So, in researching this current art project, I came across an interesting thing: we all scale our perceptions to our own experience. We joke about first world problems, but that’s the thing; for the person who is screaming about how he didn’t get his appetizer as fast as he wanted, or, gee, I dunno, who whined about liking beer in front of Congress, or who maybe killed people because they had nicer business cards than him, those things ARE the worst things ever to happen, because they’re the worst things to happen TO THEM. They’d rate that ten out of ten on their scale, because that’s how they tare their scale.

The depth of feeling is the same as it would be for, say, Katrina survivors - the worst thing is the worst thing. The problem is how many people lack the basic capability to go “oh, not getting a 7 pm table at Prego’s is not the same as having cancer.” Or “Being told you can’t graze your herd on public land for free for years is not the same as systematic racial discrimination over three hundred years.” It doesn’t work any more than that thing we heard way back when about how we should clean our plates because there are starving children in Africa worked. 

The problem is that empathy, or even the ability to recognize that your scale of suffering might not line up with someone else’s, can’t be legislated, it can’t be forced on people. It’s actually somewhere in the physical brain. We evolved to have empathy, and it’s clear that not everybody got it in the kit.  Hell, maybe human society needs the occasional bastard to function, I dunno.  

But the key thing here is that appealing to a lot of people in power’s empathy is not going to work. They will think that because the worst thing ever was the time their frat bros have them a wedgie and they got through that all right, then everybody else’s worst problem can be gotten through just as easily. 

Facts don’t matter because their scale has been tared to a region of human experience where person-to-person interactions are all that matter.  If you’ve never had an experience where the world disagreed with you and you couldn’t tell it “No, there ISN’T a fire burning my house down”, then you have no way to deal with someone ELSE telling you that if you have a gasoline-and-sparklers party in your living room, bad things might happen. 

This is why I think a fair number of anti discrimination activists are attacking the problem where it can’t be hurt. Reason doesn’t work on the people whose scales are set to a region where feelings got hurt. Fairness doesn’t apply to people who haven’t ever experienced unfairness. 

What would work? I dunno. But if somebody thinks that being late for a dinner party is the same as having your children taken away and lost in the system forever, and can’t imagine there’s a difference between them, then you gotta try another way to solve the problem. 

Bear with me here; this takes a bit before I get to the point. So I'm a nominally heterosexual caucasian white male. I have a tiny little amount of street cred when it comes to prejudice and discrimination, but nowhere near enough to justify me going on about it (anti-Appalachian prejudice does exist, but I can pass, kind of thing.) That said, it's bloody well time for everybody to go on about it, because Trump and his fellows have enabled a huge amount of complete assholery and oh-my-god-are-you-really-saying-that that has actual, real world consequences for huge numbers of people across the planet. 

I want to do something. I donate to causes (it's hard to donate to political campaigns in the US from Canada), I vote, all that kind of stuff, but I was at a loss as to what. 

When I sat down and thought about the situation, I had an idea of something I can do. It's not a lot, and it won't actually affect the people who are most complicit in this disaster, but it might nudge the center of the bell curve 0.000001% in the right direction. The thing is, I'm worried about it. 

Here's the idea:

As a piece of art, I'm designing and building a game. Six players, concentric track-based - imagine Trivial Pursuit if it had three circles instead of just one- drawing cards to affect gameplay, etc.  Players draw cards -I'm stealing from Ticket to Ride here - that tell them what they have to do on that game board. So far, so good. 

The key bit is - I am building discrimination into the game rules. Certain players will have a definite, highly unspoken, advantage; they get more choices, they get a starting bonus, they can do things to the other players that  the other players can't do back, and so on. I won't state it in the rulebook that "Player X represents WASPs, and player Y represents Mexican-Americans" - it's just that there are more cards in the deck that let the blue player do things to the yellow player than vice versa. 

I'm thinking about including cards that let the players choose to vote on altering the rules - five out of six players can vote and say that the yellow player can't enter the inner circle, say, or that three out of six can demand the other three give them all their cards. 

It will be entirely possible to play the game so that everybody has the same shot at victory - just don't use the cards that screw other players over.

The goal is to get six male, white, cis players to sit down and play it - and maybe film the thing, maybe not, depending on human experimentation permission. Hopefully, as the game goes on, one or more of the players will realize that they are being systematically dicked over by both the rules and the other players. "Hey," they should say, "This ain't fair. I can't win", at which point I leap in and go "That's the point!"

There are games-as-art out there; there's one called Train that uses the act of playing a game to induce a feeling of complicity in an atrocity (I won't say how, that's part of Train's point). This one, though, isn't about complicity, it's about systematic discrimination.

The thing is: I am nervous. 

I don't want to be a dick. I don't want to be the white guy co-opting the oppression of others. I don't want to be Kevin Costner doing Dances with Wolves and thinking he's doing the First Nations a favor. 

I am, being white, cis, male, etc., complicit in the system that discriminates. I can't speak to the nonwhite, noncis, nonmale experience. What (I think) I can do is address how systems are put in place by people somewhat like me that result in systematic discrimination.

Is this fair?

Can I do this without being a dick?

Yup, that’s me. 

Most of what's on my mind these days are psychological ones: I'm in therapy, I'm going to a psychiatrist on Tuesday for another part of my full work-up, I feel terribly, terribly guilty that I'm not meditating as often as I should, which defeats the whole goddamn point of meditating, etc., etc., etc. Much of the rest of my mind is dedicated to my dog, and my housemate's dogs, which brings me to today's post (fair warning: I use One Post Wonder as a place to work through issues.)

I love my lil' boy, as anyone who has seen my recent Egyptian Face of the Book feed knows. However ...

why the hell do I feel so guilty whenever I think about him?

I live in a pretty small duplex with a tremendously small lawn - when you have dogs, you rent where you can - and Rover is a herding dog, who has lots and lots and lots of energy. I throw the squeaky for him, I try to take him to the dog park as often as I can, he has about three thousand toys, two thousand leashes, he's got a selection of treats that range from the prosaic to the mutant, and so on ... but I feel so incredibly guilty about the lack of running space for him it contaminates everything else in my head when I think about him. 

I wish the ol' ice-cream-scoop-to-the-frontal-lobes approach to mental issues worked, I really do. Because I don't have much else in my life, if my guilt over Rover ruins my appreciation of him, I think I'm going to spiral even further down than I already am.

Which, I should note, sucks.

I just made a decision of no great import. But it took me a long time to make it, it woke up a lot of memories, and I have no better way to process it than to write it out, especially considering how much my brain be broke lately.

so, about, oh, two, three weeks ago, a person who went to my high school when I was there sent a friend request on Ye Olde Booke of Ye Faces. What the hell , I went, and clicked okay. 

Thus beginneth the problem. 

 See, this was a person who had never made a secret of her disdain for me, back in the day. Sure, we’re all a lot older, and hopefully a bit better people, but, still, I have trouble acknowledging one of the few people who DID like me in high school on The Egyptian Book of the Face because I don’t know what to say to him after a good thirty years of radio silence. 

Why would someone who, given the choice between spending time with me and with a slime mole colony, would pick the colony nine times out of ten, want to reconnect? Hell, to connect at all?

If there are readers of this, then you may or may not have seen that comic that went viral this week about the person who found her high school abuser on-line, and was dismayed to see that that person was well-thought of and had a reasonable life. That’s kind of this situation, except that this person wasn’t an active bully, just someone who made the disgust at the thought of me very plain.

It doesn’t help, of course, that this person apparently has done very well indeed in the intervening years, and is now a quite respected scholar at a major university in the UK. I’ve got low-enough self-esteem as it is, and, as petty as I may be, but it kind of twisted the knife with my totally-unlikely-to-get-tenure-and-holding-on-to-sanity-with-the-most-feeble-of-grips situation to see someone who apparently was not only tenured but had been fought over by multiple institutions. 

The decision I spoke of above, by the way, was to unfriend the person. The memories awoken were not helpful, the shame and the perception of myself as a failure weren’t helpful either, and the fact that I’m sliding into a total breakdown was, really, on the unhelpful side, to boot.

I dunno. Maybe I should have used this as a face-ones-anxiety moment.  Maybe I’m worse than I think I am.

I can’t help but wonder, though... why send the request in the first place?

I've been thinking about anxiety and depression and the unfortunate way that they've affected my life, and how, even though everybody bloody has them, apparently no organization is set up to deal with it. However, as I am a) aware that there are others who have dealt with that at much greater length lately (see also Wil Wheaton), and b) that it's kind of dull, I am therefore going to c) talk about Avengers: Infinity War. Be warned, for them as care, here there be spoilers, although I do not intend to sum up the plot nor give any background beyond that which is necessary for a reasonably coherent paragraph or two. Will this be particularly insightful? Will reading this improve your viewing experience? Will you pay three installments of $19.95 each for this amazing TV offer? 

Enh, probably not. 

So. Here we've got a big ol' massive event with oodles and boodles of characters, a special effects budget bigger than some cheaper military hardware, and Tobias Funke in a supporting role. Seriously. He's in there. I saw this thing. I had a good time with it. I'd recommend that people see it. 

And yet, the complaints of several people I've heard, I agree with. They're totally valid.

You have to have seen a bunch of previous movies to get this. There's no way around it - you have to have seen Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Iron Man: Civil War (little joke there), Black Panther, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Thor: Ragnarok at a minimum to know what the hell to make of this thing. Add Iron Man III, Captain America: Winter Soldier and Thor if you want to be thorough. So that's kind of putting up a barrier to newcomers to the series, although based on the box office, that's not doing too much harm right now. 

What it is doing is making this, literally, an event. Not a movie. You can go back and watch, say, Empire Strikes Back, and at least to a certain extent, you can enjoy it, even without watching A New Hope. The cast is small, you can deduce a lot of the backstory just by watching things happen, it makes a certain amount of sense. 

This, on the other hand - I am, like, totally not sure that this will be watchable in five years' time. (Did the accent come through there?) Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark will still be a classic character, sure (although let's face it, two of the three Iron Man movies were ... not great) but will people remember Doctor Strange and Civil War and whatnot enough to get the plot? 

Plus, as an added bonus to my skepticism, I remember what happened with Watchmen. Watchmen was a twelve month comic book limited series to begin with - which is important to remember these days because you can't go into a bookstore without tripping over the Watchmen book and the Absolute Watchmen deluxe book and the Watchmen box set complete with Rorschach mask and the Amazing Garden Weasel. 

I didn't have many people to talk comics with back then, but amongst those I could, we talked Watchmen for hours, every issue. We examined every page for clues: I remember I was convinced - as I'm sure I was meant to be - that Hooded Justice had thrown the Comedian out the window, due to the similarity of hand positions between one frame of the Comedian as a young man being beaten up and another frame of the elder Comedian getting beaten up, just prior to the aforementioned being-thrown-out-the-window. That was so much a part of the Watchmen experience that rereading it today feels like a pale, wan, boring imitation of the original 

Anticipation was a major part of the Watchmen event, just as it was back in 1841 when issues containing the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop caused riots on the docks of New York City (spoiler alert: Little Nell? Dead.) Anticipation is a major - albeit mostly unexamined part - of the impact of any cultural artifact that spreads itself across time. There's a reason James Bond movies used to end with the words "James Bond will return" in some form - in point of fact, as I mentioned the last post I made, Ian Fleming was a master in using anticipation in spackling over the problems in his stories, by putting little interlocking cliffhangers that dragged you ever onwards - and it's the same reason we got so excited when Sam Jackson said those words at the end of Iron Man.

Being told about something and then being told that you can't have it yet makes it all the more exciting, for the same reason that being told about a scary monster is scarier than being shown a scary monster. Once you see it, it's concrete. As Stephen King said in Danse Macabre, the monster may be twenty feet tall, but "at least it's not a hundred." The big Crisis Crossover may be twenty characters big, but, dangit, it's not a hundred characters. 

Not every experience is improved by anticipation, but many are. And this? This is one of them. Every one in the theatre had our own hypothetical movie that we'd be watching in our heads before the lights went down. We always do. (I had a much different movie in my head especially before Green Lantern, but we will talk about that on another day when I have had my lithium.)

So ... this is a firefly in a jar, caught on a summer's night. It will only last so long, and when it's gone, it's gone. 

How is it as a firefly, then?

Well, it's all right. I enjoyed myself.

But you know what movie I went back to last night?

Rampage.

Because it's exhausting. It's damn near three hours long once trailers are included. Stuff gets thrown at you fast enough that you genuinely don't give a crap about a lot of it - and for those who disagree, here's a little test: Name Thanos's henchmen. And if you can, did you know them before the movie? If you get more than one, you're a better man than I am. Honestly, I can't even tell two of them apart - there's the big guy who knocked around Manhattan at the beginning of the movie, and I'm almost positive he was also in Wakanda near the end, with the big dome and the Vision and like that. 

There's whole sequences in the movie that I would pay big money to lose, just to reduce the narrative load a little - and, I'm sorry, but they pretty much all revolve around the Vision and Paul Bettany. When he puts some goddamn life into his voice, he's a good actor. When he's playing The Messiah 2.0, he's not just a snoozer, he's actively annoying ... and it's not helped by the fact that the Scarlet Witch and everyone near her is a moron. Unstoppable bad guy who wants to kill untold quintillions of intelligent life across the universe on his way? Fuck it, get out the ice cream scoop and get that gem off that there forehead. Yes, I know, from a narrative sense, it helps. It plays into the whole "sacrifice your loved one for a greater good" theme/question of the movie, but fuck, it was artificial (in a bad way), it didn't feel organic to the movie, and it let them bring Ms. Plot Device Herself back into the movie - I like the actress who plays T'challa's sister a lot, but she's what The Smart Guy usually is in these stories, which is a way to get yourself out of or into a problem - she's not a character, she's the author saying "Well, Thanos is just going to bloody well show up with this here gem still in the forehead, deal with it" and flipping the audience off. 

I really would have liked more from other sequences, too: Thor's trip to the forgeworld would have been an awesome movie that nobody except me and the other three people who liked Thor: The Dark World would have gone to. I'd have liked more information about Titan - which, thank the Maker, is no longer the moon in orbit around Saturn - and so on.

So it's not the movie I had in my head in that respect: I really hate Q - style characters who Provide The Gear or Solve The Problem but have no other personal arcs or involvement in the story, and Paul Bettany playing Jesus bores me silly. Fine. No worries there. You can agree or disagree on those, and I'll be fine.

I'm sad about two other characters though - one a mischaracterization, and one a wasted opportunity.

Mischaracterization first: Zoe Saldana can play badass. I've seen her. Hell, she was in a movie with three (I think) other actors who're in this movie with her where she was the scariest one (The Losers, if you're interested. I like it, the snuke(sic) aside. Your mileage may vary.)  In Marvel canon, Gamorra is described as the baddest-ass woman this side of Lynda Carter. What does she do here? Whimper and beg the Man in Her Life to shoot her. And as soon as he doesn't, she rolls over pretty much instantly to give Thanos what he wants. This is not badass. Okay, sure, she does a bit of stabbing, but it's vanishingly brief in comparison to the whimpering and the rolling. What the hell, Marvel?

Wasted opportunity second: Captain America: The First Avenger is my favorite Marvel movie. The lead actor plays Cap with a sense of humor. He's got opinions. He's got attitude. He's got a personality. In this? And Winter Soldier? And Civil War? Cap is a stoic, glum character to whom things happen. I know, it's hard writing a genuinely decent character, but Cap (here and in a LOT of recent comics with him) is a total stiff with no personality. The actor (sorry, I know he's a Chris, but I can't remember the last name and I'm not gonna look it up right now. He's not Hemsworth or Pine, but I'm blanking on what he is) is genuinely funny as hell. He was the best part of the Fantastic Four movies, he was the best one in The Losers because he was funny, he has serious comic chops ... and he's asked to play a role that could have been played by Tor Johnson. 

So, after all this, you may be asking "why do you like it, then?"

Well, Zoe Saldana and Paul Bettany and Chris (*mumble*) aside, the actors all do a damn good job. Marvel's got a big group of actors who can steal a scene,  ham it up when needed, and crank it down when needed. Cumberbatch and Downey have good chemistry together, Rocket and Thor play off each other well (although Rocket drops out of focus a bit early in their sequence. He needed more "Whee! Weapons!") 

As a set of character pieces, the movie generally works, Vision aside. They're fun little micro-movies that are well worth watching. 

And then there's Josh Brolin, who totally nails it here. I'm sorry, Andy Serkis, but if there's any justice in the world, you aren't going to be the first guy to win an Oscar for a CG performance, it's Brolin. He makes Thanos believable - it really is Jim Starlin's Thanos up there, but it takes some heavy lifting to make him work, and Brolin does. There's some minor continuity issues between Thanos's appearances, but in general, for once, Marvel has a villain who's not forgettable and wimpy. Seriously; Brolin pulls off a performance that, while perhaps not written as well as, I dunno, Passage to India or something, makes Grimace's butch brother actually have gravitas.

So - this isn't a movie. It's an event. It won't make sense in five years. But it's still worth it to watch the actors work.  

So, this is probably going to be a longer, more in-depth, more passionate post than necessary about a film that does not deserve more thought than whether or not to upsize your combo, but I feel like saying a few words about the slightly-earlier-than-summer summer blockbuster “Rampage.”

To start with, this movie does something that I quite like in general. Readers of TVTropes will no doubt be familiar with such concepts as the obligatory dumbass that does something stupid at the beginning of the movie to show how smart the protagonist is in comparison, or the obligatory hot woman who shows intense interest in banging the protagonist, again early in the movie, to show how amazingly hot HE is, or the obligatory nerdy guy who exists purely to say “You’re supposed to do things THIS way”, just to demonstrate how the protagonist is a loose cannon, man, and you just can’t control him, man, he’s like the wind.

Rampage has those elements. No question about it, they’re there. But they aren’t overplayed. The dumbass is dumb, true, but his dumbness is resolved in about three seconds and information is imparted during the sequence that comes up again later in the film. The hot woman is dealt with in three sentences, and she’s done. The nerdy guy has a legitimate point, and he’s not dismissed as an obstructionist moron like Peck in Ghostbusters. Everybody in the film - with one glaring exception - is doing things as well as they can, at that point in time, with the cards they’re given. 

The one exception is, unfortunately, the primary villian of the piece, a evil nefarious sinister muahahahaha psychopathic woman who may be a scientist or might just be an evil businessperson, but is so over-the -top evil that she’s hard to take seriously. She starts off telling a woman in a exploding space station that she won’t let her off the station without the Plot Device of the movie, and winds up getting her killed, and follows that up with a (admittedly necessary for the screenwriters) incredibly stooooooopid decision to bring all the giant monsters - I’m assuming that anyone reading this is at least vaguely aware of the premise of the film, but for those who aren’t, a brief summary is “giant monsters wreck Chicago” - to downtown Chicago instead of, say, a hundred miles outside of town, which would have been trivial to arrange for her. She’s basically in an entirely different movie from everybody else - only genetics prevent her from twirling her moustache and tying women to railroad tracks - and it’s somewhat jarring. 

To be honest, she’s the reason I suspect that people who don’t like this film don’t like it. The actress who plays her and the director and the screenwriters all made choices for the role, and they chose ... poorly.

I have to admit, though, her sidekick/henchman/brother plays off of her unstoppable evil well - he’s basically the eighties businessman from Futurama, and he’s just as confused by how eeeeevil his sister his as we are, even though he’s willing to go along with the general business plan of “make giant monster-izer/???/profit”. 

I can’t say enough about this particular aspect of the film: the people in it are not stupid. They may be wrong, they may make mistakes, but they are not, Big Evil Businesswoman aside, doing things that put up a big flashing sign that says “I Am Doing This Only Because The Plot Needs Me To Do It Now.” I respect that entirely - it’s one reason why I like Die Hard, and it’s one of the few things that I don’t like about the original Ghostbusters (Walter Peck has a point, goddamnit.)  

The second point I like about this film is that things are not belaboured to death. So, in the film, three canisters of Giant Monster-In-A-Can land at three locations across the US. One of them lands bang in the middle of a forest in Wyoming, and is discovered by a wolf. The Evil Nasty Businesswoman sends her Unstoppable Killing Machine Of A Henchman and his cohorts to go get the canister and/or the wolf. The UKMOAH is depicted as these guys usually are - we see how many attachments he has on his gun, we see how professional he is in the field, and we see exactly how tough he is. Heck, in another movie, he’d be the hero. Hell, basically he was, in a little film called Predator.

It’s a nice, tight little sequence, seeing him and his crew find the impact point, get spooked by animals, all the usual things ... and then the wolf shows up and we get the entire rest of Predator happening in about two minutes as his entire team gets eaten, culminating in the UKMOAH himself getting killed by the wolf. Bang, we’re over, done, and out. Nice, tight, well-constructed, showing how much of a threat the wolf is without making us watch twenty minutes of unneeded characterization and/or padding. This happens several times, actually - we get a setup, we get the information that moves the plot along, we get a pretty-well-done action sequence (although this director is no McTiernan, he does an okay job,) and we move on. I know that, in most movies, we need to have a heightened sense of emotion to make sure the threat is clear, but here, we don’t bloody need it. We have a giant goddamn wolf, we have a city, we need to get’em together as fast as possible, let’s get cracking. 

I’m genuinely surprised at how long the movie is, as well as how short it feels. It works the same was as many of the best Bond films do; a book on Bond that I have calls in the Fleming Sweep - you get carried along from scene to scene and location to location, because you don’t overplay it and you don’t waste time on unnecessary elements, saving time for the bits that do matter. 

Lastly, and this is the thing that made me write this, and is the thing that I suspect nobody else cares about: I am awestruck at how well this movie evokes the feeling that the original source material - the video game Rampage - should have.

The game involves three people mutated into giant monsters - one Godzilla ripoff, one Kong ripoff, and a giant werewolf - who run around an 8-bit city climbing and wrecking buildings, beating up on the Army, and eating people. It’s fast (for the period it came out), mildly funny, and basically tries to capture the feeling of the best of the cheeseball Toho Godzilla movies (There are Godzilla movies that are horror movies, there are Godzilla movies that are science fiction adventure films, and there are Godzilla movies that professional wrestling looks at and goes “Really?”) where you’re rooting for the monsters and the set-builders. 

That’s why, in passing, the Evil Nasty Businesswoman attracted the giant monsters to Chicago. It would have made sense, in the real world, to have all three of the mutated animals of the movie come to some safe point in the middle of nowhere, but that wouldn’t be any fun. 

No, we need our giant ape, our giant wolf, and our giant lizard, all come to some place with buildings they can climb, punch, and grab people out of to eat. It’s incredibly stupid in any universe save the one of Rampage, but here, we get what we pay to see, and that’s a massive shitload of property damage and spectacular giant monkey-on-giant-wolf-or-giant-lizard action.

I am on record as being in favour of the 2014 Godzilla movie - it was designed around the idea of anticipation adding to the pleasure of seeing Godzilla open a can of whoopass, and for me it worked. The final shot of Godzilla giving the MUTO what-for was worth the entire movie, as far as I’m concerned. 

I’m also in favour of Kong: Skull Island, which basically gives you as much monkey action as you could want. Kong versus helicopter, Kong versus skullcrawler, Kong having a bath, Kong versus squid, you want it, it’s there. I love Kong: Skull Island to pieces, because it really understands what we want from Kong in the modern era, and it treats Kong’s status as a giant metaphor for something with respect. (In the modern era, it’s hard to write a story with Kong representing the wild, untamed, urge of the protagonist to get it on with the female lead, so they found another metaphor to use.)

Rampage is somewhere in between - more closely following the Toho paradigm of two-thirds of the movie being people talking about the monsters, and the last third being the monsters kicking ass and taking names. The buildup is good, the anticipation is good, and the payoff is - mostly - deservedly fun.

As a side note, at this point, if you know your memes, there’s a shot of a particular Air Force airplane in flight, during which you WILL say “Let me sing you the brrrrt of my people.” As a long-time fan of that airplane, I highly approve.

That payoff, though, is as close as you can get to the same payoff of the game. I don’t believe that every adaptation needs to follow the source exactly. I’m fine with changes ... as long as they respect the thing that makes the original worthwhile in the first place. 

Rampage does. In spades. It’s not impenetrable to non-players. You don’t have to know a damn thing about the game to watch the movie. But it’s a movie about monsters, buildings, and fucking huge destruction, and the fun you can have when you bring them all together. The goddamn SEARS TOWER falls down during the course of the film. A giant wolf jumps through one building to get to another one. A mutant crocodile tail-whomps a whole bunch of Army APCs into the next area code. 

This is not Super Mario Bros., which takes the game and pees on it. This is not Mortal Kombat, which takes the game and turns it into a pale imitation of Enter the Dragon. It’s not Street Fighter, which ... doesn’t quite work but also doesn’t feature much street fighting at all. This is Rampage. Period. And it does what Rampage does. No subtext, no distractions, just an honest attempt to put a relatable human face on a movie that pretty much exists to wreck as many buildings as possible and eat as many people as possible while keeping a PG-13 rating or under. 

I had a great time. I don’t think I’ll ever call it a classic, but it is so much fun (particularly in those motion-control seats. Really added to the fun) that it doesn’t matter. People who want sensitive human drama - yeah, not for you.

People who want giant monsters wrecking stuff? 

Why aren’t you already in the theatres, dude?