PC Pick-and-Mix: Observing Dark Sorrows At the Second Gate

It’s time more reviews of PC games I had enough thoughts on to talk about here but not enough to do full articles on. This time, I’ll tackle a cyberpunk survival horror game with a very familiar face, an extraordinarily pretty point-and-click adventure, and a Baldur’s Gate game, but not the one everyone’s excited about right now.

Observer

In the far-off future of 2084, tech corporations exert more power than national governments, a terrible pandemic (the nanophage) has recently torn through society, and a years-long war rages in eastern Europe as relations between Russia and the West have declined alarmingly. (Note: Observer was published in 2017, so we can only assume that developers Bloober Team employ actual psychics.) Poland has fallen under the sway of the Chiron Corporation, which was able to exert authority and keep the infrastructure going when the government itself collapsed. On the streets of Kraków, Daniel Lazarski is an Observer – a police detective able to tap into people’s brain implants in order to probe their inner psyches.

One day, Lazarski gets a call whilst he’s on shift from his estranged son, Adam, which he is able to trace to a disgusting apartment block in the Stacks – a downmarket area of Kraków largely occupied by an underclass of “Class C” citizens. Tracking down Adam’s apartment, Lazarski discovers a headless corpse. Is Adam dead, a murderer, a bystander, or something else? Lazarski is determined to find out – but he’ll have to do so without backup, because the apartment block has abruptly come under lockdown, despite there being no evidence of a nanophage outbreak. Lazarski’s investigation is not made easier by the fact that the residents of the apartment complex tend to be eccentric, alienated, and often outright broken – and Lazarski himself is finding that his sense of what is real is becoming attenuated.

Worse yet, the killer seems to be trapped in the apartment complex too, and to get crucial information Lazarski must use his Observer abilities in the most dangerous and forbidden way possible: to interrogate dying and dead minds…

Doctor Who: Seven’s Sonic Seasons, Part 1

As I’ve previously described, Big Finish announced the arrival of their Doctor Who audio dramas with the oddball multi-Doctor adventure The Sirens of Time, followed by a brace of stories featuring the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors to establish their credentials at telling solo stories featuring the Doctors of the 1980s. Over 1999 and 2000s, they continued to put out their monthly range, expanding each Doctor’s line of audio dramas until they eventually had done the equivalent of a short season of the television show for each of them.

For this article, I’m going to look at their early Seventh Doctor stories, following The Fearmonger. On the one hand, the Seventh Doctor’s brief television run ought to have set him in good stead for adaptation to the audio drama format – his seasons of the show were good enough to act as a showcase for how writers could get the best out of McCoy’s interpretation of the Doctor, but were brief enough to leave all sorts of directions unexplored. On the other hand, the Virgin New Adventures had taken the character in an odd new direction which on the one hand would never have flown on television, but on the other hand had been broadly embraced by the fanbase. This left Big Finish at a crossroads with their Seventh Doctor material: do they mimic the TV show, follow the lead of the New Adventures, or try to find their own way?

The Genocide Machine

The Doctor and Ace have come to Kar-Charrat – a jungle world that is home to a vast library that rivals even the Matrix of Gallifrey for the sheer range of information it contains. Chief Librarian Elgin (Bruce Montague) is only too glad to greet the Doctor, who becomes quite interested in the new “wetwork” technology the library has deployed for data storage. Meanwhile, spacefaring antiquities thief Bev Tarrant (Louise Faulkner) and her team are excavating a nearby ziggurat – said ziggurat being the latest antiquity Bev has been assigned to steal – when they are assailed by violent robotic pepperpots YELL-ING ANG-RI-LY. It’s the Daleks – but what are they doing here?

Penned by Mike Tucker, The Genocide Machine is the first of the loose Dalek Empire series which ran through the Doctor Who monthly range in its early years. In theory it’s a connected arc, but in practice it doesn’t seem like there’s much connecting the arc beyond “here’s this incarnation of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks on Big Finish”; the Dalek Empire title would later be assigned to a Doctor-less spin-off series about the Daleks doing one of their bids for galactic domination and some homebrewed heroes trying to stop them.

Pam Grier and Jack Hill: Crafting the Archetype

Blaxploitation as a subgenre is an absolute minefield. At its best, it led to Black actors, writers, directors, and other creative parties getting to make compelling B-movies with better representation than had been seen in prior years, often with the backing of significant studios. At its worst, it indulged in all the bad habits of 1970s exploitation cinema in general with added racial frisson making everything more problematic. White directors and writers jumping into the genre could, perhaps, be expected to be especially prone to the latter failure mode, especially if they glossed over some of the radical politics behind early genre works and just went broke out the obvious aesthetic tropes of the genre (slap bass, pimp hats, you know the deal).

On the other hand, some managed to be better allies; in particular, the movies that Jack Hill wrote and directed as vehicles for Pam Grier, Coffy and Foxy Brown, have proved ripe for examination from a feminist perspective over the years, since they’re essentially hard-edged action movies with a Black woman in the lead role at a time when merely seeing a woman taking the lead in such a movie was a rarity. With Arrow Video having put out blu-ray versions of both, let’s see how they stand up some 50-odd years later.

Coffy

Flower Child Coffin (Grier) is an emergency room surgical nurse turned bloodthirsty avenger, intent on taking out the drug pushers she blames for getting her younger sister LuBelle (Karen Williams) hooked on the drugs that have ravaged her body and left her unresponsive in a rehab facility. Saving lives in her day job and taking them in her spare time is doing a serious number on her, and worse yet Officer Carter (William Elliot), her police officer ex-boyfriend, has ended up stumbling across one of her murders; despite the fact she set the scene up to look like one of her victims shot the other then overdosed, Carter doesn’t buy that narrative, and disaster beckons if he digs deeper. What’s more, the more Coffy damages the local organised crime racket, the more a different and even more vicious syndicate moves into the vacuum.

Still, things are looking up – her boyfriend, city councilman Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw), is running for Congress – and Carter might in the long run be more interested in taking down the corrupt cops he works alongside than discovering the truth behind two gangsters’ deaths. Yet Howard has a web of business interests across the city he holds with the assistance of some silent partners he isn’t too specific about – and Carter’s own partner on the force is in on the racket. When Carter won’t play ball, a couple of masked goons bust down his door, beat him bloody, rough up Coffy for good measure, and then one of them tries to rape her into the bargain before his buddy, aware that they really need to be gone quick if they’re going to get away with this, pulls him off. With Carter left comatose with severe brain damage, Coffy doubles down on her path of revenge – but is she ready for where it will lead?

Cannibal Holocaust: The (Video) Nastiest of Them All?

Content warning: Look, this is about fucking Cannibal Holocaust. The title alone ought to give you a hint we are getting into a grim area. On top of the obvious subject matter, this review will also include brief discussions of scenes involving rape and abortion, behind the scenes stories of abuse and coercion, and some discussion of cruelty towards animals.

Young documentarian Alan Yates (Carl Gabriel Yorke) and his buddies undertook a journey into a region of the Amazon known as “the Green Inferno”, intending to catch on camera the most extreme practices of the indigenous cultures for a documentary of the same name. The four young Americans and their local guide never returned. Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman), an anthropologist from New York University, undertakes an expedition to try and see if any of them survived. When Harold and his guides from the military arrive at a Yacumo village that Yates’ crew visited, they are greeted with a sort of mute theatrical demonstration of rage and fury. It’s evident that something went down here – something the Yacumo found abhorrent, and that has riled up the two local groupings of cannibals which the Yacumo themselves are profoundly wary of, the Yąnomamö and the Shamatari.

Eventually, Harold discovers that the Yates team met their fate at the hands of the Yąnomamö, but through a careful process of cultivating trust Harold is able to gently persuade them to hand over the film reels that Yates and his team shot for the documentary. Returning to New York, Harold is prevailed upon to participate in a special news program, the centrepiece of which is to be the material shot for The Green Inferno. When the time comes to review the Yates team’s footage, Harold is perturbed to learn that Yates’ last documentary, The Last Road To Hell, was a Faces of Death-esque mashup of execution and atrocity footage from around the world – some of which Yates staged. Is that really the background of someone who can be counted on to show professional ethics on a shoot like this? No, no it isn’t – and bit by bit, the The Green Inferno reveals the utter extremes to which Yates and his team went to get the footage they wanted…

I hadn’t planned on owning Cannibal Holocaust on Blu-Ray – but when CultFilms ran an IndieGoGo campaign to make a 4K restoration of Suspiria, one of the backing options included a stack of nine Blu-Ray releases from sister label Shameless’ catalogue, and Cannibal Holocaust was part of that pile. Even then, I didn’t get around to watching it until recently. (Ahead of it in the queue were Four Flies On Grey Velvet, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Torso, All the Colours of the Dark, The Church, and The Sect; the two I’ve not got around to watching yet are Almost Human and The New York Ripper.)

Still, I have it now, I may as well review it. Cannibal Holocaust is far and away the most infamous movie to come out of the late 1970s/early 1980s wave of cannibal-themed horror movies churned out by the Italian B-movie industry, kicked off by Umberto Lenzi’s Man From Deep River. Ruggero Deodato, director of Cannibal Holocaust, had previously directed a fairly typical entry in the genre in the form of 1977’s Last Cannibal World, which followed the standard plot blueprint of “outsiders come to jungle, outsiders come under threat from a cannibal tribe, bad shit ensues”.

David Lynch: The Later Features

After his first three movies caused an arthouse stir (Eraserhead), took his surrealist vision mainstream (The Elephant Man), and yielded a legendary bomb (Dune), the next phase of David Lynch’s career saw him becoming a cult figure. Blue Velvet unveiled his dark vision of cruelty and abuse lurking behind the facade of small town America, and paved the way for the major cultural moment which was Twin Peaks, and off the back of that he was able to make eccentric movies like the off-kilter road movie Wild At Heart and the industrial rock psychological thriller Lost Highway.

People didn’t know it at the time, but it seems like Lynch only had three more movies in him; certainly, after this last flutter of movie-making activity from 1999 to 2006, Lynch has moved away from feature films as a format, putting out short works (ranging from enigmatic originals to music videos to adverts), shooting a concert video for Duran Duran, indulging in a bit of acting, music, and painting, promoting Transcendental Meditation, and generally doing what appeals to him. His most substantial work of the past 18 years or so is the third season of Twin Peaks.

As of 2021, there was some suggestion that Lynch might be working on something new for Netflix; regular collaborator Laura Dern has suggested he’s up to some shit, and what has emerged suggests we should keep our eyes out for more television in the form of something that might be called Wisteria or Unrecorded Night. What doesn’t seem to be coming is a new feature film – and whilst we might luck out and get more from him, it may be just as likely that he’s done with that particular format. So let’s take in these last efforts and see how he bade farewell to the medium which made his name.

The Straight Story

Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a gently-spoken retiree living in Laurens, Iowa. His health is not what it was – his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) finds him having suffered a scary fall in the family home, and his doctor (Dan Flannery) advises him that he really needs to quit smoking or his ailments are going to get worse. In an even more alarming turn of events, Alvin learns that his brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke. Alvin and Lyle fell out ten years ago, and Alvin resolves to go and visit Lyle to finally bury the hatchet.

There’s just one problem: Lyle lives 240 miles away in Mount Zion, Wisconsin. Ordinarily, you could drive that in less than five hours if you don’t take any breaks – call it six or seven hours if you don’t want to push it. Easy visit, right? Well, that’s where Alvin’s own health problems come in: he no longer has a driving licence, and the mix of conditions he has means that getting a new licence is out of the question. And Alvin’s got an ornery streak, and adamantly clings to every scrap of self-sufficiency he has; if there’s a way he can drive himself rather than relying on someone else, he’s going to do it. When Alvin realises that you don’t need a driving licence to use a driving lawnmower, he decides to drive his trusty mower at a brisk 5 miles per hour all the way to Mount Zion. This is the legend of that journey: The Straight Story.

KOTOR: Knights of the Obnoxious Respawns

A little under 4000 years before the events of The Rise of Skywalker, the Galactic Republic is in crisis. The Mandalorian Wars – a confrontation with the expansionistic, war crimes-happy warriors of Mandalore – has only recently shaken the galaxy. The Republic was almost brought to its knees by the Mandalorian forces, but was rescued in through the deft leadership shown by the powerful warrior Malak and his enigmatic mentor, the master strategist Revan.

Revan and Malak were both Jedi, but they did not have the approval of the Jedi Council for their intervention, however – their actions were unsanctioned, and their disobedience saw them break from the Jedi Order. A year later, the duo returned from obscurity. Now calling themselves Darth Revan and Darth Malak, they proclaimed themselves the leader of a new Sith Empire, and had gathered to them a cadre of allies from their service in the Mandalorian Wars and disaffected Jedi. Most astonishingly, they had somehow assembled a vast fleet of starships apparently from out of nowhere.

With with Revan and Malak’s schismatic Force practices and wanton embrace of the Dark Side at the heart of Sith ideology, the Jedi Order see no alternative but to ally with the Republic to defeat this threat. At the point where we pick up our story, the alliance has just pulled off a major victory. Using her special power of Battle Meditation, a young Jedi prodigy known as Bastila has managed to pull off a daring assault on Revan’s flagship, during which Revan was bested in combat. With the previous Dark Lord of the Sith fallen, Darth Malak has now stepped up to take Revan’s place. As Knights of the Old Republic begins, you awake on Bastila’s flagship as it comes under attack in the vicinity of the Sith-occupied world of Taris; you and Carth, a war hero of the Republic, manage to reach the escape pods just in time and make planetfall.

It soon becomes apparent that the Sith are combing the planet to try and find the occupants of the fallen escape pods – with their primary target being Bastila herself. Little do you realise the incredible destiny and astonishing revelations that await once you, Carth, and Bastila manage to get away from Taris – and the Jedi Council of Dantooine inform you that in light of the pronounced unconscious Force prowess you have exhibited, they have decided to train you as a Jedi…

Deathstalker: From Punching Down To Punching Itself

In the wake of the Falklands War, the military junta which had ruled Argentina collapsed and the nation returned to democracy. In the process, this prompted something of a shift in its film industry. In some respects, this resulted in a new generation of serious-minded, highbrow cinema – in part because during the years of censorship filmmakers played it safe and stuck to lighthearted fare and everyone was well and truly ready for a change, in part because audiences wanted a chance to confront the horrors of the junta’s Dirty War and the industry was glad to finally address the subject.

In other respects, this involved a certain amount of desperation. With the economy having collapsed, local studios’ budgets didn’t go that far – but money from overseas carried a lot of weight. Héctor Olivera, co-owner of Aries Cinematográfica – one of the biggest studios in the country – realised that the international B-movie industry was always keen for opportunities to take advantage of favourable exchange rates and other such conditions. If they could get a B-movie maker from the US to collaborate with them, that could bring in a welcome injection of dollars at a time when the industry badly needed it. Olivera and fellow producer Alejandro Sessa therefore reached out to the king of the B-movies himself – Roger Corman – to see if he was interested.

This gave rise to a sequence of schlock, crafted and intended for US audiences, with Corman co-producing. Eventually, some ten movies would be yielded by the partnership, but only three of these – Cocaine Wars, Two To Tango, and Play Murder For Me – engaged much on a diegetic level with the fact that they were being shot in Argentina. (Cocaine Wars was an “American tough guy fights drug dealers in a generic South American country, whilst Two To Tango and Play Murder For Me were stylish thrillers set in Buenos Aires.) The remaining seven – Deathstalker, The Warrior and the Sorceress, Barbarian Queen, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, Amazons, Stormquest, and Deathstalker II – were sword and sorcery efforts, hopping onto the fantasy bandwagon kicked off by Conan the Barbarian.

I’ve covered The Warrior and the Sorceress before on here, but I’ve not yet delved into the others. Being as I am an aficionado of the absolute cheesiest and worst sword and sorcery movies the Conan boom offered, I’ve had the original Deathstalker on DVD for ages – complete with 4:3 aspect ratio and the shot-through-a-film-of-soap picture quality you get from early DVDs which decided to just dump a VHS rip onto disc and call the job done – but more recently, 101 Films made the baffling decision to put out the first two Deathstalkers on Blu-Ray, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see how they come across in high definition. Let’s see how they hold up now we can get a clear look at what’s going on, shall we?

Content warning: I’m afraid I’m going to spend a lot of this article going “Wow, this artifact of rape culture really does suck when it comes to the subject of sexual assault!” This is particularly the case when it comes to the first Deathstalker movie, which was one of the first films to get widely discussed and panned on “bad B-movie”-themed websites on the early web in part because even in the early 2000s (and, indeed, on release), everyone kind of realised that it was really gross on the subject. A major course correction was attempted for Deathstalker II; rape is not absent from that movie, but it does seem to have been made with an understanding that the previous movie used it way, way too often, and was particularly nasty about how it made use of it.

Deathstalker

Deathstalker (Richard Hill) is a Conan-style vagabond in a fantasy realm. On his travels he encounters the exiled King Tulak (Jorge Sorvik), who was deposed by his court wizard Munkar (Bernard Erhard), who appeals to Deathstalker to venture forth to cast down Munkar and rescue Tulak’s daughter, the Princess Codille (Barbi Benton), from his clutches. Munkar is, in fact, having a (somewhat suspicious) tournament and has invited the finest warriors in the land to participate, which would surely be a golden opportunity to infiltrate and get close to him!

Deathstalker, though, is no chump, and more or less refuses to go on the quest even slightly. Then there is an extremely confusing scene where the witch Toralva (Verónica Llinás) gives him a tip-off about a magical sword, amulet, and chalice which together can be the undoing of Munkar’s power, and Deathstalker decides he may as well attempt the quest seeing how he’s been handed a walkthrough. By the time he’s reached Munkar’s fortress, he’s had a run-in with Munkar’s main enforcer General Kang (Victor Bo) and been joined on his journey by Salmaron (Augusto Larreta), a thief whose curse is lifted by Deathstalker in the process of recovering the sword, and fellow tournament contestants Oghris (Richard Brooker) and Kaira (Lana Clarkson – famous these days mostly for being murdered by Phil Spector).

Salmaron seems to only be in it for himself, but may prove to have hidden depths in the long run; Oghris is simply trying to compete in the tournament, and might not be up for much heroism; Kaira is by far the most heroic of the four, which means she’s too decent of a person for this movie. In the end, it will be Deathstalker himself who must face down Munkar…

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Season of Perfection

OK, that’s an article title which needs a bit of justification. I’m not using “perfection” here in the sense that the show could not possibly getter, or that it would stop developing from here – instead I mean it in the sense of the process of perfecting something, refining it and bringing it closer to the best it can possibly be.

Specifically, season 3 seems to be where Star Trek: the Next Generation fully works out what it wants to be. Gene Roddenberry’s initial vision for the show proved to be decidedly hit and miss in season 1, and the process of sidelining Roddenberry was continuing apace in season 2; by this point, though his name was still in the credits his influence over the production process was like that of a distant constitutional monarch, giving the nod to legislation that has passed Parliament but not really making the calls on what gets drafted in the first place.

This was in part because no less than two of his catspaws hadn’t panned out; Leonard Maizlish, his personal attorney who’d ended up acting as an unofficial script editor on season 1, was belatedly shifted away from interacting with The Next Generation staff in favour of hassling the Undiscovered Country production team, but only after Maizlish had managed to alienate or drive away more or less all the Original Series veterans on the writing team. Maurice Hurley, who’d been parachuted in to be Roddenberry’s mouthpiece during the production of season 2, had ended up falling out with Roddenberry; by now he was out, Rick Berman was more or less solidly in control, and the path was clear for Gates McFadden to come back as Beverly Crusher, because she’d been fired solely because Hurley didn’t like her.

That means that here, finally, The Next Generation more or less adopts the shape we associated with it; Riker has his beard, Dr. Crusher is in sickbay, and all’s right on the Enterprise. Behind the scenes, the writers were no longer facing a tug of war between their own instincts and Gene Roddenberry’s dictats, allowing the show to definitively move away from simply reflecting one man’s vision of the future and opening up the scope of what The Next Generation could be. Much of the tail end of season 2 – after Hurley got annoyed at Roddenberry and stopped trying to enforce his vision – can in retrospect be seen as an attempt to work out a new mission statement for the show; here is where the team were able to present it with full confidence.

The Virgin New Adventures: Cat’s Cradle – Prophets, Seers, and Sages

The story so far: the Virgin New Adventures have kicked off with a bang with the Timewyrm tetralogy. Though a bit hit and miss – what with the first book involving John Peel being extremely skeevy about young teenage girls and the third book being pretty bland and unambitious – it did at least offer up a pretty good Terrance Dicks story about the Doctor and Ace foiling the Nazis, and it also offered Revelation by Paul Cornell, a radically experimental book which demonstrated now the New Adventures format and ethos could really push the bounds of Doctor Who. As 1992 came around, line editor Peter Darvill-Evans was tasked with continuing the series, and he did so by inaugurating a new named story arc: Cat’s Cradle…

Before I go into that, however, I’d better explain a bit about how I’m planning on tackling the New Adventures going forwards. Like I said at the end of my review of Season 26, the best way to approach Doctor Who tie-in media (and, quite possibly, the actual show itself) is to not worry too much about being completist but to instead cherry-pick appropriately, concentrating on what interests you and skipping over the bits which don’t work for you. That’s certainly how I intend to tackle these books. I’ll make a game attempt to read at least a representative portion of each one, but I reserve the right to give up after the first few chapters if a book doesn’t grab me. If a book seems to be good, I’ll read it, and if it seems to be bad in an amusing or interesting way, I may keep going, but if it simply doesn’t engage my interest then I’ll just skip straight over it and move on to the next. Life’s too short, you know?

Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt

The Doctor and Ace have stopped over in Perivale for a cup of tea and a fry-up at the greasy spoon in the wake of the Timewyrm saga. Bizarre temporal phenomena break out, and they hustle back to the TARDIS – which is, in fact, the cause of the problem. As the Doctor takes it into the time vortex, so if necessary he can purge it of contaminating matter without polluting London, it becomes apparent that something nasty has infiltrated it, and the Doctor and Ace become separated as the Time Lord heads out to look for the intruder whilst Ace keeps an eye on things in the control room. Meanwhile, aeons ago, ancient Gallifrey rules over a vast space empire. Yet space is not the final frontier to the Gallifreyans; now they are undertaking their first tentative experiments in time travel. A prototype ship – a Time Scaphe – undertakes the most ambitious time expedition yet, only to crash headlong into the TARDIS…

After the collision, Ace awakens in a strange world-city, ruled over by an alien entity known as the Process – the thing which infiltrated the TARDIS – and occupied by the crew of the Time Scaphe. Vael, one of the latter, has become the Process’s henchman, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found. What is going on? Where is the Doctor? Where, for that matter is this city? And can Ace and the crew of the Time Scaphe beat the Process? The answers may lie with a bizarre silver cat…

A Touch of Zen

Fort Jinglu is a foreboding ruin at rhe edge of a sleepy rural town that has stood empty since immemorial. Gu Shengzhai (Shih Chun) lives next door to it with his mother (Zhang Bing-yu), who frets that he’s satisfied being a mere scribe and scholar rather than trying out for the civil service, a good marriage, and other forms of social advancement. Shengzhai, however, has other things on his mind: he keeps hearing noises from the fort, bringing to mind all the old legends about it being haunted. What’s more, there’s strangers in town – the herbalist Dr. Lu (Xue Han) and his apprentice (Wan Zhong-shan) who showed up a month ago seem nice enough, but there’s something odd about Ouyang Nian (Tien Peng) – a strange man who only just arrived, seems to be spying on the herbalist, and appears intent on getting Shengzhai to believe in the ghost stories.

There’s no ghosts in the Fort, however – instead, someone very much alive is living in there, a coldly formal woman named Miss Yang (Hsu Feng). Who is Miss Yang? Who are the other strangers? Can Shengzhai’s mother convince him to try for Miss Yang’s hand in marriage? Why does Ouyang suddenly seem keen to encourage him to take the civil service exam and move away? And why has the Eastern Group – a feared secret police force controlled by the Imperial palace eunuchs – taken an interest in this sleepy little town?

Directed by King Hu, this followup to his previous Dragon Inn is another highbrow wuxia effort, but unlike that movie was not an instant hit; being rather long, it was initially released in two parts, neither of which performed well domestically, and it was only when the full three hour version had a showing at Cannes that it gathered widespread international praise. You can somewhat see why that is the case; it’s a three hour martial arts epic in which not a single blow is struck for nearly 40 minutes, the first proper fight doesn’t happen until around an hour in, and what appears to be the climactic fight happens half an hour before the end.