I’ve barely had my morning coffee today, and I’ve already chokedup once.
The gorgeous, chilling trailer for the video game Dead Island has been ricocheting aroundthe Web, and it’s a doozy. The game, a zombie shoot-’em-up, is set at a tropical resort. The wordless trailer, which moves backward through time, follows one person’s experience during the melee:
The trailer has already been recutand re-edited to show the events in proper chronological order.
I think the piece is benefiting a bit from lowered expectations (“Video games are capable of this ? Get outta town!”), but I still think it’s incredibly effective.
Metaphorically speaking, zombies are a very flexible kind ofmonster; they can standfor a whole lot of things . But I think the real reason they’re cropping up so often in popculture these days is precisely because of the emotional, narrative characteristicswe see in this trailer: Zombies, with their ability to suddenly turn familymembers and loved ones against each other, stir up primal feelings like noother monster can. One of the most moving scenes I saw in the early episodes ofthe AMC zombie apocalypse show The Walking Dead involved a character and his young son holed up in a house that’s being circledby the revenant who used to be their wife and mother. You know what the man isgoing to have do — you can see it coming from a mile away as soon asyou know he has a shotgun — but his dilemma is no less powerful for that.
Meanwhile, for any gamers who find themselves seduced by this trailer, Wired ‘sGame Life blog recommendscaution , as “thisisn’t really a game trailer in the traditional sense. It’s not a series ofclips from the game….Though the trailer is said to capture the game’s solemntone and setting, it is not the same thing.”
