In this new media-synergistic world, we’re now used to seeing merchandise spread out on different platforms: the movie, the officially licensed T-shirt, the videogame, the novelization, the cheap plastic toys that come with your burger. The constant lesson, though, is that quality seems to have an inverse relationship to all this lateral diversification. The videogame rushed to stores before the movie’s opening will usually be in the discount bin before long; the movie made to capitalize on the videogame’s success — well, I hope you only paid matinee prices when you saw them. (I still feel a twinge of sadness remembering that Raul Julia’s last movie before he died was Street Fighter.)
For its marketing campaign, Electronic Arts did it somewhat differently and out of sequence, as it were. Chuck Patton’s Dead Space: Downfall is a feature-length animated film that’s a prequel to their action game “Dead Space”. Or, looked at another way, it’s the sequel to Antony Johnston and Ben Templeton’s comic book “Dead Space” (also downloadable for free as an animated comic from Xbox Live). Either can stand alone, actually, unless you’re interested in a narrative resolution, which is ostensibly worked out in the game.
As the bridge between comic and game — or because it’s a bridge — Dead Space: Downfall is an unremarkable animated horror film. The events take place right after the comic: a space freighter named the USG Ishimura has been ordered to transport a mysterious artifact (called the Marker) back to Earth. Unknown to the crew, the unearthing of the artifact has somehow triggered chaos in the mining colony below: psychosis, mass suicide, and the troubling way in which flesh-eating aliens are inhabiting and reanimating suddenly-famished corpses (called Necromorphs). (But none of this is really in the movie, mind you; it’s the weakest link in this “trilogy”.)
You can suss out the rest, I think. The crew realizes they are not alone on their otherwise hermetically-sealed ship, and, undercooked subplots about mutiny and religion aside, the movie devolves into a point-and-shoot bloodbath. (There’s also the occasional neck-slicing — a wee bone thrown to gorehounds, but it’s just not as satisfying when done cartoon-style.) The game begins where the movie ends: you play the part of an engineer who answers a distress call from the seemingly abandoned freighter. Assigned to restore power to the Ishimura, the engineer soon finds he has his hands full, and that his mining tools do effective double-duty against the mutated dead.
Which is the real reason for this review: “Dead Space” is the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had playing a videogame. The dark set design alone — shock corridors of blood-spattered metal, flickering lights in a morgue, twisted beams of steel from a hole in the ship during a panicked spacewalk — is superb.
The sound design, for instance, is fantastic: the scrabbling of creatures in the vents overhead, disembodied whispers and moans, metallic groans and creaks, even the sound of babies crying. In Dolby Digital 5.1 it’s an amplified nightmare, and I found myself gripping the controller so tightly my knuckles hurt, afraid to go around a corner. “Dead Space” produces a more direct somatic reaction in the player. They aren’t called twitch games for nothing, after all.
One can, of course, treat the game as a first-person shooter and charge through hallways with rail guns and rippers blazing, but you’d miss the point. It’s like how Hitchcock delineated the difference between surprise and suspense. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of hesitating before a closed air lock, knowing that the hallway it opens to will be infested with creatures — not because the game is structured that way, but because you can hear them seething and scratching behind the door.
Or you stand at one end of a corridor, the moment after you see (or did you really see it?) a large tentacle slither across the opening on the other side. Sure, there are a good number of horror-movie jolts, complete with deafening sound cues, but on the whole it’s a relatively quiet game. (On the Easy level of difficulty, there are even less Necromorphs, making it less of a shooting game like, say, House of the Dead, and more of a creeping game.) It’s all about the primal terror of walking into the dark and being scared of monsters — except that they really are “there”.
It’s the relationship between game and film that interests me — and not necessarily this film, but other science-fiction movies in general. There’s nothing particularly original about its plot elements: the Marker comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, while the game and film clearly steal their structure and aesthetic from Event Horizon (which itself borrows a smidgen from Solaris) and the Alien Quartet.
What’s fascinating about “Dead Space”, though, is that it’s very much dependent on those cinematic conventions, or rather, the game-playing audience’s familiarity with those specific films. That is, you expect something to burst through the vents above you because you’ve seen it in the movies. It employs a form of verisimilitude that’s not related to the material world, but a precisely filmic one. The videogame both employs Alien‘s structuring tropes and puts the viewer within the same movie. At least for a few nerve-shattering hours — or at least until you stand up, freaked out, turning on all the lights in the house — you’re in the Nostromo itself.
“Dead Space” is the cinematic horror experience that Dead Space: Downfall should have been, and their relationship to each other, media synergy or not, is precisely the opposite. As Hollywood blockbusters (and animated films like this one) approach videogame territory in terms of their pacing and editing, videogames like “Dead Space” (and perhaps “Grand Theft Auto IV”) become more cinematic in their aesthetic and narrative depth. But one wonders as well whether “Dead Space” is closer in spirit to the cinematic experience in which viewers found themselves when they watched the Lumière brothers filming that train in 1895. It may be 21st-century technology, but what “Dead Space” seems to do is replicate the shock of the old, bringing the audience nearer to the immersive quality of early cinema.
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