Red Faction: Origins

Speaking of liquefying and brains, let's meet our cast of intrepid Factioneers! Carrying the burden of cool badassery on his square masonic shoulders is Grip Wreckblast Jake Mason, hardass Martian warrior princeling, who knows all of the weird tricks to surviving life in the harsh outlaw deserts of Mars, like for example:

• If you walk into the toughest dive bar in Mars Eisley, it's perfectly fine to just order a glass of water, and nobody will call you a pussy, because water is cool and refreshing to drink on a hot, tough day
• How to tell that glass of water from the insidious but nearly-identical Roofie Colada, and why you should for some reason order and pay full price for said Roofie Colada anyway even though you have no intention of drinking it
• If you try to murder a Martian Irish hobo but then change your mind, he owes you a life-debt and is now your best Martian friend forever (BMFF)

Above all, Jake specializes in pausing the action to have really long and impractical flashbacks to his traumatic abduction-filled childhood, because character development through dialogue is way harder. At least we're in the hands of a pro director, who knows that vignetting is synonymous with both trauma and art as a whole, and proceeds to use it in every part of every frame of every flashback because that's just what memories look like:

Despite the fact that he's generic enough to be, well, a video game protagonist, Jake is really the only being in this miserable tale that actually registers as a character of some kind. There's lots of assorted cannon and/or plot fodder running around:

• Jake's hyper-alcoholic Randy Quaid-esque shell of a father, who is the hero of some stupid Marsxist revolution or another and drinks to forget about it or who he is or why he agreed to appear in this movie at all
• The eyepatch guy, who kind of looks like the mexican guy who pretended to be an indian guy on Star Trek: Voyager, only with an eyepatch (yes, his character is so bland this is the best thing we could come up with to say about him)
• His menacing army of GI Joe KKK ninjas
• The aforementioned crazy Martian Irish Hobo (might also be a wizard, we're not sure)
• His son, the god-prince of the space gypsies, whose sole contribution to the film is getting date raped because the producers ran out of ideas
• Our personal favorite, Dirty Earth Lady aka Leetza Haksu aka Somebody Delavega, who seems to exist just to be a really indignant lightning rod for all of the weird confusing anti-Earth stereotypes and epithets that the Martian culture is apparently teeming with.

While we're on the subject, we'd like to take a moment to clear some things up here. There've been a lot of nasty, hateful rumors and ridiculous myths getting spread around lately by people from a certain red planet about people from a certain blueish greenish planet and it's about time somebody spoke up and set the record straight. For example, it's actually NOT true that people on Earth carry umbrellas everywhere all the time in case of rain and then laugh casually and twirl their umbrellas when it doesn't rain because it's really no big deal since it'll just rain some other time anyway, or that everyone on earth lives on/next to an ocean and eats nothing but crabs and seal cheeks all day while they take their yachts to work through the Panama Canal.

Sure, maybe there're a few bad eggs here and there, like the idiot frat boys lighting their farts on fire on YouTube, or printing out rasturbated posters of the face of Mars and drawing dicks all over it/making it look like he's picking his nose, which is so offensive to native Martians that there's not even a direct translation for it (although one political philosopher at Briggs Crater Community College reportedly described it as being akin to the image of slapping God in the face with a dead shriveled whale dick, which is sort of a metaphysical double-whammy because whales don't even exist on Mars) -- but it doesn't mean we're all a bunch of vulgar gluttonous avocado-gobblers down here!

On the flipside, we here on Earth could really do a better job of keeping stark Martian sensibilities in mind. Next time you take our rich, thick atmosphere for granted by setting a forest fire or smoking one of those yard-long "El Presidente" cigars at your Douglas Quaid Memorial weekend marathon backyard bonfire-BBQ, maybe at least take a moment to appreciate the natural gifts of breathable atmosphere and clean, natural water untainted by roofies that you're actively destroying because it's really fucking fun and feels downright great to do. Or don't, we don't give a shit.

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)