Friday 20 January 2012

Fear not the Psyker

So to say I'm into Games Workshop stuff is a bit of an understatement. Since about the end of primary school I have always had a love for the fantasy and sci-fi, while I didn't always play the games due to lack of people to play with I have always tried to follow the history and models and such. I also love building and converting the models, even if my painting skills suck balls, and lately I was thinking of getting back into Warhammer and 40k, as I play Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and the god awful Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, so I decided to look up other Games Workshop video games as I played Chaos Gate and a bit of Final Liberation at a friends house and never saw the FMV cinematic for it, so I went and looked them up on YouTube and thought 'Wow these have been done well' for an FMV title as I've watched all the FMV Hell videos over at The Spoony Experiment, and as bad as the FMV's are in Final Liberation they're better than most.


While watching the FMV's on YouTube I saw a link on the side for something called Inquisitor. Now first when I saw this I thought it was some cos players doing a fan movie, but as I watched I started to think it was a bit more than a fan movie, then I read the comment the poster of the movie put and I was rather shocked. This wasn't a fan movie with cos players, this was an actual movie made to pitch the idea of a Games Workshop movie on their 25th anniversary back in 1995-1996 I think, along with two 'fake movie' trailers for Hive Infestation, Space Wolves terminators taking on a Tyranid Genestealer Cult in a Hive City and Blood for the Blood God some sort of Dark Angels and Inquisitor take on Ork and a Khorne Berserker appears. It was a limited release and rumors I heard as Game Workshop have bought back a lot of the old copies to show them at Games Day, but this is just internet rumours. Now with Ultramarines: The Movie coming out, the first thing that came to my mind was 'Why hasn't this been re-released?!' as a Warhammer 40K fan myself I'd buy it and I'm sure others would as bad as it is, but it's still a piece of Games Workshop history.

The movie starts with a pretty rocking guitar riff and the Games Workshops Imperial Eagle logo before going into more melodic type music for the credits which are over shots of a gargoyle type statue, then we get a shot of space and I was expecting the Princess Irulan narration from the Dune movie but no we get a imperial warship coming out of the warp and firing on a planet. Then inside the ship the Admiral Arteres looks down on the planet before the first Space Marine enters and yes he looks like he's a Halloween space marine costume, ( See above picture. ) and we find out he is Captian Darius of the Dark Angel space marines, though the white power armour makes him look like he should be a Deathwing Terminator as Dark Angels have dark green armour, but that's me geeking out. He is told by Arteres they will have the help of an Inquisitor who has an artifact from the last mission to Genarius Prime, the planet they had been bombarding and Darius tells us how he was there and how a Dark Angel squad went with the Inquisitor onto the surface and only the Inquisitor returns with an artifact, a bit more bad mouthing of the Inquisitor and then he appears, Inquisitor Krieger, I had hoped for it to be Torquemada but I guess he wasn't in the Warhammer 40k lore yet. There's hostility between Darius and Krieger, which seems a bit off a Space Marine should show respect to the Imperiams Ordo Malleus, losses or not, so Darius and Krieger are to descend to the planet by drop pod with five marines Darius among them. The CGI, I admit is bad, and the drop pod looks more like the rocket from Wallace and Gromit A Grand Day Out. We get the first look at a Chaos Marine, no one says it is, but one look at his ugly mug and it's hard not think, 'TRAITOR TO THE EMPEROR OF HUMANITY!'.

Back on the ship Arteres is visited by the Astropath Prime of the fleet, who reads the mind of the Admiral to make sure he's not tainted by Chaos, and his voice and general look again makes me think to the David Lynch Dune movie and the Spacing Guild. Once having read the Admirals mind he channels the thoughts of the Ordo Malleus members wishing to speak and they tell him that and assembly of psykers, I'm guessing Primaris Psykers as the order said the highest station and I doubt Sanctioned Psykers are that high up, maybe Librarians but I geek out once more, suspect that Genarius Prime is of more import than they had once thought. We're told that the bombardment they were doing was against an energy field, this field is meant to be generated by an alien machine to keep the forces of Chaos inside and Krieger is to be recalled, but he has navigated through the field and the Arteres informs the Psyker speaking through the Astropath of this, he then tells him that a Fleet of the Ordo Malleus Battle Cruisers, four regiments of Space Marines, three companies of Grey Knights and the Psyker who I'm guessing is a top ranking Ordo Malleus Master are on their way and that Arteres should pull back and assume full battle readiness, clearly they aren't fucking about. Also if the field should fall and anything but Krieger and the Dark Angels come out, then Arteres' bravery would be noted, showing a lot of faith in the man then aren't you?

Meanwhile back on the planets surface Krieger, Darius and the Space Marines have come across what I can only describe as the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as they enter we get a cut back to the Chaos Marine who gives us a speech of how he's awakened and he feels the field weakening so they can begin their emergence. Once inside Darius asks if Krieger remembers anything of the place, and he says this is right, so what he's forgot? Darius leaves one of the marines at the door, who might as well be called First to Die, as they head on into the CGI temple and the Chaos Marine says how the place weakens and he seems to make the wall bubble, that's chaos for you always bending of the laws of physics, and he reaches through the wall and pulls in the marine left at the door. Who didn't see him about to die? Eh? Darius uses his comlink to contact the marine and gets nothing, so another says it might be the structure interfering and he sends the last two back to check on the one left behind, as Krieger, Darius and the last marine keep on. Once they discover the marine they left behind is gone they decide to head back and tell Darius but from the walls come Chaos Space Marines! With this some action starts and the Dark Angels engage the traitors in a bolter shoot out, though they seem to be switching from semiautomatic to automatic fire, Darius hears this and demands they go back but Krieger ignores him and continues on so Darius follows with the last of his brother marines, the two who are in the shoot out fight bravely but after one falls the other takes out the traitors before the head of the Chaos Space Marines puts his bolter through a wall and picks off the last one, talk about unfair advantages he bent the laws of physics to win! CHEATER! And by the looks of his men they are Khorne Berserkers, they shouldn't be able to bend physics like that they're not Thousand Sons worshipers of Tzeentch, they should fight face to face, not with tricks! Khorne should punish him!

Krieger and Darius continue further into the structure, Darius getting more angry at Inquisitor until they reach the center chamber and Krieger announces he remembers, saying that the artifact he brought back was Chaos Containment Field and he starts to try and reactivate it, as he does the Khorne Berserker emerges behind the last Dark Angel and gets shot by Darius, dragging off the marine while he's at it, but the Chaos leader appears and shoots off Darius' hand or at least his glove as he holds Darius hostage and Krieger continue to dismantle the generator, thinking it's how he would reactivate it as from a wall a CGI Khorne Juggernaut starts to show it's metallic demon face. Darius realizing it's a trap and he's shutting it down not activating it calls to Krieger and he starts to reassemble the generator, this in turn weakens the Chaos Lord, banishing him and the Juggernaut back into the structure, ending the movie with a shot of the generator and then the structure, which both look like the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith.

The two fake movie trailers at the end are also worth mentioning, the first in Hive Infestation which starts with a monologue of 'In a bleak and savage future, the enemy lives among us, and they are not open to negotiation', over a view of the hive city, then a genestealer megus and some Space Wolf Terminators. It's a pretty standard sort of trailer, cutting between the Terminators of the Space Wolves and the Genestealer Magus and a rather convincing looking rubber Genestealer costume, also the entire trailers feel is very Aliens, with the Space Wolves traveling through the corridors of the Hive City which is all industrial looking, with pips, steam and steel gratings while they hunt down the Genestealers and purify the Hive City, and it's very much an Alien rip off and I wouldn't have been surprised for a line like 'It's a bug hunt', at the end we get a close up of a Tyranid Warrior, which I assume is to say the Hive Fleet arrived. Now while I loved the look of this trailer and would give anything to see a sort of 40K version of Aliens with Space Wolves and Tyranids, it begged the question, why not just make it Space Hulk instead? Blood angels purging genestealers in a giant abandoned space craft? But hey, Space Wolves are WAY cooler than Blood Angels I feel.

The second of the trailers is Blood for the Blood God, which starts with a more 40k sounding monologe, 'Deep in the nightmare world of the 41st millennium, there is only war' which is the tag line most recognized with Warhammer 40k, this one has two Dark Angels taking an Ork in front of an Inquisitor who asks if it carries the Mark of Chaos, I hope not, that game sucked! But really, I don't recall orks ever bearing a mark of Chaos, at least not often. Then we see some other orks, planning to save their boss, and again they look rather convincing for rubber suits, even if they don't talk in what I'd like 'Orcish' to be, they sound like what a World of Warcraft orc would sound like to a human, gibberish not a Warhammer 40k Ork which is more bad English I guess. As they attack it's disjointed scenes of a gun fight in the traditional action movie montage trailer cut in with a chaos marine getting ready and end with him saying 'Blood for the Blood God.'

In general this is a REALLY shitty movie if you go by today's standard but don't get me wrong, if you're a Warhammer or Warhammer 40k fan go to YouTube and look up Inquisitor it's four parts, three in ten minutes and the trailers taking five minutes together, three for the Hive Infestation and two for Blood for the Blood God, so it's not a big chunk of time to watch and even though the cheese factor is high and the acting and effect are sub par, it's freaking AWESOME! And I am waiting for Ultramarines: The Movie, but I'd prefer a Salamander movie, but till they make Ultramarines: The Movie or any other Games Workshop franchise movies, watch Inquisitor because if you don't the Ordo Malleus might think you're not devoted to the Emperor of Mankind and we suffer not the witch, the heretic, the alien or the mutant to live.

UPDATE!

While scanning through my favorites on YouTube I noticed that Inquisitor has been taken down due to Games Workshop giving it the copyright stuff. This annoys me. I mean there is no other way to see it and I really hope that they put it on the Ultramarines movie DVD or something as if it's gone then the entire Warhammer 40k fan base has lost something truly awesome!

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