Wow, what an amazing trailer that new new Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution trailer is! It’s so good I almost don’t care what the game’s like, so long as they eventually do some kind of CG movie spin-off. As much as I enjoyed it, however, I couldn’t help but feel that I’ve seen a lot of it before somewhere. So, into my DVD collection I delved to try and work out what Deus Ex three reminds me of.
Ok, so this is more allegorical than nabbing others’ aesthetics, and very smart it is too. It alludes to Rembrandt’s 17th century painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholaes Tulp, invoking the dawn of medical science, a scary time when limbs were sawn off at the drop of a baldric. Adam’s dream suggests that man of 2027 is embarking on a similar level of medicinal discovery but with fewer ruffs and probably more cybernetics.
Adam sitting with his post-op fag and booze, adorned with blind-split sunlight, his shiny new cyber arms contrasting with the baroque couch, invokes Ridley Scott’s cinematographic stylings and Blade Runner’s cyberpunk interiors. The trailer’s ochre lighting is just classic Blade Runner – regard:
Deckard’s Apartment.
The window tinting sweeping down like a blind in the Tyrell’s office.
Look, here it goes again – the eye reflecting the city scape is one of Blade Runner’s most memorable images.
Speaking of cityscapes, there’s a good few in the trailer and they’re pretty unique. Too clean for Blade Runner, too dirty for something like Ghost in the Shell. You know what? That two-tier structure reminds me of Midgar.
Yes, Midgar – the iconic city of Square’s favoured child, Final Fantasy VII.
More city. Reminiscent of Akira in my mind – check out the spotlights.
Now, you can’t really go in the direction of thermoptic camouflage and women’s bottoms without talking about Ghost in the Shell.
Thermoptic camo is Ghost in the Shell, it’s a huge part of its world. It’s not simply this aesthetic either, Deus Ex 3 seems to be thrusting in that thematic area as well with talk of ghosts, proxy soldiers and pondering the nature of human existence in the face of dehumanising technological advancement. What it means to be human when your body’s cybernetic is totally Ghost in the Shell’s territory. It’ll be interesting to see if DE3 can add anything new to this debate. To be honest, judging by the quality of the writing in the trailer, I am not hopeful that they’ll be able to say anything better than the highly sophisticated musings of Oshii’s tremendous anime and Kamiyama’s superb reboot series Stand Alone Complex.
GITS’s Major Kusanagi – weirdly sexualised and asexual. Usually naked (thermoptic camo doesn’t work with clothes in GITS) and with a urm, very feminine physique, we see her assembled at the film’s opening so we know she has no privates. Also, she’s in charge and utterly kicks ass. Hopefully DE3 can put that ass wiggling in a similarly sophisticated context.
That’s not a gun arm.
THIS is a gun arm (Batou from GITS2: Innocence)
Rioting. Yeah, well that’s just Akira isn’t it? Dystopian future + Rioting + ultraviolent police = Akira.
There’s a reporter reporting the riot on a screen within the riot in Akira too.
In the future, it’s all about heliplane things. They are pretty cool, I must admit. Heliplane in DE3 above. And GITS and GITS 2 below.
(this heliplane is my favourite)
The Sarif building outside which the riot is happening in the DE3 trailer is architecturally reminiscent of this building in GITS2: Innocence (ish anyway):
It wouldn’t be the future without an old-style globe with a cool hologram instead of wood or whatever.
This one’s from GITS2: Innocence. Obvious symbolism for the shrinking world as caused by technology, megalomania, control etc. Yawn. Come on, how about something more original? Like a Newton’s Cradle made of bullets or a crazed, cybernetic travel agent?
Well, this is just from Watchmen. Does no one fall out of a window head first?
EDIT:
Ok, this is bugging me now. Let me elaborate on the above glibness. The falling through the window bit, to me, evokes the Comedian’s death in Watchmen. There’s probably nothing meaningful behind this but, especially in terms of the recent Zack Snyder movie, it evokes the scene pretty heavily, with the body positioning and the slo-mo. You’d think they’d want to make their falling-through-window bit unique, y’know?
You can stop trying to find it, this isn’t actually in the trailer – it’s from Robocop! There’s Murphy on the ground about to begin his transformative process by being shot the hell up by street thugs. This seems to be what happened to Adam right? If Paul Verhoeven isn’t involved with DE3, I shall be slightly disappointed.
Now, medibots. This medibot appears to be in DE3 and GITS 2. Go it!
I’m sure this ‘making someone shoot himself in the head by hacking his brain’ is in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to search through 25 hours of tv show to find it. Reminds me of F.E.A.R too, actually.
Head crushing spider hand, premièred in Ghost in the Shell.
Matrix style landing-from-a-great-height. As used in the Matrix. Also, GITS (Major Kusanagi really is awesome):
Punching through a wall, eh? Try HEADBUTTING through a wall – like wot Roy Batty does in Blade Runner.
“You better get it up, or I’m gonna have to kill ya!” – yes, he actually says this.
Don’t get me wrong – all this isn’t to suggest that DE3 has thieved a load of material from the other daddies of cyberpunk, near-futuristic sci-fi, it’s almost inevitable. But it is interesting to note how closely it decides to brush past them – there’s no way anyone working on this trailer won’t have already watched Akira, Ghost In The Shell and Blade Runner to death so any similarities have to be conscious decisions. I just hope that they manage to form a distinct aesthetic of their own within the game and at least try to make it something as clever and special as the original. Hope the writing’s better too. It can’t just be me that thinks it’s fucking awful in the trailer?
I don’t think the writing was particularly great, but it was made worse with the extremely unnecessary text that accompanied it.
Oh, and it looks sweet.
Solid case for the Ghost in the Shell stuff, but the real similarities don’t seem to belong with stuff like the implication that Watchmen invented falling through a window with anything other than your head.
Y’ok. That was intended as a throw-away observation, it’s certainly not something I’d try to argue seriously :)
Edit: Right, I’ve added a bit there, in order to subdue the sweating paranoia that I sound like an idiot.
Nice spot on all the cyberpunk homages. GITS 2 is one of the best looking films I’ve seen and there’s a definite influence there. I don’t mind there being lofty-but-badly-written themes if the actual game doesn’t suffer as a result. Anyway, it’s a trailer. I’m just glad it didn’t start with “One man…”
Heliplane? That’s an interesting name for a tiltrotor. :)
On topic, I agree here. It looks like it has the potential to be interesting and fun, but given the series’s track record on insightful sociological and philosophical observation, I doubt we should expect too much.
You may have guessed, I still have some way to go before I get that pilot’s licence :)
The forcefield around our boy there cushioning his fall put me in mind of Gore Burnelli fighting the assassin in the Commonwealth duology.
I’m prepared to be disappointed. It’s the best way for any series.
As someone who was fairly lukewarm on Ghost in the Shell (what can I say? I just don’t like Japanese storytelling conventions) I’m very excited to see something addressing the kind of themes that it might have briefly touched on in an in depth, mature fashion. If it does it with even a fraction of the sophistication of the first game it will be truly excellent.
A couple of literary analogues you may have missed or just decided not to bother with, Adam’s built in sunglasses (from the first trailer) were very similar to Molly’s lenses in Neuromancer (the original cyberpunk novel). Molly also has razor blades coming out of her fingers, similar but different to Adam’s oft shown wrist blades.
I wonder if Adam’s tears are rerouted to his mouth like Molly’s were. Unfortunately the vibe I get from the trailer is more Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan than Gibson. More a “this looks cool, let’s include it” feeling than the tech being believably written into the world.
Hey, I’d be pretty happy with Altered Carbon – The Game, just so long as it doesn’t drop of the sex and violence deep end like every subsequent Richard Morgan novel I’ve read.
“Now, medibots. This medibot appears to be in DE3 and GITS 2. Go it!”
Its actually more real life. Here is the Da Vinci surgical system:
http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/robots_03_04/r12_14745781.jpg
Alternatively – MEDIBOT
Also “Sarif” (of Sarif Industries) is pronounced suspiciously close to Seraph which is a kind of six winged angel which surround and sing the praises of god. Clearly the religious overtones will be present here as they were in DE1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seraph for more info.
Yes, it was bad. It was also very Deus Ex. Opening scene of the orignal! It’s basically the same.
Good point. It’s not such a crime, when you consider that whatever the merits of the original Deus Ex, it was mostly awfully written.
STICK WITH THE PROD! >=<
What are you saying? DX 1 was incredible well written. It was not your typical entertaining dialogue, its was a philosophical, thought provoking script about democracy, human condition, power struggles, freedom… Very, very unique game.
Eder, the concept was good – the subject matter, but I mean the writing itself. The characters were stilted and unrealistic. I loved the game and don’t debate the quality of the content, just the fact that every character in it sounded like a pretentious 14 year old reading from a script about social change, environmental awareness and global conspiracy. Dialogue, specifically, was poor =)
I recall that Joseph Manderley was a particulary ‘I am a waffling grim old man, fear my quavering voice!’, that Paul sounded painfully overidealistic, Gunther Hermann a vile stereotype overdone, and so forth =)
Terminator (possibly)!
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/138348257_65f7ea5834.jpg
Star Wars (maybe)!
http://www.starwarsholidayspecial.com/swcs/episode4/images/Ben_tractor_beam_large.jpg
It’s worth remembering that Ghost in the Shell borrows very heavily from William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ – Which is also likely where Deus Ex takes a lot of its inspiration too.
Anime didn’t invent cyberpunk, there a just well written ones that borrow heavily from it.
The “eye reflection” is not a reflection. They are eye augmentations. Surely you noticed the whirring camera-like sounds among other things?
I believe he’s referring to the reflections across the surface of his cyber-eye, not to the rotating iris bits =)
Good article – you’ve a great taste in cinema.
I tend to be similarly brutal, I use youtube videos/songs and google image search to rapidly show friends just how derivative their new ‘favourite’ game, film or music is. Some of us just seem to have a great memory library, and can pick all the inspirations and references straight out of a given work.
Curses. I spent all of yesterday completely lost high pitched epic japanese choral music from GitS and Origin, craving some apocalyptic/dystopic anime and someone to watch it with, and now you’ve rammed my eyes full of doll bots and Roy Batty to give me another day of it..
I think Science Fiction, while being criminal in how awful some of its productions are.. Is as a genre the most laudable and worthy form of fiction. It warns us about dangers and keeps us hoping.
And the best of it is so frequently proven right.
“The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholaes Tulp” is actually visible in the trailer at 1:38. Blink and you’ll miss it. I noticed it today in one of the Eurogamer screenshots and was certainly surprised.
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/8551/19jpgnc.jpg
Hello! Very interesting article.
But I think you could have mentioned the part where the main character goes flying towards the sun. For me, it is clearly a reference to the mythological character ICARUS, that tries to reach the sun using wings his father created, but when he flies too high the sun melts the wax used in the creation of the wings.
Oh, and the father of Icarus is… DAEDALUS! Those who played the first Deus Ex surely will recognize this name.
Yeah, I was more interested in exploring some of the visuals that I found familiar from more closely related sources. Classical stuff’s fair game and kinda speaks for itself I thought.
Something Deus Ex 3 will probably not take after ENOUGH is Design Reboot’s imagining of a possible Deus Ex prequel, written from (I think) before this game was announced:
http://designreboot.blogspot.com/2009/10/design-reboot-laputan-machine.html
Many thanks for the link. Good writing and good artwork. Such a pity >.>
Hey guys, guys, I just noticed something- The latest Dragon Age trailer seems to heavily borrow visual elements from “The Lord of the Rings”!
…ok, honestly, Ghost in the Shell didn’t invent Cyberpunk and Akira didn’t invent Dystopian futures. Dystopian future + Rioting + ultraviolent police = almost any dystopian sci fi you can name.
You have basically said.
“Anyone to ever use Gmajor is a huge fan of the first person to ever use it”
Stealth suit, gun arm, punching through a wall,…
ALL these ideas are common in these genres.
Falling through a window in slow motion = watchmen!?
What!!!
The point behind science fiction is that it needs to be vaguely related to science – eventually, bearing in mind how many prolific science fiction writers there have been, one will run out of or reuse concepts because they’re still good concepts. When the opening lines of the article are going as far back as Rembrandt, it’s effectively open season on ‘who came up with the concept first’ (and frankly, one would only have to go back 20-30 years before finding someone who did it before ).
Take stealth suits. Ancient history – the provided examples are hardly the first to have done it. Stealth suits make for a great addition to gameplay, done well. The militaries of the real world have been conceptualising stealth for decades, and Predator did it before GITS did in the entertainment scope of things.
Does it really matter? Does something need to be original to be appreciated? Stories have been told since time immemorial about human nature, yet human nature has never really changed, yet we keep telling and listening to such stories. Also frankly I’d want a globe in my penthouse office of my huge company, if I were in such a situation, whether it’s cliched or not ;)
The writing (to use a very open-ended term like that) in Deus Ex was superb. There is a reason why it continues to be considered one of the best games of its kind even today (just one example, compare its Amazon reviews with that of, say, Mass Effect), and it wasn’t fancy graphics, or even gameplay, that sold it. It was the secretive world Ion Storm wove together.
It remains to be seen as to whether Eidos Montreal can achieve the same. They don’t need to be original about it – they just need do it well.