In a recent interview, celebrated film director David Fincher discussed being approached to helm the forthcoming Star Wars sequels. In laying out his vision, Fincher compellingly argues that Star Wars is not a tale of guys with magic powers running around the galaxy dismasting each other with laser swords, but instead the story of two metal slaves, C-3PO and R2-D2, who “go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man.” Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t exactly the tack Disney planned on taking with the $30 billion franchise, and the company anointed J.J. Abrams instead. But Fincher’s unrealized robot slave opera was very much on my mind as I played Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor, the latest video game set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings universe.
You play as Talion, a dour human ranger of the North—a guy cut from much the same haggard cloth as Tolkien’s Aragorn. He lives with his wife and son on the border of Mordor, the sulfurous black land administered by the duly elected Dark Lord, Sauron. Unsurprisingly, things go very, very bad very quickly, and Talion soon finds himself, in the immortal words of Miracle Max, mostly dead. He’d be all the way dead if it weren’t for a blood curse put on him by the one of Sauron’s top lieutenants, who, in killing Talion and his family, linked the ranger’s essence to that of a long-dead elf lord. The grim elf wraith has no memory of who he is or why he and Talion have been spiritually fused together, so the two of them are off to get some answers in what is sure to be remembered as Middle-Earth’s strangest buddy comedy. As Mordor is primarily peopled with foul orcs—or Uruks—it is these creatures who Talion and the ghostly amnesiac elf lord interrogate for answers.
In Tolkien’s mythology, the orcs can trace their lineage back to elves whose genes were long ago spliced with distilled evil and possibly some kind of booger-based genetic pool. The resulting creatures are grotesque and extremely violent, as well as lacking any formal government structures other than following the guy who is best at murdering his constituency. They are predisposed to serving as the willing slaves of evil wizards and the occasional iron-fisted demiurge, and in the game commonly sport ironic names like Nazkuga The Merciful or Ratanak The Endless, whose quick death by Talion’s blade belies his title.
Indeed, being mostly dead has done nothing to dull Talion’s considerable fighting skills, and being linked to the elf wraith has given him an impressive range of powers that can be augmented as the game progresses. This comes mainly at the expense of wave after wave of orcs, with players mowing through using a familiar combination of counter-based brawling from the Assassin’s Creed and Batman: Arkham games. The initial goal is to eliminate orc war chiefs and sow confusion among Sauron’s army, but killing for killing’s sake becomes its own source of twisted satisfaction. The orc hierarchy is a fluid thing, and shifts accordingly after a captain is killed, either by Talion or a rival. Killing captains outright isn’t always the best strategy—important intel about the strengths and weaknesses of their superiors can be gleaned through Talion’s brand of advanced interrogation technique.