political action thriller genre for this decade.

When you break it down, the political action thriller has been defined in the first decade of the 21st Century by two franchises: 24 and the BOURNE Trilogy, which stand as flip-sides of each other. What they have in common is in style and rhythm: a faster pace, a frenetic shooting and editing style, and a frantic soundtrack punctuated by percussive beats and melodramatic strings. However, they're on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The creator of 24, Joel Surnow, who got his start writing for MIAMI VICE, is a self-admitted right-winger, and 24 has a tendency to swim gleefully in every reactionary right-wing anxiety since 9/11, particularly in its dodgy swarthy, dark-skinned terrorists-under-the-bed plots and insincere nods to the token good swarthy dark-skinned foreigner, who usually gets killed to serve the plot. Lawyers, Human Rights Campaigners and Due Process are considered namby-pamby hindrances to getting the bad guys and saving America. The advocacy of torture and vigilante action also tends to be on the fascistic side of the might-is-right thinking that the Right likes to believe in. The BOURNE Trilogy leaned more to the Left, with its distrust of government and institutions, which are shown as willing to bump off anyone who threatens to expose their corruption and conspiracies, including people who committed no crimes. Robert Ludlum's novels tended to lean left-of-centre anyway, and always featured heroes up against corrupt government agencies. What both franchises have in common is the basic belief that the government could be much better if the corrupt, greedy and incompetent could just be weeded out of it. Being mainstream Hollywood series, you wouldn't find a movie or TV show with an overtly Far Right or Far Left perspective, let alone an Anarchist one. I don't know if there are any successful screenwriters in Hollywood whose politics are outright Anarchist.

What's notable about 24 is that its anxieties were an honest expression of what Americans hate and are afraid of post-911, whether intentional or not. This was probably more down to the writers' need to constantly move the plot along with new elements more than an overt political outlook, since not all the writing staff is right-leaning, and the pressures of making a weekly show for 24 weeks, so characters behaving amazingly stupidly for plot's sake and unintentionally funny office politics backstabbing that looked more and more ridiculous as it went on. A non-American could learn a lot about what was on the mind of Americans at the time just by watching the first few seasons of 24. That's what happens when a show manages to catch the zeitgeist. Interestingly, BOURNE also caught the zeitgeist, and also ended up redefining the spy genre in film and TV, and now games as well. It's become the touchstone for anyone making another spy movie or TV show. The owners of the JAME BOND franchise were overtly influenced by the BOURNE movies when it was felt BOURNE was the more up-to-date genre configuration and rebooted the movies into the Daniel Craig version, even hiring the action choreographer from the BOURNE movies to work on the fights. Even the upcoming SALT with Angelina Jolie is an attempt to launch a female BOURNE (though the original script featured an male hero) franchise.

In a way, it's fitting that 24 is ending in 2010 as the decade draws to a close. Every TV show has a sell-by date and 24 stopped being fresh at least two, maybe three seasons ago. This is when a show is no longer fresh and no longer really catches the mood of the times. It falls into repetition and self-referencing to the point where it feels dull and repetitive, and with 24, how many more times can Jack Bauer threaten to torture a suspect (though they've been downplaying it after it caught so much flack in the media for advocating it), a mole or a suspect demand their immunity agreement in writing from the President, another sulking desk jockey in the office, another mole, another colleague with unrequited love, another hostage, another tedious speech by a terrorist fanatic – it all got old in three seasons. It stopped being appointment television. With the Bush era over and much of the energy derived from that period, it feels played out.

And you could say the plot of SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION is an interesting capping-off of the genre in its current iteration this past decade. The makers said they wanted to update the game to a more BOURNE-like dynamic. It has the same kind of percussion-driven music and a lone hero running and sneaking and using his tactical combat skills to prevail. The shift in political views over the decade are reflected in the game where super-sneaky operative Sam Fisher is now a fugitive on the run from the government and actively working against his former agency, which is now utterly corrupted and in league with a Blackwater-like Private Military Corporation. The SPLINTER CELL games have shown a tendency to not buy Clancy's simple-minded right-wing leanings at face value and often introduce certain wrinkles and nuances into the plots of the games, and CONVICTION is no exception. I wonder if the fact that the studio that made it is French-Canadian and perhaps had some leftward leanings. And I guess it's too early in the game's release for right-wing bloggers to start commenting on it. (WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS UP AHEAD, FOR THE REST OF THIS COLUMN) Here, the top secret spy agency Third Echelon has launched a plot to stage a coup by assassinating the female Hilary-manqué president, framing Fisher for it, and installing the venal neo-con Vice President, who's smug, foul-mouthed and utterly venal. So it comes down to Fisher as the one lone head-shooting killing machine to single-handedly save the day, bring down Third Echelon – by basically killing everyone in it – and save the President. I doubt it was an accident that the Vice President, when you finally meet him, is a balding, white-haired asshole and the game takes over to have Fisher shoot him in both knees and leaving him to bleed on the floor so he can't escape. Of course Fisher saves the President at the end. And when he gets his hands on the corrupt leader on Third Echelon, you're suddenly given the MASS EFFECT-style choice to either let him live or execute him. I decided to keep to the vigilante rage of the game, and avoid hearing another tedious arch-villain speech from a clichéd character.