Rez and The Fountain

It was my 26th Birthday yesterday, and in order to make myself feel old and realise how quickly life seems to be passing me by, I started thinking about those moments in my life that you never forget. It's been over four years since the moment I first played a demo of Rez on the PS2. Having ditched console gaming in favour of the downright-better-in-every-way PC, I was surprised to be playing a game so elegant, so intelligent, so esoteric and just so damn great. It was so attuned to the way I thought games should be that I immediately went out and bought myself a Dreamcast and a copy of the game.

I spent months playing it, playing levels over and over again, just admiring the sheer beauty and breathtaking purity of the game - it wasn't trying to be cinema or a comic book - it just was a game. I wrote pages and pages of notes for my dissertation on the game, and did a lot of research into Kandinsky and synaesthesia, as well as the nature of religion in games. Swept away in such an incredible deluge of information that I couldn't see any way to feasibly construct a meaningful 10,000 word essay on the subject, I chose to write about Half-Life instead.

The concept in Rez that I found most fascinating and frustrating was the nature of the balance between science and religion in the game. Set within a computer whose rampant AI has reached a critical point, the player character must destroy "viruses" and set free the core which has evolved into a beautiful woman. Or something. It's a bit confusing, and the game plays like sitting in a shopping trolley being hurtled down a darkened alley whilst someone throws radioactive Transformers at you. Anyway, what's fascinating is that within this setting the AI has its own notions of religion (in particular Buddhism), as witnessed in the imagery of the levels - huge temples and meditating avatars. It struck me that thematically it had much in common with Darren Aronofsky's film pi, in which a scientist uncovers a pattern of numbers which seemingly hold the key to both science and religion. It doesn't say science and religion are the same, merely that there are similarities and neither can answer the really big questions we have about life.

Which brings me on to Aronofsky's latest film, The Fountain. A love story set over a period of a thousand years, the film deals with protagonist Tom Verde's immortality after drinking the sap of the Tree of Life. Watching the trailer, the visual similarites of the "future" third of the movie to Rez are uncanny - both feature a meditating guy in a ball floating through a futuristic environment. I often wondered if, or how, one would be able to project Rez's synaesthesia on the big screen, and hopefully this is it. I hope that when the film is released in March 2007, I get another one of those moments, this time sitting in a cinema.

Labels: Feature

posted by Henry @ 7:01 pm