Gamer Cinema: Dante's Inferno

Dante's Inferno is sort of a weird beast. The game was EA's fairly shameless attempt to do a God of War rip-off, and it was seen a such, coming and going without much fanfare. But EA also does this thing with a lot of the properties they own where they are making direct-to-video animated films (that are surprisingly graphic and violent). Even though the game didn't make much of an impression, there apparently is a full length feature film coming out. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to check out the animated feature.

I admittedly have no clue how close this sticks to the game as I never played it (not a huge God of War fan not to keen to play an obvious knock off) , but I'd imagine at least the premise is the same-Crusader Dante's fiance is brutally murdered and stolen away by Lucifer and he must travel through all the stages of hell to rescue her, facing various challenges along the way. Pretty straightfoward right?

Except that Dante is a downright awful human being, and this is slowly shown throughout the movie. Yet Dante always seems to react to this stuff like it's a sudden revelation, like he was in complete denial of how much of a bastard he is. It's hard to sympathize with a guy who acts like he's a wronged innocent one second and then a complete bastard the next (and this happens in nearly every stage of hell). Granted, he's trying to rescue his fiance who is completely innocent, so points there, but he completely brought this on himself in every way possible, he shouldn't really get any redemption here.

Plot and character issues like that aside, it's still fairly watchable, just kind of uninteresting. The animation takes an interesting direction, as each circle has a different style to it., but that's the biggest positive I can give here. Much like the game it's based on, Dante's Inferno is pretty forgettable with a hero that's extremely hard to root for on any level.

That's it for today, I should definitely have a post up this weekend with thoughts on this weekend's big releases-Skylanders Swap Force & Pokemon X/Y.