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There are a lot of World War II movies. There's also a lot of books on the subject, as well as tabletop strategy games, and video games, the list goes on. WWII was so massive, so important, that its influence and legacy lives on. Things happened in World War II that are directly and indirectly responsible for events happening now. It was the last big war on Western European soil, a landscape
many of us have a connection to or are familiar with. It was a war that accellerated technology, firmly moving war out of the industrial age into the modern age. So it goes without saying that the biggest appeal of the genre comes with its drama, location, its combatants, the mythology surrounding it (particularly the Nazi fascination with the occult) and its justifications.
That said, there are a lot of people who complain that there are too many World War II games. While that's an understandable viewpoint, it is a bit shortsighted and unfortunately the genre itself propagates it. Every time a game comes out set in WWII some people complain, which in turn causes other people to complain, following suit like lemmings. But World War II isn't a specific genre of game, it's only a setting that many genres from FPS to strategy, even an MMO, utilize.
My question is, why all the complaints about there being too many games set in World War II when there are hundreds if not thousands of games taking place in some generic sci-fi or fantasy setting?
You could argue that "generic space or fantasy setting" could be any universe at any point in time. But that doesn't hold water in the face of, ironically, lack of creativity. Sci-fi settings nearly all have the same things: lasers, aliens, hyperdrives, et cetera. They always go out of their way to make sure the evil looking ones really are evil. Fantasy? Same issue- swords and sorcery. Elves? Check. Orcs? Check. Magic? Check. Magic armour? Checkity check. At least World War II was a real world setting and therefore has some built-in restrictions, which excuses them from the lack of originality/creativity argument, and in addition, it's far back enough in time that it avoids political issues that a game set in the modern day, or even as far back as Vietnam, would not. Science fiction
and fantasy settings don't have these restrictions yet by and large they're all basically knockoffs of Star Trek, Heinlein, and Tolkien. It's totally the developers' fault, of course. With a sci-fi or fantasy setting, they have the option of showing players something new, but more often than not, they don't take that option. That makes it hard to find something that does something different, and to have it be good on top of that is like finding a diamond in a sea of shit. Fallout was revolutionary because it stepped away from the saturation of fantasy in the cRPG genre, changed the way cRPGs were played, introduced the concept of retrofuturism into gaming as a whole, and either avoided most of the usual science fiction tropes or used them deliberately. There is a new space RTS coming out called StarCraft 2. Lasers? Check. Aliens? Check. Glowing bits? Checkchekchchhcclhekcehefkkikekekekekekekekeke
Second of all, the two biggest contributers to the conception of WWII games being ubiquitous has been Medal of Honor 
and Battlefield 1942. Medal of Honor has what, 10 games in the series? They're pretty much all crap, too, with the exception of Infiltrator and to some extent Airborne. BF1942 had a huge following for years and is largely responsible for there being a heavy multiplayer element in WWII games these days, though it's been reduced to a bunch of hardcore clan fags who scream cheater for doing stuff that's described in the manual. Granted, there are quite a few WWII series, but to be perfectly honest World War 2 has been a common theme in games since the days of tabletop wargaming. I had a history teacher who had so many wargames I suggested that he could basically re-enact every battle of World War II from the invasion of Poland in 1939 all the way to the battle of Berlin. This tradition continued into the strategy genre of PC gaming, and into the RTS subgenre.
I think the fascination these days with World War II- a fascination which seemed to die out in the 70s and 80s, in part because of Vietnam- is due to Saving Private Ryan, 
which was the first WWII film to truly portray the sheer brutality of the war. It used to be, if a character died, he would just fall over, no blood- thanks to the censors that controlled Hollywood. As the censors lost power and faded away, it's become much more realistic, culminating with Saving Private Ryan. The film was revolutionary in the war movie genre, and established a certain style that would be used in war movies since. This happened just as FPS games were beginning to come into their own and break away from the "Doom clone" label.Okay, granted, there was Castle Wolfenstein way back on the Apple II, and then Wolfenstein 3D, but they weren't really about famous battles- instead it played on the espionage and intrigue that took place behind enemy lines. 
The lack of realistic locations, too, was a result of the technology of the time. The first FPS to ever actually show some simile of WWII combat was actually a mod for Duke Nukem 3D that came out in 1997. The creators went on to make WW2GI, which sucked. The point is that Duke3D was one of the first games to portray a real-world setting as realistically as possible, proving that FPS games were more than just the same damn hallway over and over and over. This allowed for a level of detail that previous games could not reach- and thus the modern WWII shooter was born.
The truth is, there's nothing wrong with the genre itself. The problem isn't that there are a lot of games with that
setting. It's that too many of them tend to share a lot of the same issues: an overreliance on the American viewpoint, lack of meaningful character development (something Brothers in Arms tries to fix, with very good results), overreliance on the most famous battles (Omaha Beach and Normandy come to mind), too much emphasis on the European front compared to the Pacific, very little plot (just because it's historical doesn't mean you can't expand on the story; this is made all the more apparent with the lack of characterization), and what plot there is tends to be the usual flag-waving "let's hear it for the grunts" trope that propagates the idea that America won World War II singlehandedly, a problem that afflicts most WWII films as well. If you're going to complain about WWII games, complain about the above issues. But there's no point in complaining about the whole of WWII- Europe, Africa, Asia- as a setting unless you're going to complain about fantasy as a setting or sci-fi as a setting.
As some of you who know me will attest, I am a big fan of the Aliens series of films, as well as the related media such as comics, video games, and novels. I had seen parts of Aliens when they showed it on WSTR-64 here in the Cincinnati area, back when it was known as Star 64 during the 1990s- my father enjoyed the film but at the time I was under the impression that anything dad watched was inherently bad because mom said so. Give me a break, I was still a kid. In any case I would sometimes sneak a look at it, but I never watched for long. Sometime the mid-1990s, (I forget when exactly) ABC aired Alien 3 as a prime-time network premiere. My mother was on the other side of the house that evening, working on some project, so I was left to entertain myself- I watched the entirety of the film and loved it. I would eventually come to borrow the films from my parochial school's preist and religion teacher, the affable Fr. Wysong, affectionately known as Father Y. Eventually I got around to watching Alien Resurrection... and was less impressed by it than I was by the other films. I rarely watch it anymore, and when I finally popped in the disc (I have the big 9-DVD boxed set, I don't want to know how much my aunt spent on it to get it for me one Christmas) last November after 4 years of refusing to watch it, I realized why it took me so long to watch it again.
I am about to explain to you exactly why Alien Resurrection is an absolute abortion, a crime against humanity, and a perfect example of why Joss Whedon is the worst writer in Hollywood. I realize by my writing this last sentence there are a couple hundred thousand people, many of them with neckbeards, who suddenly feel a disturbing, unexplained need to form a lynch mob, but I stand by my position and I'll state it again for the record: Joss Whedon is the worst writer in Hollywood and I hope he dies horribly. I mean don't get me wrong. I liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then I graduated high school.
Anyway, on to the movie.
The Script
Joss Whedon, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, needs to stop fucking writing everything like a comic book. It is not good writing. It is not funny. It is not witty. He is a hack who should never have been allowed near the Alien franchise. The man can't write dialogue to save his life. It's evident in his other work too- his Buffy universe is high school tripe and anyone who thinks that Firefly or Serenity are in any way clever in the way that it blends several different genres is utterly tasteless because Joss Whedon has managed to make about 3 or 4 different genres boring all at once. His script for Alien Resurrection is like a bad fanfiction. It does have a few good parts, but it escalates way, way too quickly. The first three movies have always been about the slow buildup of tension and suspense. Even Aliens, far more actiony than its prequel or sequel, built tension to an almost unbearable point. Alien Resurrection is basically the movie equivalent of premature ejaculation, and you're left wondering "what the fuck just happened?" But its biggest problem is the dialogue. It's horrible. There are too many characters and they all end up sounding the same, which is basically true of nearly anything Whedon creates because of his fetish for ensemble casts. Whedon once said he likes to cast actors who can do comedy because he believes comedy to be harder than drama, and so if they can do comedy... Anyway he's wrong and he should feel bad. What makes Alien Resurrection particularly irritating is that with one notable exception (Gary Dourdan as Christie, awesome character) the only characters even worth remembering are the ones who make it all the way to the end. Least worthy of all was a military guy who would not shut up about weapons and whatnot. He gets so feverish about it you half expect him to sink to his knees and start masturbating at the sight of a gun. Shut the fuck up and go shoot things like you're supposed to you meathead. But the biggest crime is the Newborn.
Oh my fucking god. Whose brilliant idea was that? It's horrible. The concept itself is kind of retarded but could've gone over better if it didn't feel so tacked on, not appearing or even being hinted at until the last third of the movie. 
Sometimes a sudden appearance can work (such as the Queen in Aliens), but in this case it didn't, it failed horribly. The scene where they introduce it is singularly awful- possibly one of the worst scenes in the whole movie. There's this scientist, who's glued to the wall, going on and on about how the queen took on a secondary reproduction sequence. If he hadn't taken on the ridiculous "THIS IS RIPLEY'S GIFT TO HER" horseshit and just kept on mumbling scientifically I would have liked that scene a lot more. But no, he actually fucking says, "you are a beautiful beautiful butterfly." I puked in my mouth a little.
People say Paul W.S. Anderson ruined one of my favourite franchises with Alien versus Predator. No, Joss Whedon did it first. I want him to die in a fire.
The Directing
Never let a Frenchman direct a horror film. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's directing is flatout fucking terrible. Now, I've heard a lot of praise for two of his earlier films, Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, both loosely dystopian films, but this isn't about those movies. It's about Alien Resurrection and frankly Jeunet's directing only compounds the horrible script. The tone he brings to the film is all over the place: wait here it's serious, wait now it's a surreal comedy, now it's serious again, no wait it's a bad 80s action flick, wait now it's a comedy again. Wait, this film is just shit. One thing in particular he did that irritated me to the point where I gritted my teeth every time he did it was when he zoomed in on people's faces at odd angles during what were supposed to be emotional moments. All it really did was show how overacted the scenes were and resemble a college student film thesis that barely scored a C.
The Production
I'll be honest, I did like the setting somewhat. It was kind of a cross between the interior of the Nostromo from Alien with the grittiness of the colony buildings in Aliens. But I wasn't happy with the alien hive at all. The hive in Aliens was smooth and almost skeletal. In Alien Resurrection it reminded me of those horrible tentacle rape .gifs you used to see on the internet back in the day. Ripley disappearing into it only makes it worse.
As for the aliens themselves... why do they all have to fucking breathe steam? Aliens don't breathe, period. They're biomechanical constructs created by an alien race as a weapon of war. Also, the sequence where this one alien uses his inner jaw to pound on a button that releases liquid nitro to freeze a guard is mindnumbingly stupid. It would've been a lot less so if the alien had used his, you know, HAND. The inner jaw is is for puncturing skulls, not basic object manipulation.
Stuff I Did Like
- The one part where Ripley wakes up in her cell- very creepy "birth" motif there.
- The bit where they show her pictures and she cries at the one of a little girl (which is not actually in the theatrical version, which is retarded because it adds depth to the character that's largely absent otherwise.)
- The bit where she rips out an alien's jaw.
- Ron Perlman. (Of course. Who doesn't like that guy?)
- The underwater scene.
- Seeing Gary Dourdan before he was cool.
- The director's cut ending.
Conclusion
This movie could've been so much better if it had a different script, a different director, a different plot, a different and smaller cast, and was basically not this movie.
And no fucking Newborn.
However, if Joss Whedon were to catch fire right now for his horrible horrible script, I think that would make the movie so much better because I could enjoy it in the knowledge that if nothing else, Joss Whedon died in a fire for this terrible movie. Honestly? The series could've ended with Alien 3 and it'd have been a perfect trilogy, even considering the problems Alien 3 had. But noooo. That squirting sound is of a franchise being milked for all it's worth.
many of us have a connection to or are familiar with. It was a war that accellerated technology, firmly moving war out of the industrial age into the modern age. So it goes without saying that the biggest appeal of the genre comes with its drama, location, its combatants, the mythology surrounding it (particularly the Nazi fascination with the occult) and its justifications.
You could argue that "generic space or fantasy setting" could be any universe at any point in time. But that doesn't hold water in the face of, ironically, lack of creativity. Sci-fi settings nearly all have the same things: lasers, aliens, hyperdrives, et cetera. They always go out of their way to make sure the evil looking ones really are evil. Fantasy? Same issue- swords and sorcery. Elves? Check. Orcs? Check. Magic? Check. Magic armour? Checkity check. At least World War II was a real world setting and therefore has some built-in restrictions, which excuses them from the lack of originality/creativity argument, and in addition, it's far back enough in time that it avoids political issues that a game set in the modern day, or even as far back as Vietnam, would not. Science fiction
and fantasy settings don't have these restrictions yet by and large they're all basically knockoffs of Star Trek, Heinlein, and Tolkien. It's totally the developers' fault, of course. With a sci-fi or fantasy setting, they have the option of showing players something new, but more often than not, they don't take that option. That makes it hard to find something that does something different, and to have it be good on top of that is like finding a diamond in a sea of shit. Fallout was revolutionary because it stepped away from the saturation of fantasy in the cRPG genre, changed the way cRPGs were played, introduced the concept of retrofuturism into gaming as a whole, and either avoided most of the usual science fiction tropes or used them deliberately. There is a new space RTS coming out called StarCraft 2. Lasers? Check. Aliens? Check. Glowing bits? Checkchekchchhcclhekcehefkkikekekekekekekekeke
and Battlefield 1942. Medal of Honor has what, 10 games in the series? They're pretty much all crap, too, with the exception of Infiltrator and to some extent Airborne. BF1942 had a huge following for years and is largely responsible for there being a heavy multiplayer element in WWII games these days, though it's been reduced to a bunch of hardcore clan fags who scream cheater for doing stuff that's described in the manual. Granted, there are quite a few WWII series, but to be perfectly honest World War 2 has been a common theme in games since the days of tabletop wargaming. I had a history teacher who had so many wargames I suggested that he could basically re-enact every battle of World War II from the invasion of Poland in 1939 all the way to the battle of Berlin. This tradition continued into the strategy genre of PC gaming, and into the RTS subgenre.
which was the first WWII film to truly portray the sheer brutality of the war. It used to be, if a character died, he would just fall over, no blood- thanks to the censors that controlled Hollywood. As the censors lost power and faded away, it's become much more realistic, culminating with Saving Private Ryan. The film was revolutionary in the war movie genre, and established a certain style that would be used in war movies since. This happened just as FPS games were beginning to come into their own and break away from the "Doom clone" label.Okay, granted, there was Castle Wolfenstein way back on the Apple II, and then Wolfenstein 3D, but they weren't really about famous battles- instead it played on the espionage and intrigue that took place behind enemy lines. 
The lack of realistic locations, too, was a result of the technology of the time. The first FPS to ever actually show some simile of WWII combat was actually a mod for Duke Nukem 3D that came out in 1997. The creators went on to make WW2GI, which sucked. The point is that Duke3D was one of the first games to portray a real-world setting as realistically as possible, proving that FPS games were more than just the same damn hallway over and over and over. This allowed for a level of detail that previous games could not reach- and thus the modern WWII shooter was born.
setting. It's that too many of them tend to share a lot of the same issues: an overreliance on the American viewpoint, lack of meaningful character development (something Brothers in Arms tries to fix, with very good results), overreliance on the most famous battles (Omaha Beach and Normandy come to mind), too much emphasis on the European front compared to the Pacific, very little plot (just because it's historical doesn't mean you can't expand on the story; this is made all the more apparent with the lack of characterization), and what plot there is tends to be the usual flag-waving "let's hear it for the grunts" trope that propagates the idea that America won World War II singlehandedly, a problem that afflicts most WWII films as well. If you're going to complain about WWII games, complain about the above issues. But there's no point in complaining about the whole of WWII- Europe, Africa, Asia- as a setting unless you're going to complain about fantasy as a setting or sci-fi as a setting.
