Buried is the most claustrophobic film I’ve ever seen. It’s almost unbearable at times, and judging by the squirms and noises coming from several people sitting around me in the cinema, I was not the only person who felt genuine pity for Ryan Reynolds: a kidnapped man trapped in a wooden coffin, 6 feet underground in the Iraqi desert, with nothing but a mobile phone and a zippo for company.
As painful as it is to watch, Buried is an excellently crafted film with a solid performance from its sole star. Reynolds nails the panic, anger and sadness his character experiences as he desperately tries to figure his horrific situation out. Considering the film is set entirely within the confines of a cramped wooden box, its surprisingly exciting and relentlessly tense, with the director implementing neat camera angles and clever use of lighting to keep the movie as varied as possible, and with the exception of the moments of total blackness (when Ryan turns his phone off/puts the zippo away, etc), you are completely there in the coffin with him. It’s very unnerving. This was emphasied even more seeing it at the cinema on such a vast screen, and I could see numerous people around me shifting uncomfortably in their seats. If you know you already want to see this movie, then I strongly recommend seeing it on the big screen.
It’s by no means perfect, and a few niggles for me included the fact that Ryan constantly has his lighter lit, thus burning away his precious oxygen, and I’m also quite dubious as to whether you’d get any signal at all for your mobile phone if you are buried underground, but I don’t really want to find out that one first hand. Nonetheless, I’m am inclined to ignore these gripes and its really not that hard because the film is so damn immersive at all other times. To describe anything else of the film would be to ruin the suspense and tension gained from watching it yourself, so I’ll not say any more. You probably already know if you want to see it or not.
I recently played through Cult of the Lamb, a satirical take on the concept of running a demonic cult. It turns horrific things like sacrificial rituals, cannibalism and straight up gaslighting abuse into hilarious amusements by filtering everything through its cartoonish lens. You are a sheep, after all, and all your followers are sycophantic anthropomorphic […]
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
I’ve been pretty absent from PC gaming for some time, since moving to Canada in early 2017, because I haven’t had a proper computer to play games on. That has recently changed, since I got myself set up with a new gaming rig that can handle pretty much anything that’s out at the moment. I […]
To say I’m a fan of the original Deus Ex is a bit of an understatement, and I must admit that my hopes and expectations of this prequel were mountainous. Dozens of trailers and gameplay previews teased me with what was clearly a beautifully designed game graphically, but I was dying to know if the story and gameplay would prove to be as deep and ambitious as its older brother. And now we find ourselves in the present. I have played through the entirety of Human Revolution, and I now know the answer…
Team Fortress just went Free-to-Play. Forever. If you’ve never played the ultra-violent cartoon shooter before, now you have absolutely no reason not to. My Steam profile claims I’ve poured over 40 hours into this, but I know its at least double that in reality because I was there from the very first beta. I’ve seen it evolve from the beginning, with constant free updates which have added new maps, new weapons and yes, hats… it really is amazing how much Valve have added to the game over the years and now its available completely free. Also, Meet the Medic below.
Dead Space 2 currently appears to be set for an early 2011 release (to my dismay) and after hearing that it’s going to have a multiplayer side to it, we’ve been wondering how that could work in a single-player game that made such a huge impact in our survival horror part of our gaming lives. Apparently, one of the main multiplayer features (if not the only) of the game is a 4v4, objective-based struggle between humans and necromorphs and requires that the humans fight to complete a set of tasks, all the while defending against the mutant menace on the other team, who’s sole purpose is to stop them (see video below).
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