Author: Trafficblast

It’s been over a year since we first laid eyes on the announcement trailer for Elden Ring, From Software’s next soul-crushing adventure, and we haven’t heard a peep since. Fans of the game have gotten tired of waiting and have built their own playable demo of what they want to see in the game.

“With all the great fake lore content and creative concepts that has been posted here the last [few] weeks I thought about working on a nice game for this community,” wrote Redditor SpriteBlood in a post on the Elden Ring subreddit last month. “I read about that idea several times now and I am myself highly involved in this hype.”

That post, along with a flood of users making up fake lore for the Elden Ring world, kickstarted a process that led to a playable demo. Fans of the upcoming game have contributed music, voice acting, sound design, and other elements to the development process for a playable demo. You can see it in action in the video below.

Originally reported by USGamer, these fans have gathered in a Discord server to hash out gameplay details and other design elements. They have dedicated channels for lore and script writing, concept art, and other details. Fans can contribute as much as they’re able to.

The community isn’t sure what they’ll do once actual details about Elden Ring are released. They can’t use the same name as From Software or they might run into legal trouble. They could rename their project and keep development going–they already have a solid chunk of development done that could lead to something special if they stick with it.

We don’t know much of anything about Elden Ring outside the fact that Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is helping build the world and lore. The Action RPG, which is From Software’s “biggest” title yet, has been in development since Dark Souls 3’s DLC wrapped up but we still don’t have a release window.

Nintendo surprised-released a Nintendo Direct Mini today, with loads of new announcements. Among them was the first word of Just Dance 2021, the next entry in the popular casual dancing game. It’s coming to Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Stadia. Unlike Just Dance 2020 and many series titles before it, it won’t be coming to Wii.

Just Dance 2021 will include 40 new tracks. The full list hasn’t been released, but the announcement detailed 11 of the tracks, so there’s only 29 left to go:

• “Señorita” by Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello
• “Dance Monkey” by Tones And I
• “Que Tire Pa Lante” by Daddy Yankee
• “Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa
• “Temperature” by Sean Paul
• “Feel Special” by TWICE
• “Juice” by Lizzo
• “all the good girls go to hell” by Billie Eilish
• “In The Navy” by The Sunlight Shakers
• “Zenit” by ONUKA
• “Heat Seeker” by DREAMERS

You’ll also be able to team up in co-op. A new Quickplay option lets you jump straight into a dance with a randomized playlist. This year’s version will also include a Sweat mode for working out and a Kids mode for kid-friendly songs and choreography. The announcement also promises an optional subscription to Just Dance Unlimited, which will let you stream over 550 songs, with new ones dropping throughout the year. The game will come with a one-month trial.

Just Dance 2021 releases on November 12. Launch dates for the next-gen consoles have not been announced, so it could arrive on those systems sometime later.

Netflix has released Making The Witcher, a behind-the-scenes special exploring the story behind The Witcher’s fantasy world of magic and monsters.

The Witcher’s official Twitter account shared a trailer for the new Netflix original documentary, which offers an exclusive backstage look into the production of the live-action series adaptation, starring Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia, the titular monster hunter.

Feast your eyes on the story behind the Continent. Watch Making The Witcher, now on @netflix. pic.twitter.com/80sVbYzigG

— The Witcher (@witchernetflix) August 26, 2020

The video teaser for the 32-minute special features several cast and crew members divulging “the secrets behind the saga,” providing fresh insight into the show’s casting processes, the choreography of its action sequences, the application of different storytelling perspectives, as well as the show’s visual effects and make-up design choices.

One clip shares thrilling footage of Cavill and Emma Appleton sparring with swords as part of their 10-day training session to prepare for Geralt and Renfri’s climactic fight scene, which features in the very first episode of season one, while other segments offer glimpses at the crafting of the world’s monsters and the CGI construction of its landscapes being created “from the ground up.”

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The Witcher launched on Netflix last year and quickly became the most in-demand TV series in the world across all streaming platforms, even surpassing Disney Plus’ Star Wars: The Mandalorian as “the top show” around the globe for one week in December, as 76 million households streamed the first season of the action-packed fantasy-drama.

Season 2 of The Witcher started filming in London earlier this year, with a planned release sometime in 2021. However, the shoot was suspended back in March as Netflix paused filming on all of its films and TV shows in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Netflix has since resumed production on the second season of the hit show after being given the “green light” to start filming again.

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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

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As Tenet begins its release in international markets, we’re taking a look back at filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s entire feature-length filmography, exploring each of his films one day at a time. Today we continue with his second feature, Memento. Read about Nolan’s earliest films Following and “Doodlebug” here.

Full spoilers for Memento follow.

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“I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze.”

That quote by Christopher Nolan, in a 2010 interview with the LA Times, sums up the director’s approach to narrative point-of-view. “Making the turns at [the characters’] side,” he says, “keeps things more exciting.” There’s perhaps no better illustration of this than Memento, his 2000 nonlinear neo-noir thriller, based in part on brother Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori.”

In Memento, protagonist Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) searches for the mysterious “John G,” the man who raped and murdered his wife Catherine (Jorja Fox). Leonard leaves himself a labyrinth of clues via polaroid photos and tattoos on his skin, made necessary by his anterograde amnesia; he hasn’t been able to retain new memories since the day John G attacked him. Every few minutes, Leonard’s brain re-sets, forever trapping him in the moment of his trauma.

In the second part of our deep dive into Nolan’s work, we examine Memento’s unique structure, the way it blurs the line between facts and feelings, and how it’s the ultimate expression of Nolan’s maze concept, albeit one from which its main character cannot escape.

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Backwards and Forwards

What ought to have been a standard revenge flick with a psychological twist becomes a labyrinthine treatise on memory, thanks in part to editor Dody Dorn (who received an Oscar nomination for her work). While placing scenes in reverse-chronological order dates back to the early days of cinema — Jean Epstein’s 1927 film La glace à trois faces (The Three Sided Mirror) uses the technique to expand its point of view, albeit only once — Memento is perhaps the most comprehensive, well known and thematically appropriate use of the form. Watching Leonard’s story means being dropped into situations without nearly enough context; the main plot, therefore, unfolds in reverse.

Two alternating timelines make up Memento: The first, in colour, begins at the seeming end of Leonard’s journey, with each subsequent colour scene showing us what transpired immediately before. The second, an apparent flashback in black & white, functions as exposition, and moves forward in time as Leonard explains his condition to someone over the phone. The film alternates between these two modes of expression — backward and forward, vivid and colourless, instinctive and clinical, now and then — one scene at a time, as if cutting between two trains speeding towards each other, destined to meet in the middle.

Chronologically, it goes: scene 44, scene 1, scene 43, scene 2, and so on, but breaking it down mathematically is a disservice to how instinctive it feels. Each new scene begins and ends with a precise impulse, orienting us in time and place: a note Leonard wrote to himself, the arrival of a new character, a specific object or sound, a state of transformation. More than a logistical roadmap, it’s an emotional one, drawing Leonard further into the mystery. Scenes begin and end in medias res, as characters like Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) pull Leonard into (or out of) what feels like a dream; “Lenny!” he yells, smacking the hood of Leonard’s car, jolting him to attention at the beginning of one scene, and at the end of the next.

Though what we know, and what Teddy does not, is that by the end of the story, he’ll be dead and Leonard will have pulled the trigger. Memento is a mystery in reverse, one in which we have the answers, but slowly uncover the questions. The film begins (much like its predecessor, Following) with the mysterious details of a crime. In the film’s only sequence that plays rewound — disorienting us before we’ve had a chance to get settled — a bullet returns to the barrel of Leonard’s gun (a la Tenet), and a polaroid photo of Teddy’s body begins to fade from existence, like a fleeting memory.

Then a gunshot. Then we see the murder play out, in an abandoned warehouse, and we see what brought Leonard and Teddy there. Though, as the film goes on to reveal, much of Leonard’s journey up to this point is a self-constructed game; a lie he’s convinced of, but one he doesn’t remember telling himself.

The “backward” colour narrative is propelled by Leonard scrambling to uncover clues. He interprets information from photographs, placing them in a specific order and ascribing each one meaning based on notes — as if he’s editing a film, though what he’s really been editing are his own memories. Meanwhile, the “forward” black & white timeline is grounded in the facts of his affliction. He tells the tale of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a man with a similar condition, who Leonard investigated when he worked in insurance prior to his own accident. It’s a time Leonard remembers clearly.

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The “backward” timeline reveals itself through conflict with duplicitous side characters like Natalie (Carrie Anne Moss), a femme fatale who kisses Leonard with open eyes, gazing just off-screen as if she were scheming — like “The Blonde” in Nolan’s Following (or Bonita in 1964 Bond film Goldfinger), embodying fears of intimacy. As the film moves backward, it reveals an unspoken story of a man instinctively using humour and violence to stave off any real human connection in the present.

In contrast, the “forward” flashbacks function as a clinical guidebook to understanding Leonard’s routine, the way he navigates the world, and the film’s own premise. After all, that premise — a man who can’t remember, trying to heal through violence — is the only thing Leonard knows for sure. Everything else is in question.

What Do We Trust More: Facts or Feelings?

Leonard categorizes facts and evidence, but he also finds himself stuck within fleeting moments and heightened emotional states he can’t fully understand. “You feel angry, you don’t know why,” he explains. “You feel guilty, you have no idea why. You could do anything and not have the faintest idea 10 minutes later.” No matter how much Leonard organizes his redacted case files, the memories and sensations attached to his mission still confuse him and throw him off balance.

He trusts his notes more than he trusts his memories, so he creates a base for himself using maps, photographs and tattooed instructions, as explained in the “forward” timeline. It’s a map to his own history, expressed in a black & white visual palette, which we associate with the past (given how colour film has become the language of modernity). These exposition scenes in Leonard’s motel room are focused and contained, portraying old events which have already unfolded — for instance, a clue Leonard tattoos to his skin has already appeared “later” in the timeline. These scenes are ordered in a way we intuitively understand, and can be implicitly relied upon, like factual information with a defined point of origin.

The “backward” timeline, meanwhile, is a journey through sensations. It may not technically be a flashback, but it feels like walking through dreams or memories, as Leonard travels from place to place with no sense of time, and no sense of how he got there. His surroundings are littered with vivid blue objects — his truck, his shirt, the walls of the motel — like constant reminders of the blue marbles that shattered in his bathroom the night of the attack. It’s also a timeline in which he scrambles to write down information, and creates notes that are sometimes contradictory. Given this timeline’s backward structure, it’s fundamentally untrustworthy, like an obtrusive emotion whose cause you can’t identify.

Using the narrative and aesthetic clashes between the two timelines, the film seems to ask: What do we trust more? Something that feels like a fact, or something that feels like a memory? At first, Leonard trusts the system of facts he’s built for himself. However, by the end of the story (or rather, the middle), the colour and black & white timelines fade into one another, leaving little distinction between fact and memory in Leonard’s world. Both are up to interpretation, and the film no longer offers a clear answer.

Both timelines feature their own flashbacks to before Leonard’s accident, which are later revealed to be unreliable; “Memory can change the shape of a room,” after all, according to Leonard himself. When he mentions his wife Catherine, he does so in the “backward” scenes and recalls her in vivid colour; their petty arguments, their playfulness, the minute details of who she was, all of which appear in the form of brief flashes — fragments unmoored from time. It’s a potent expression of the way it feels to love another person, or to remember a love lost. But Catherine exists only in these disconnected moments, shot shakily and hand-held. She’s a distant recollection, and yet, in Leonard’s mind, he only lost her moments ago. He remembers who she was, but not when she was.

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The visual language of the flashbacks changes drastically when Leonard retells the story of Sammy Jankis, in black & white. The camera is more stable and scenes play out in full, as if Leonard were narrating one of his case files. He casts Sammy as a helpless, innocent man, and Guy Pearce plays the past version of Leonard as ruthless and cold-hearted, as if his own self-image is warped by guilt. At first, this appears to be the guilt of having doubted Sammy’s condition, leading Sammy’s diabetic wife (Harriet Sansom Harris) to test Sammy by making him inject her with insulin over and over to see if he’d remember to stop. He didn’t.

Though, as the film goes on to reveal, Leonard has told this story so many times he’s convinced himself of its veracity. The meaning he interprets from his “Remember Sammy Jankis” tattoo has fundamentally changed. Sammy, in truth, never had a wife (if Teddy is to be believed). He was a conman, and it was Leonard’s wife who — having survived the attack by “John G” — tested Leonard with the insulin, causing her to slip into a coma from which she would never wake. But by this point, months, perhaps even years later, Leonard’s bridge to the past is so winding, and so self-deluded, that he can’t even remember if his wife had diabetes.

This revelation places his made-up Sammy “flashbacks” in perspective. The guilt Leonard feels, having caused “Sammy’s” wife to kill herself, is just one of his many misappropriated emotions. Another inexplicable, lingering sensation he still lives with, and wrestles with, but one he has poured into a fictional story since he can no longer trace its origins.

Healing Through Violence

“I don’t even know how long she’s been gone,” Leonard says. “How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?”

The fear of time being unable to repair emotional wounds rears its head throughout Nolan’s work, often taking the form of a dead wife or girlfriend. While the trope is socially malignant from a big picture standpoint — male artists often write female characters only as fuel for their rage, or as disposable extensions of themselves — the version seen in Memento feels more emotionally honest than run-of-the-mill rape revenge stories.

These tales often use women’s trauma as a means to center men’s power fantasies, and while Leonard’s wife is by no means the center of attention — in his mind, her life beyond the attack never even happened — Leonard himself is framed with an awareness towards such genre stories. He has, by lying to himself through his notes (and by stealing suits and fancy cars), created a suave, covert persona, bringing to mind the Bond influence on Following, and several of Nolan’s future films. Only here, it plays like a winking homage; Leonard is an insurance claims investigator biting off far more than he can chew, and the power fantasy is one he both writes for himself and often lucks his way into.

The philosophy Leonard espouses, about being unable to let go of the past, is his wife’s narrative re-spun to fit his own. Sammy’s wife, a figment based on truth, was unable to accept the “new Sammy,” in a story that hints at Leonard having witnessed (and absorbed, in some subconscious way), his own wife’s inability to move forward. The story he creates for himself is similar in theme, but he grafts it onto a self-constructed vigilante identity — Leonard isn’t all that different from Nolan’s Bruce Wayne — living the tale of a righteous man on an endless search for justice, unable to move on until he finds it.

And so, Leonard re-enacts a story akin to a spy movie or detective novel in order to feel a sense of purpose. His lies are more gratifying than having to face the truth of having harmed his wife, and casting “John G” as a phantom mastermind (rather than a junkie he already killed) creates a neat narrative bow for him to chase in perpetuity. This is his “truth,” while his “facts” — manipulated and redacted to send him on his quest — have him returning to an abandoned warehouse to kill the wrong man over and over again. He’s caught in an impotent loop, forever chasing, in his wife’s name, a violent catharsis that will not and cannot last. Or, as Nolan’s brother writes in “Memento Mori”:

“Never-ending grief, never-ending anger. Useless without direction.”

However, Nolan’s “dead wife” trope, while certainly questionable, isn’t just familiar dramatic short-hand. This theme appearing film after film no doubt feels rooted in fears of losing a loved one (and of no amount of time being enough to heal from those wounds). But Emma Thomas, who Nolan married in 1997, isn’t just his wife. She’s also the producer on every single one of his feature films (and his short film, “Doodlebug”). In fact, hers is the very first name to appear in Memento’s closing credits. She is, in many ways, the co-author of his career, so the repeated motif of characters losing their wives isn’t just a narrative crutch. In Nolan’s films, this specific loss is grounded in losing one’s creative partner, and losing a sense of direction. And so, widower characters like Leonard — or Cobb in Inception, whose wife was his co-architect, or Angier in The Prestige, whose wife performed alongside him — are left stumbling around in the dark, in search of purpose.

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Left to his own devices, Leonard sticks himself in a labyrinth from which he cannot escape. He can never see himself from above the maze, winding around each corner the way we, the audience, eventually can. Without anyone to remind him of who he is at his core — an average man, with an average job, and a loving partner — Leonard creates a detached and violent persona instead of trying to heal, willingly facing the back wall of Plato’s cave. (The cave allegory, created by 4th century BCE Athenian philosopher Plato, describes people imprisoned in a cave from birth, and shackled so that they may only gaze at its back wall; to these prisoners, who have never seen the the outside world, the shadows cast on this wall are all there is to reality.)

While guilt, loss and time re-appear in similar permutations in Nolan’s other films, Memento remains an intimate blueprint for much of his work. It would be his first of many collaborations with co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan and with cinematographer Wally Pfister, but it would also be his most clear-eyed expression of themes that, one might argue, would eventually play second fiddle to scale and spectacle in his later films. Granted, few are as adept as Nolan at injecting big-canvas action with personal fears and ideas, but there are no more potent onscreen manifestations of his anxieties than Memento.

During the film, Leonard is asked to close his eyes and remember his wife. “You can just feel the details,” he recalls, with a tinge of nostalgia buried deep beneath layers of grief and regret. “The bits and pieces you never bothered to put into words.” Nolan’s winding timelines and practical stunts are marvels to behold, but they seldom compare to the slow push-in on Leonard’s face, as brief but powerful bursts of memory envelop the screen.

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Siddhant Adlakha is a filmmaker and film critic based in Mumbai and New York. You can follow him on Twitter at @SiddhantAdlakha.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, the popular 2018 game from Funcom (which itself was based on the decades-old Swedish tabletop RPG), is being given a full-length CG animated film treatment. The movie, which is being rendered using the Unreal Engine, is produced by Pathfinder and HaZ Films, and will be directed by Hasraf ‘HaZ’ Dulull, the indie filmmaker behind The Beyond and 2036: Origin Unknown. Watch the first full-length trailer for the film below.

HaZ explains the story of the film as follows, if you’re not familiar with Mutant Year Zero: “The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future, where civilization is rebuilding itself via The Ark , we follow a group of mis-fits, anthropomorphic mutants on a mission to locate the engineer of the Ark who has mysteriously gone missing, and they believe he holds the key to a mystical place of salvation known as Eden.  But the deeper they venture, the more they discover that things are not what they seem outside the Ark, and soon they begin to question their existence as mutants.” He adds, “This is an action adventure movie with the core theme of Hope as the beating heart of the story.”

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HaZ says he was attracted to the film because “I fell in love instantly with the characters of Dux and Bormin, I remember playing the game and just smiling throughout all the cool character moments they had including some hilarious quips, reminding me of moments I love in the great buddy cop style movies.” On the use of the Unreal Engine to render the film, he explains, “We have spent many months (before COVID) developing a unique and efficient pipeline that streamlines the way we produce our animated films with Unreal Engine powered by Nvidia’s Quadro RTX graphics.”

The director concluded by saying, “I am excited to say there is going to be some pretty insane, edge of the seat, wall to wall action like you have never seen before, driven by emotionally charged and extremely witty characters throughout, whilst having a strong story that is full of twists and mystery.  We are going to laugh out loud with the banter and quips between our characters and be emotional moved with the heart felt moments and then gripped with tension and thrown into a rollercoaster of action.” Look for more on the Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden movie soon. If you missed our review of the game, give it a look.

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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.