In the world of “Solo Leveling,” inter-dimensional gates regularly open up to “dungeons” crawling with strange and dangerous creatures. The only ones who can kill the creatures are hunters, who have awakened powers that let them take down the big bosses.
And out of all those hunters… Jinwoo is the weakest.
Needless to say, there’s plenty of room for improvement for the protagonist of Chugong’s “Solo Leveling” – and even in the brief space of the first volume, he makes quite a bit of improvement. The story thus far is bloody, harrowing, but also somewhat wryly funny – especially when the System intervenes to make life more complicated for the hero.
As mentioned before, Jinwoo Sung is the weakest of the lowest-ranked hunters, able to tag along on only the least threatening missions – and even then, he gets badly hurt. But he has no choice, because he needs the money for his family. When the party he’s with finds a rare double dungeon, Jin-woo is determined to explore the vast, eerie stone chamber filled with statues – and ends up in a nightmare that leaves him alone and dying.
Which is when the System intervenes, healing his body and saving his life. While he recovers, the System gives Jinwoo daily quests (mostly exercise) and the opportunity to level up and acquire new items. Just like a video game. He’s achieving the impossible: becoming steadily stronger, with apparently no limits.
Unfortunately, he soon discovers that even his increased power won’t keep him safe from potential harm in a dog-eat-dog profession, especially when he and another young hunter, Jinho Yoo, sign up for a freelance job posting. The problem is, the guy who’s hiring them, Dongsuk Hwang, is not the genial figure he pretends to be, and the biggest danger may be the other hunters rather than anything inside the dungeon.
The world of “Solo Leveling” is a pretty standard urban fantasy setting. It’s the modern world as we know it, except some people have magical powers and inter-dimensional gates allow them to hunt goblins, giant spiders and snakes, statue-gods, and so on. The most interesting aspect of it is the System that effectively turns Jinwoo into the protagonist of his own personal video game, with all the problems and benefits of that status.
The writing is pretty standard for a light-novel/webnovel’s style, spare and lean with lots of onomatopeia. It feels like Chugong is still building up the plot threads in this volume, since the majority of the story is just devoted to Jinwoo ending up in a nightmarish and life-threatening situation, and then spending a lot of time grinding (which is a bit tedious) and building up his strength. But Chugong has some talent at depicting the raw, wild, desperate interiors of the dungeons, and the monsters in them.
Jinwoo is kind of a mixed hero – at the story’s beginning, he’s courageous, unselfish and quick-witted, but still petrified of dying and acutely aware of his almost comical weakness. However, he becomes a lot colder and less likable as the first volume winds on, after he comes to the conclusion that all people are cowardly backstabbers. Hopefully the presence of Jinho – a golden retriever of a rich boy who constantly addresses him as “boss” – will mellow him out in subsequent volumes.
“Solo Leveling Volume 1” has some growing pains, but it’s an entertaining foray into a series with plenty of promise, solid writing, and a hero who wobbles on the edge of antihero. At the very least, it inspires me to check out volume two.
In the world of “Solo Leveling,” inter-dimensional gates regularly open up to “dungeons” crawling with strange and dangerous creatures. The only ones who can kill the creatures are hunters, who have awakened powers that let them take down the big bosses.
And out of all those hunters… Jin-woo is the weakest.
Needless to say, there’s plenty of room for improvement for the protagonist of the manhwa adaptation of Chugong’s “Solo Leveling.” The first volume mostly devotes itself to introducing us to the world of hunters and the hideous events that lead to Jin-woo’s chances to improve himself, with a terrifying and bloody series of challenges at the center of the story. The artwork is half the reason to see this – dark, gloomy and beautifully detailed.
As mentioned before, Sung Jin-woo is the weakest of the lowest-ranked hunters, able to tag along on only the least threatening missions – and even then, he gets badly hurt. But he has no choice, because he needs the money for his family. When the party he’s with finds a rare double dungeon, Jin-woo is determined to explore the vast, eerie stone chamber filled with statues, in the hopes that he can scrounge up a little money.
But then the statues come to life and start killing the party members, including a vast “god” statue that has a very specific list of demands. Unfortunately, those commandments are difficult to decipher, and more and more hunters lose their nerve – leading to them being vaporized or squashed into red smears. To survive this nightmarish scenario, Jin-woo will need more than his wits. He’ll need a System, and he’ll start grinding like a pro if he ever wants to get stronger.
The first volume of “Solo Leveling” is dominated by the adventure in the double dungeon, and the entire eerie, bloody adventure is explored in great detail. It’s genuinely nerve-wracking to watch the hunters dwindle as the adventure goes on – especially as some of them turn on each other, lose limbs or panic and try to escape on foot. The fact that it’s overseen by a creepy, sadistic stone “god” with a toothy grin makes the whole thing even more eerie.
And the story is brought to life by the artwork of Jang Sung-rak (aka Dubu), who used color exceptionally, painting the god’s chamber in stark, ghostly, cold blues and the regular world in warm, sunlit tones. The artwork is also very detailed and expressive, lingering on the characters’ faces to show their terror, tension, eagerness and apprehension, and even brief bursts of action (like the murder centipedes in the desert) are wonderfully dynamic.
We also have a good introduction to Jin-woo, who seems like a vividly realistic character – he’s courageous, unselfish and quick-thinking (he unravels all three commandments without help), but still petrified of dying and acutely aware of his almost comical weakness. But after the System accepts him as a player, we see him starting to branch out into becoming stronger, whether it’s racing laps around the hospital or venturing alone into a new dungeon.
The first volume of “Solo Leveling”‘s manhwa adaptation is a nail-biting experience that flies by quickly, before introducing you to the central conceit of the series – and it promises to get more interesting as Jin-woo levels up.
It hasn’t been a good few years to be a Lord of the Rings fan.
First, Amazon crapped on Tolkien’s intellectual property with The Rings of Power, even as they followed the time-honored tradition of attacking the fans preemptively to try to bully people into watching. I’ve been blocked by TheOneRingNet on Twitter after I called them out for bigotry against Tolkien’s religion and their abuse of fans, and I am very proud of that fact. Being blocked by bigots is practically a compliment.
And then… we got The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
If anything will make you miss the glory days of Lord of the Rings games, it will be this… thing. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum proves that there is a distinct lack of quality control in J.R.R. Tolkien’s franchise, displayed here through a game that is deeply and intensely broken on every level. Nothing about this game is good, except for possibly the entertainment factor of goggling at whatever aspect of Tolkien’s world that is being molested.
The core concept is not necessarily a bad one. Sure, a video game about a cannibalistic crackhead who obsesses about jewelry sounds like a terrible idea, but Gollum is a complex and nuanced enough character to lend himself to an expanded story. He’s also strong and nimble, which lends itself well to the idea of a parkour game. The story supposedly covers Gollum’s adventures prior to the events of The Lord of the Rings, namely how he was captured by Sauron and imprisoned in Mordor, and then captured by the wood-elves and imprisoned in Mirkwood.
Unfortunately, it soon becomes obvious what is wrong with the game. For one thing, it looks like a PS2 game that somehow fell through a time vortex and landed in the year 2023… and was given a PS5 release. The graphics are primitive at best, eye-gougingly ugly at worst. Gollum looks like he’s melting 95% of the time, and almost all of the other characters look primitive and sometimes actually unfinished. The color palette is depressingly muted, except for when the world suddenly becomes radioactive and burns your retinas.
There are also a thousand artistic choices that are absolutely baffling. Why does Thranduil look like an overtrimmed shrub is growing out of his head? Why is Gandalf referred to as “wizard”? Why do some of the orcs have phallic armor? Why is there a random Russian in Mordor? Why is one of the orcs French? Why does Gollum have a bird sidekick? Why does the Mouth of Sauron dress like an extra from “Dune”?And why, in the name of Eru, did someone decide that Sauron, the Nazgul and the orcs weren’t sufficient villains for the story, and thus we needed a new and chilling enemy titled “The Candle Man”?
Even this might have been slightly tolerable if they had plumbed the depths of Gollum’s tortured, addiction-wracked, divided mind. Unfortunately, most of what the devs seem to know about him is the existence of his Smeagol alter ego… and not much else. He’s never convincingly depicted as the sly, corrupt, malign, disgusting little creature of Tolkien’s works – this Gollum has an internal moral debate about killing a beetle and adopts a little baby bird. For context, the Gollum of Tolkien’s books ate babies. Human babies.
As if the story wasn’t bad enough, the game is extremely broken – glitchy and buggy, frequent crashes, and a confusingly random frame rate that often makes the animation janky and stuttering. The stealth mechanics are poor, with some tasks that are very difficult to complete due to a lack of user-friendliness, and it’s often difficult to see what’s going on around Gollum. It sometimes feels like a game made by enthusiastic but not-very-well-trained amateurs who did their best… except that you’re expected to pay for it.
Playing The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a thankless, joyless experience, and it is all the more egregious when you realize it was based on the life’s work of a man who so expertly and passionately crafted his imaginary world. There are many good or at least tolerable Lord of the Rings games, and any of those would be better than this one.
I have a confession to make: I kinda like the Mortal Kombat movie from 2021.
I mean, it’s not as controversial as saying you’re an unironic fan of Battlefield Earth or something like that. But as I understand it, fans of the video games didn’t like it a great deal, even just compared to the 1990s movie.
And I won’t lie – it’s flawed. Cole is a pretty bland lead character who isn’t from the games, though he’s inoffensive and he avoids the whole Gary Stu character aspect. Kano is lots of fun to watch, and I suspect the actor had a ball playing him. Shang Tsung is not really very intimidating, There’s some eye candy for women and a small number of men (Liu Kang is basically this ALL THE TIME). The special effects are pretty decent. Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim are basically perfect as Scorpion and Subzero, and there’s a reason the entire climax is about these two whaling on each other.
But I think of all the characters, I enjoy watching Sonya Blade the most, because she is an example of a warrior woman written correctly. And we don’t have a lot of those anymore – a lot of female characters in current-day action movies are essentially written as power fantasies…. which are okay, as long as it’s acknowledged that they’re nothing better than that. These characters are coldly constructed to maximize feelings of shallow empowerment without risking upsetting anyone by making the character look “weak” by having them be vulnerable, struggle to do anything, or need anything from a man.
Disney, I’m looking at you. You gave us Rey, Live!Mulan and Captain Marvel.
Sonya Blade is literally not like the other girls… and for once, that’s a good thing. The first thing to note is that she is always depicted as a butt-kicking badass – she’s a military veteran who’s good enough to fight in Mortal Kombat, and she’s strong and skilled enough to capture Kano and keep him chained up in her house. When Subzero is chasing down Cole, she’s the one that Jax sends him to to keep him safe.
But it’s worth noting that in raw physical power, she’s not the strongest. On average, men are much stronger than women physically, which many movies and TV shows don’t want to acknowledge because… I guess acknowledging it would be considered misogynistic. But Mortal Kombat does implicitly acknowledge it, because Sonya is shown going toe to toe with physically powerful men not based on raw muscle power, but using her brains, her training, and her agility. Her part of the climax is a wonderfully intense game of cat-and-mouse, where she not only has to battle Kano’s physical power but his laser eye, which she manages through manipulating her surroundings as well as physical attacks.
Which brings me to another aspect of Sonya that many other action heroines don’t have anymore – she struggles. Watch the Disney action heroines mentioned above, and you’ll be lucky if they EVER struggle to take down their enemies.
In the shallow minds of the people writing these stories, I think they imagine that a woman struggling would make her look weak… and that idea is bad storytelling. Seeing your hero struggle is part of the experience of wanting them to triumph – you watch them sweat, get punched, collapse to the ground and struggle to get up again, and lose their initial fights. That makes it all the more cathartic and satisfying when they finally triumph – because you know they worked for their triumph over the bad guys, and all the sweat, blood and tears were worth it in the end.
If the hero’s only flaw is “he/she needs to realize how AWESOME he/she is!”, and they breeze through, effortlessly winning the day without breaking a sweat… the only people who find that satisfying are people who just want a power fantasy.
And yes, Sonya struggles. She follows the arc of HERO FIGHTS –> HERO FAILS –> HERO REGROUPS/TRAINS –> HERO FIGHTS AGAIN –> HERO WINS AFTER STRUGGLE, like Luke Skywalker and other classic heroes. Her ultimate triumph over Kano – and gaining an arcana – is narratively satisfying because we watched her grapple with him right to the end, and it was a near thing. So when she looks at her dragon mark and laughs, it feels earned.
I do not get that feeling from a Captain Marvel, a Rey, a Live!Mulan. They don’t struggle to win, so there’s no cathartic satisfaction when they do win. It’s like watching Usain Bolt outrunning a toddler. Who’d find that satisfying?
I also really like Sonya’s relationships with the men around her. She doesn’t really interact much with the female characters – I think she only encounters Mileena, who skips out on murdering her because she wouldn’t get Mortal Kombat street cred from it. I guess she probably meets Cole’s wife and daughter at the end of the film.
Anyway, throughout the movie Sonya interacts mainly with the male characters, and for the most part… they treat her no differently than if she were a man. The only exception of Kano, who is a walking mass of personality defects, who is sexist to her because he’s casually offensive to everyone (and also he’s salty that she chained him up). But the men on her side treat her with respect and admiration, not considering her any less worthy because she’s a woman, and it’s hard to imagine that, say, Cole would treat her any differently if she were a guy.
That also goes for her relationship with Jax. I’m not sure what the age difference is between them, but it seems like they have a big brother/little sister connection, with a hint of mentor/student.
One thing I’ve noticed about movies in recent years is that women are often not allowed to be the mentees/students of men anymore – a woman must either know everything she needs automatically, or she must learn from another woman. See Rey, Captain Marvel, etc. That makes it kind of wholesome when Sonya admits that when she first entered the military, she wanted to make Jax proud, and that was clearly an important motivation in her training and her service.
It’s also worth noting that in the second act, she also spends a lot of time just supporting Jax. She’s told that she can’t train for Mortal Kombat because she doesn’t have a dragon mark that gives you superpowers, and instead of pouting or kicking up a fuss, she decides to go support her best friend, who just lost both of his arms and has been given little dinky robot ones instead. She doesn’t make it all about her, but about her friend who needs help.
On the subject of Sonya not having an arcana, I also liked that she’s demonstrated to have actual morals rather than a vague sense of goodness that is never challenged or confronted with temptation. You see, Sonya wants an arcana because she wants to engage in Mortal Kombat (DA DA DA, DADADA DA DA DA!), but there are only two ways to gain one. Either you are an elite fighter and vague supernatural powers bestow it on you, or you gain it by killing someone else who has the marking.
Kano has the marking. Now, Kano is a person who has done all sorts of hideous criminal things, and killing him would probably make the world a better place. In fact, he keeps taunting Sonya about killing him, even to the point where she fights him but does not kill him, just to demonstrate that she can in fact beat him. But she doesn’t kill him, because at that point he was technically an ally and wasn’t a direct threat.
Does she kill him? Yes. But only after he turns against the group and tries to murder her twice, in self-defense.
The same way a hero has to struggle for his success to mean anything, a hero’s morals have to be challenged for their morality to have any depth. If the hero is never tempted to do the wrong thing, then their morality doesn’t really mean anything. This is especially true in a situation where doing the wrong thing feels like it might be the right thing, such as killing a loathsome murderer who will get superpowers and probably misuse them to kill even more people.
Anyway, those are my scrambled thoughts on the character of Sonya Blade in the Mortal Kombat movie, and why I liked her far better than most action heroines in current-day films. She’s tough, she’s smart, she’s compassionate, she’s skilled, and she fires pink laser beams. Not bad.
For the record, I have never actually played a Resident Evil video game. I have, however, watched them being played from the same sofa, and have gotten invested in them the same way you get invested in a very long slow TV show where zombies and Lickers can lunge out and chew on an identifiable main character. I am also moderately well-versed in the series’ lore, and I’ve watched the CGI anime movies. So I think I have at least a middling understanding of the franchise.
And I hate the movies.
Honestly, the movies feel like a thirteen-year-old girl’s fan-fiction, where the beloved main characters either do not exist, or are hollow inept sidekicks to the glorious all-powerful and beautiful Mary Sue. That is what Alice felt like to me. It also felt like Paul W.S. Anderson – who has produced maybe two adequate movies in his entire career – was making plots up based on other popular movies, and just slapping on superficial aspects of the video games to justify the name “Resident Evil.”
So I was pretty thrilled when I heard that they were going to be producing a Resident Evil TV series, because this was a chance to get it right. A fresh start! Maybe it would be something more faithful to the original games, with the Redfields, Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine and Ada Wong.
Then… I read the information about it. It’s not about those characters. It’s about Albert Wesker’s made-up-for-this-TV-show-exclusively twin daughters, and we have more post-apocalyptic crap, just like in the movie series. As the final slap in the face, it’s being made by the same production company that gave us those crappy movies, executive-produced by a woman whose most notable success was Harriet the Spy, and written by some guy who’s given us about fifty million episodes of Supernatural. There’s really nothing to be optimistic about here.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for them to just make a good Resident Evil movie. I know that until Detective Pikachu you were lucky to get even a mediocre video-game movie, but… these movies already have their plots and characters sketched out for the filmmakers. Literally all you have to do is reshape the plot into a three-act structure, streamline the obstacles and quests, and add some dialogue. Voila! Movie!
And look at the characters! The characters of these games are iconic – not quite to the level of Mario, but they’re well-known and well-loved. I would love to see a movie about Leon Kennedy, Claire and Chris Redfield, Ada Wong and Jill Valentine. But in the movies, they’re either nonexistent or turned into pathetic defanged temporary sidekicks for the new characters that nobody likes.
I don’t care about Alice, no matter how much Paul W.S. Anderson wants me to because she was played by his wife. I don’t care about Albert Wesker’s newly-invented-for-this-TV-show daughters. I want Leon, Claire, Chris, Ada and Jill! JUST ADAPT THE GAMES! THE ONES FANS LIKE! But no, they’re doing the exact same thing that they did before – no attempt to make something that reflects the actual games that fans love to this day.
That’s why I’ve mostly stuck to watching the CGI anime movies based on the video games. They’re not perfect, and some of the CGI has aged, but it’s certainly better than the films.
THAT SAID…
I found out some utterly wonderful news last night. You see, there are actually twoResident Evil TV shows being produced. One is the above idiocy I whined about for so long. But there is another – a CGI anime being released on Netflix, which stars Leon and Claire… and which actually looks like a survival horror story. With an emphasis on “horror.”
And it looks… really good. Obviously you can’t tell quality from a minute-long trailer that is mostly Claire walking around an empty room, but the animation is good, the atmosphere is good, and it has Claire and Leon.
(I know Resident Evil games can have other protagonists, like the last game, but the adaptations should probably stick with established characters for the time being. Especially since the last original protagonist in an adaptation was… very very bad.)
Even better, I found out that they are rebooting the Resident Evil movies later this year… and while I can’t speak to the quality of the adaptation yet, the characters are Leon, Jill, Ada and the Redfields, it takes place in the 90s like the original game, and it’s apparently based on the first couple of games. I’m more cautious about this because… well, video game movies are almost always bad, mediocre at best, so I’m not going to get my hopes up. But the fact that it isn’t the Further Adventures Of Alice Doing Whatever She’s Doing really makes me hope it’s good and successful.
The Forest 