Review of "Broken Saints" (online version)
"Less is more."
-- Adage ignored in overlong review of overlong webcomic
*WARNING: SPOILERS*
Summary
"Broken Saints" is no mere webcomic but (*cue pretentious music*) a piece of "cinematic literature" (according to the site's FAQ) which appeared online from 2001-2003. It's an apocalyptic science fiction tale of four strangers whose paths cross and form an alliance to save the world from a biotech corporation with a mysterious agenda to reconfigure humanity.
I consider the 12+ hours I spent with "Broken Saints" to be more of an endurance test than an entertainment experience. It was poorly written, with mediocre illustrations and overstuffed with the most heavy-handed sermonizing in a story since "The Celestine Prophesy". While lauded as a technical marvel for its use of Flash, I found the presentation to be painfully slow and exhausting.
The FAQ advises viewers who complain that it's too slow to use that extra time to "Read the words again…chances are you missed a hidden meaning or reference." Here's a representative sample of what we are supposed to mull over while waiting for the program to advance:
If that kind of prose strokes your psyche, then "Broken Saints" may be an ideal comic for you, because all the characters speak in a similar over baked manner dripping with angst and cosmic portent.
Layout/Navigation/Animation/Sound
I downloaded the entire program chapter by chapter on to my hard drive to avoid any connectivity issues while watching. I started viewing with my monitor set at my standard 1024x768 resolution, but then switched to 800x600 which maximized the "BS" screen size and centered it nicely on the hosting HTML background.
While it has no formal pause function, by right clicking and deselecting "Play", you can usually freeze the image or at least remain within a sub-section loop of animation within an individual program. So it sometimes seems like it's still continuously playing but it's really only playing with a particular sequence (which is still better than getting blasted back to frame one of the chapter). By doing this, my initial frustration with the technical aspects of "BS" was eliminated. I still didn't like the fact that you couldn't step back or easily go to any specific frame within the program. I guess I've been too spoiled by the convenience of DVD's.
Viewers who get distracted must start again from the beginning. Distractions make you miss the subtle symbolism.
"BS" has been described as "limited animation", but this is a bit misleading, because we are talking really limited animation here. There was little artistry of motion on display. Many of the animation's didn't work well at all and would have been better left alone. When characters moved their limbs or moved across screen, it looked awkward and unconvincing, like paper cutouts being dragged. When the camera moved in or pulled back, the imagery became jittery and unstable looking. Much more effective and impressive were the lighting/atmospheric effects and general transitions between scenes.
I found the use of sound and sound effects to be very effective and the overall score of "BS" was appropriately moody and went a long way to help keep get through the program.
I agree that "BS" deserves some accolades for not being a typical, lame, comedy based Flash cartoon, and breaking free of that Flash mode, but I don't think its own technique really succeeds either. I found the more modest, reader-controlled approach to Flash used in "Vicious Souvenirs" to be more effective. If you don't have voice actors to set the pace of the dialogue, then it's really frustrating to have to read and then wait and wait. If my personal reading speed had set the pace, I could have viewed the program in a fraction of the time. It sounds like this issue was resolved in the DVD where they do have voice actors. So to answer the Furilius question, maybe the DVD is the definitive version, but I can't really say.
The end ain't for another 11 hours yet, so hang in there.
Art
The artwork was just okay, serviceable for this kind of genre tale, but unimpressive. The actual compositions and layout of elements within a shot were fine, it was just the rendering of the elements that were rather weak. There were no memorable images I'd want to save as wallpaper or frame as a poster. Because the nature of the presentation forced the viewer to linger on images far longer than one would in a normal comic, it only made the flaws more apparent. The characters were often stiff and awkward. The faces didn't reveal a lot of nuance of personality. Even if the artist didn't have time to create a new full figure pose for each new word balloon, hey could have done a better job at doing minimal adjustments to the character expressions to match what was being said.
Two of the expressive faces from "Broken Saints"
City backgrounds and interiors were often lacking details. I wouldn't have minded a stylized simplicity, but the choices of what to render and what to leave out just made the scenes look unfinished instead of intentional. Nature scenes were much better. Overall I found the coloring and color schemes to be fairly effective at conveying a mood.
Writing/Story/Characters/Themes
I'm astonished at how many awards "BS" has won, including a Sundance Film Festival Award. I can't imagine anyone familiar with good science fiction (or just basic storytelling) sitting through this entire thing and being impressed. It took forever for the story to get even marginally interesting. The tale didn't start click into gear for me at all until Chapter 16 when two of the main protagonists actually take initiative and start to DO something.
The four main characters were all rather dull and had little nuance or richness beyond their defining character traits. Raimi is the cynical, callow young American hacker genius (think Neo from "The Matrix" without the messiah complex) who occasionally made undercutting wisecracks (brief moments of comedy in an otherwise humorless work). Oran is an intense Iraqi warrior, devoted to Allah. Kamimura is a wandering Shinto priest wrestling with the burden of a past obligation. Shandala is an empath woman raised by native Fiji islanders who fills the goddess/messiah role. All of them would be fine as two-dimensional figures in a shorter work, but as I spent so much time with these character, their lack of depth became increasingly disappointing. I just don't think the writer really cared about them as people; they served as mere vehicles to convey some aspect of the grand philosophical themes.
Don't get me wrong, I love grand philosophical themes in science fiction and consider it almost an essential component of the genre. Most all the great works of sci fi ("Dune", "Childhood's End", etc.) are also about religious/philosophical discovery. But you want to discover the insights along with the characters and actually feel the sense of transcendence (think Jodi Foster in "Contact", Richard Dreyfus in "Close Encounters", Paul Atreides in the novel "Dune", Dave Bowman in "2001", etc). In "BS", the viewer is hammered constantly frame after frame with New Age truisms, so by the time you get to the supposed "big truths" at the end, the wad has been shot, and the viewer is already exhausted from insight overload.
In "Broken Saints" no character is too minor to deliver a sermon. Pearls of wisdom from a newsstand vendor.
You know how in the climax of films with supervillains (like James Bond movies), the villain will go into his gleeful monologue about how no one appreciates his mad genius and how his nefarious scheme is justified from his own warped perspective. Those speeches can be a lot of fun in a twisted kind of way (think Syndrome in "The Incredibles" or Ozymandias in "Watchmen"). But imagine a speech like that going on for like a half hour! At that length, it's no longer fun; it becomes a goddamn insufferable lecture. And in "BS" it's delivered in two parts, first by the villain as hologram and then by the flesh and blood version. Twice the fun!
"Pop's layin' down the straight dope, so listen up you wanna-be heroes."
Learn of everything that ails the modern world in the full-length lecture.
But that's just the most extreme example of the kind of over-the-top sermonizing that "BS" engaged in constantly. The writer seemed more in love with his agenda of ideas than in telling an effective story. He should have just written a theological treatise first, gotten the sh*t out of his system and then used the choice bits to infuse the story. Every symbol was underlined in "BS" from the ship named "Revelation" to the island named "Heaven". The overstuffed tale attempted to address every theme man has ever contemplated, but 'subtlety' was the one missing element in the world "Broken Saints".
WAKE UP you lazy dreamers! Something significant is happening in every damn frame of "Broken Saints!
In the entire epic, there was but one chapter (Chp 18, Act 1) that I really enjoyed. It was a tarot reading scene, and finally, I got some of the intended cosmic buzz. It involved a street-smart albino psychic who, in her brief scene, seemed more alive than any of the other characters. Her tarot card reading was creepy, humorous, mystical, deep and most importantly, it made me actually want to know what happens next. Hurray for effective storytelling!
Allusions To Better Works
Sorry folks, this rant ain't over yet. After sucking up twelve precious hours of my life, I'm entitled to some payback. I think what annoyed me most of all about "BS" was its constant (and I do mean constant) allusions to vastly superior works.
Only 12 precious hours of my life, Jesus.
In an all to obvious nod to Alan Moore's "Watchmen", "BS" bookends each chapter with a pair of theme-setting quotes from literature, music, film, history, etc. In "Watchmen" it was a brilliant extra accent to already ground-breaking work. Here it felt forced, more hammering of themes in a work already theme-heavy and story-light.
Images and concepts liberally borrowed from "Twin Peaks", "The Matrix", "The Wizard of Oz", "Brazil" only made me long to return to those genuinely imaginative worlds. Every time I saw a background poster or homage bumper, I kept thinking that I could be watching "A Clockwork Orange" right now or "Eraserhead" or "Fight Club" or "Monty Python", or even all of them if I were using my 12 hours more wisely.
Oh, is it ever painful. But at least the needle is quicker.
My irritation reached its peak when a character started singing the Roy Orbison song "In Dreams" during a horrific scene. Now this song never had a specific horror association until David Lynch famously used it to such unforgettable effect in "Blue Velvet". To see it used here in such a similar context just cheapened the whole experience and really annoyed me. I know that movies borrow from each other all the time, but I guess there's a way to do it where it's fun or clever and then there's the "BS" groan-inducing variety.
Even more offensive from a human perspective was the extensive use of famous photographs of horrors from the 20th century that get streamed at the viewer in a climactic montage. Combined with the villain's monologue they attempted to tackle EVERYTHING: Hiroshima, pharmaceutical companies, Tiananmen Square, mad cow disease, Holocaust victims, Vietnam War executions, Gandhi, JFK, nuclear weapons, starving children in Africa, you name it. This went beyond mere pretentiousness. It totally cheapened these real world tragedies to have them framed in such a cheesy fashion within this cornball comic.
After endless hours and so many false finales, could this possibly be the final final climax?
Overall
Despite everything I've said, I'm glad the creators had the hubris to attempt and tenacity to complete such an ambitious work as "Broken Saints" (and it does deserve an "A" for ambition). As a critic, I'm glad I've seen it, because I think it really helped me understand just how wrong a graphic novel can go in a particular direction. I don't feel guilty that my review was too harsh, because a steaming review will actually make some readers more curious to check it out than a tepid negative reaction would. If you are interested in exploring "BS", I'd say give the first couple chapters a shot, and if you're not into it, don't give up yet. Jump to Chapter 16 and start from there and give a few more chapters a try. I suppose under the proper circumstances of sleep deprivation or mind-altering drugs, each droplet of profundity might strike the viewer with the intended revelatory 'oohs' and 'ahhs'. But for me, it lacked the compelling characters and drama needed to allow the themes to actually resonate as they did in the many superior works that "Broken Saints" was constantly quoting and alluding to.
"Work smarter, not harder."
-- Adage for aspiring writers of epic graphic novels |
