Red vs. Blue: RVBX: Ten Years of Red vs. Blue Blu-ray Review
O brave new world, that has such machinima in it.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, November 9, 2012
I am the father of two teenage sons, and as such much of my home life with them is filled with conversations about
videogames. In
fact, my youngest son partook in an exchange program earlier this year where we had a Chinese exchange student
stay
with us for a few weeks and my son visited the same kid in China over the summer. The Chinese boy had only a
rudimentary facility
with English (much better than my own son's nonexistent command of Chinese, it should be stated), but once my older
son started asking him about videogames, it was like there was no language barrier at all,
and all three boys were instantly on the same wavelength, something that both my wife and I marveled at when it
occurred. My oldest boy has become so proficient at the online component of a game called Starcraft that he actually is
making money
mentoring other players, and in a completely unironic moment, we were advised by one of his teachers that he should
include this "entrepreneurial" quasi-startup on any college admissions form he may fill out in the coming year. This
same
son just recently discovered a very minor glitch in Starcraft which he uploaded to YouTube, generating thousands of hits
within minutes of the posting. Such is the brave new world in which we live. Both of my boys have played Halo through
the years, and in fact
my oldest son did a project for school a few years ago that utilized Halo's built in movie making capability. However, I
still wasn't
really all that up to speed on the long running
Red vs. Blue webisodes until my younger son started showing
them
to me on YouTube (and yes, I was a bit shocked at the language in some of them).
Red vs. Blue is entirely built
around so called "machinima", utilizing Halo's movie making capability along with goofy interpolated voice work to
weave together a now improbably long running tale of two opposing factions. Imagine the obscenity laced ambience of
South Park combined with the sort of dunderheaded peacekeepers of
Reno 911 and you might have at
least a glimmer of the general tone and content of the series.
For those of you either uninitiated into the world of videogames yourselves or not privy to vicarious information
imparted
by your children, Halo belongs to a genre that is called a First Person Shooter (FPS) game. Players have their "avatars",
so to speak, that maraud through various scenarios, and pushing various combinations of buttons on the videogame
controllers allows the player to (hopefully) decimate their opponents before being taken out themselves. There's also
an
online component (via such portals as X Box Live) in Halo, and in fact for some years during my eldest son's middle
school
era, that was his main way of connecting with his buddies after school. A lot of these kids liked using Halo's movie
making
capability to capture their attempts to make it through various levels as quickly as possible, and it became popular to
upload some of the videos to sites like YouTube. But one Burnie Burns saw the potential in this so-called machinima,
bringing a sort of
Mystery Science Theater 3000 ethos to the idiom. With
his buddies, he started
producing
Red vs. Blue, initially planned to just be a sort of silly one-off that was done purely for fun, but which of course
became a major internet sensation and has now provided Burns and his cohorts with nearly a decade of regular "work".
The not always reliable Wikipedia includes the rather odd tidbit that Burns is the son of a Catholic priest and a Catholic
nun; one assumes they had left their relative callings before they procreated, but it may give at least a little insight into
Burns' skewed look at life, at least insofar as it's revealed in
Red vs. Blue. The series is often surprisingly
existential in
tone, with a sort of
Waiting for Godot meets Tex Avery ambience that is both innovative and at times extremely
funny. But there's also a scattershot aspect to
Red vs. Blue, one which becomes especially apparent when you
sit down and watch ten years' worth of material
en masse (something I personally don't recommend). While a
lot of
Red vs. Blue is giddily amusing, there are also long swaths that are unbelievably repetitive and never
quite find their ultimate punchlines.
There are three main story arcs spread across the ten seasons (so far) of
Red vs. Blue. "The Blood Gulch
Chronicles" spanned the first five seasons of the series, "The Recollection" played from season six through season
eight, and the last two seasons have encompassed "Project Freelancer". Burns and his creative crew have done an
amazingly adept job for the most part at keeping the basic concept fresh. What started out as a kind of military themed
parody a la
Gomer Pyle USMC or
No Time for Sergeants has become decidedly more pointed and
philosophical through the years, which is not to say it's not simultaneously juvenile, profane and just plain stupid some
of the time. But despite the (intentionally) lame brained antics and sometimes tepid humor, this is generally a very
smartly written enterprise, one that is post-ironic without ever being so self conscious that it grates. What particularly
impressed me in wading through this rather lengthy outing is how wisely Burns and his crew have built upon the
basic premise and generated some rather nice little developments along the way (not to post any spoilers, but this
series echoes
Lost in its willingness to jettison, if even momentarily, major characters). There is some very well
done interweaving between the three main sections of the story thus far, and in fact "Project Freelancer" casts a whole
new light on much that has gone before.
Part of what keeps the show enjoyable are the very clearly delineated characters, something that's rather amazing
when one considers the fact that aside from their "colors", they're largely interchangeable from at least a visual
standpoint. On the Red Team, we have the ridiculously savage leader Sarge, who of course refers to his grunts as
"ladies" and, a la Kenny in
South Park, is repeatedly offering up Private Grif for sacrifice. Grif's antithesis is
Simmons, obviously Sarge's favorite grunt and one who returns the favor by obeying every order to the letter. There's
also a very funny character named Donut who has a great little arc that covers the first couple of seasons of the show,
where an unfortunate accident leads to his armor being turned pink, which in turn leads the Blue Team to think he's
female. Donut in a way reminded me of Dangle in
Reno 911, a friendly but largely clueless character who coasts
through calamity on nothing more than good will.
The Blue Team has its own assortment of lovable lunatics. Church is the supposed leader of this team, and like Sarge in
the Red Team, conveys most of his orders via furious bursts of temper. Tucker is ostensibly the sharpshooter of this
team but due to one unlucky happenstance after another is never able to utilize his weapon. Much later in the series
there's a pretty funny
Alien-esque (actually kind of
Prometheus-esque) subplot involving Tucker and an
unexpected "delivery". Private Caboose appropriately brings up the rear, and is hilariously confused as to how he even
ended up in battle. Somewhat later in the series, an unfortunate death in the "family" bring Tex, a sort of GI Joe on
steroids type, into the mix. There are also a ton of supporting characters, including robots and (mostly) in the final
seasons a whole "meta" batch of characters who help to keep the proceedings varied.
The technical achievement in
Red vs. Blue may
seem like child's play, but in listening to the
commentaries included on this massive set, it becomes obvious how fiendishly difficult the task at hand is. This is a
fascinating marriage of "pre-existing" visual data (albeit manipulated) and some often unexpectedly intelligent writing.
Is it Art? Who's to say? I know there wasn't one episode throughout the ten seasons here that didn't provoke at least
one hearty laugh, and that's certainly a pretty decent batting average.
