My Meanest Review Ever (Since the Last One)

Today was supposed to be the premiere of Season Two of my XOXO, Puppet Girl Farscape reviews, but unfortunately my evil hand took the wheel instead. Look for Puppet Girl to return this Thursday.

Fuck you to fuck me, Markiplier

On Sunday my friend persuaded me to see Markiplier’s Iron Lung movie. I’m aware this is a cursed sentence, but my friend had already bought a bunch of tickets and I am a scholar of ludo-cinematic intersections, so I went for it. What if it were good? What if it were spooky? We went to Shelby Oaks a while back and that was watchable, so YouTuber movies didn’t have that much baggage for me.

Now they have the baggage of a multi-ton mini-submarine.

The Annoying Parts of Contemporary Indie Horror Video Games

I’m told Iron Lung is a short indie horror game about piloting a tiny death-trap submarine through an ocean of blood until a creature eats you. The blood is human blood due to reasons and it may hold the secret to preserving human civilization due to reasons. This occurs in the wake of the “Quiet Rapture”, which is when all the stars and planets disappeared due to reasons, leaving only space stations and spaceships alone in the void due to reasons.

Sidebar: what would happen to space stations when the major anchoring bodies disappeared? Would they go drifting off into the void? Can space stations function without the bodies they orbit? What are the structural implications of this loss? Hell, what is that moon full of blood orbiting right now? And what is what it’s orbiting orbiting? Where is the energy that fuels the remaining life in the universe coming from? The sun keeps us alive! If she left, we would all just die, real fast, and also the Earth would go flying away.

I apologize. Stories can and should be able to stand outside of internal scientific consistency. I myself am frequently writing stories that are deeply dysfunctional from a scientific standpoint. This is a cheap attack meant to underscore the thing that I find so utterly gears-grinding about much of modern indie horror game writing. Truly every hit indie horror game is about “whoa oh shit this is so fucked up wtf jump scare quazy omg #lore”. 

Which is fine. 

I guess.

But not interesting, not as a linear story. What is interesting about video games is doing the actions of the game. This is a key reason game adaptations famously do not make for good movies: I don’t care about seeing somebody else press buttons for a vaguely exposited, internally inconsistent reason. If there’s a button to press for vaguely exposited, internally inconsistent reasons, let me do the pressing. Games do not have to have normatively “good” linear stories because they offer other pleasures.

Cinema can offer itself. Either what’s happening onscreen is engaging in a cinematic way, or it isn’t.

The Annoying Parts of Mid-Budget Indie Filmmaking

The special effects were good. That’s a true statement about the Iron Lung movie. The oceans of blood sloshed with veracity, and Markiplier mutated into a…lumpier guy convincingly. I appreciated the moments Markiplier chose to deploy practical effects and the obvious skill put into designing the submarine set.

However, good VFX in indie movies aren’t inherently interesting anymore. I feel like I’ve seen forty or fifty different movies that were supposed to be breakthroughs in indie VFX. Let’s just say VFX in indie movies have officially been broken through.

Also, Markiplier makes, like, $40 million a year; he can in fact afford to sauce up the effects. Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, he ain’t.

He also ain’t Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna in that there’s not a single provocative thing about this movie. It’s a horror movie which isn’t scary or even disturbing because it’s a comically intricate and internally incoherent capital-S Scenario. It’s a video game. It’s Markiplier in a wet shed, saying “fuck” a thousand times.

“That’s Just Markiplier!”

I can’t believe I--the person who subtitled this post “Fuck you to fuck me”--am the one who must say this, but putting “fuck” in a script does not compelling dialogue make. Markiplier speaks inordinately frequently for the star of an isolation horror film, and maybe ten of his lines aren’t “fuck this”, “fuck you”, or “oh fuck.”

It’s transparently bad dialogue, delivered, and I cannot stress this enough, by Markiplier.

It was agonizing to sit in silence in that darkened theater for ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES and not scream out “That’s! Just! Markiplier!” Every time I saw him, I thought, witheringly, “That’s just Markiplier”. Every time I see him for the rest of my life I will think “That’s just Markiplier”. Every YouTuber has the most intense iPhone face because they are literally the faces on iPhones. Forget Telemachus Todd Holland: I cannot believe Markiplier is anything but Markiplier. 

Is that Markiplier’s fault?

Yes, because he cast himself in his own movie. A good director possesses a sense of things like casting. A YouTuber trades on their own face.

I Am Obligated to Be a Dick about Everything

Do I have to be such a dick about this? Is it necessary? Am I merely acting out some deep resentment to millionaire Markiplier and way-more-successful-than-me developer David Szymanski?

No! The reason I have to be a dick about this because the movie isn’t good and nobody on Letterboxd will admit it! People are dunking on Shelby Oaks in comparison as if that movie weren’t an entire star better. Shelby Oaks had a plot, characters, even themes(!). None of it was particularly smart or original, sure, but it was also only ninety minutes. It was a guy’s first movie, so he made it go on for a mere ninety minutes.

I believe that by watching too much YouTube people have trained themselves to receive dopamine upon sight of Markiplier’s visage. Well, Markiplier’s not my fake friend so I don’t get that hit, and without it Iron Lung’s not especially good. 

At this point in my life, I go on YouTube for two reasons: 

1) to watch Farscape.

2) to listen to Christopher Tester read monologues from Warhammer 40K novels that I don’t understand. 

Maybe if Iron Lung starred Christopher Tester, I too would suffer from the delusion that it were good. 

Though he’s a professional actor, so the movie might then actually be good.

The Ultimate Video Game Movie (Derogatory)

Maybe I’m just mad because Iron Lung upends all my research. For the last several years, I’ve been developing a heuristic for diagnosing the bleed of video game storytelling norms into cinematic productions. My study is founded upon the assumption that this intermingling is non-linear and unmotivated; indeed, the most video game-like films have never been straight video game IP adaptations, but rather low-budget action/adventure films, poorly made.

But Iron Lung is undeniably a video game IP adaptation while also being a video game-like movie: boring; pure premise; lacking in character depth or complexity; structured as a series of explosive unconnected beats; weird about spatial continuity; and aesthetics-driven to the point of intellectual nullity.

So in conclusion let me say: thank you, Markiplier. You’ve revolutionized my research. Your work will be critical to my own.

Phew. Whadda load offa my mind.