L.A. Noire: Film, meet Video Game2

Written by Andric Tham (orig­i­nal post)

I was excited, as were many oth­ers, for the release of L.A. Noire. That’s because, it’s the first game to try a hand at merg­ing cin­ema and video gam­ing as sto­ry­telling mediums.

Boasting a cast of high-profile actors such as Aaron Staton (Mad Men) and John Noble (FRINGE, Lord of the Rings), and influ­ences from movies as new as “L.A. Confidential” and as old as “Naked City”, L.A. Noire is struc­tured like an episodic tele­vi­sion show and plays like an inter­ac­tive film.

With the newly-developed MotionScan facial scan­ning tech­nol­ogy, the game man­ages to cap­ture the per­for­mance of an actor accu­rately, pre­serv­ing each and every facial move­ment, big or small, to cap­ture the emo­tional essence in the story. That wasn’t pos­si­ble before in a video game, but is now pos­si­ble.

L.A. Noire is also much bet­ter than I had expected. It is a game of remem­brance, a work of art, and lastly, the apogee of the inter­ac­tive narrative.

It is the one game that many (Metal Gear Solid cre­ator Hideo Kojima included) believe will bridge cin­ema and video games.

In March, it became the first video game to be part of a film festival’s lineup, after being fea­tured in the Tribeca Film Festival 2011.

Aptly set in the 1940s, it remem­bers an idio­syn­cratic era of glam­our and grit that spawned some of the great­est nar­ra­tive films of all time. This era saw the release of some of the great­est noir films, as Hollywood, as well as crime, thrived in the post-war city of Los Angeles.

Based upon detec­tive noir films of the 1940s, L.A. Noire is mod­ern film noir, done right.

Noir, the French word for ‘black’, was used to describe films that make heavy use of stylised light­ing. Shot in Black and White, and espous­ing cer­tain dark themes such as sex­ual exploita­tion and crime, this effect became sig­na­ture to that era.

A very essen­tial part of cin­ema is sound. L.A. Noire’s sound­track boasts period-accurate Jazz sounds that rouses sus­pense and car­ries a cer­tain elegance.

L.A. Noire “Main Theme” Andrew Hale by RockstarGames

But film noir isn’t the only thing L.A. Noire seeks to remember.

L.A. Noire is a video game mas­ter­piece that saw the col­lab­o­ra­tion between Rockstar Games and Team Bondi of Sydney, Australia, two highly suc­cess­ful enti­ties of tal­ents that have, in the past, con­tributed in the release of some of the best open-world and nar­ra­tive video games ever released, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, the Max Payne series, the Midnight Club series, last year’s Red Dead Redemption, and The Getaway series.

That is not all that L.A. Noire is, however.

L.A. Noire is also the result of the immensely tal­ented cast that lent their like­ness and soul to the game’s nar­ra­tive, the metic­u­lous artists that put together every inch of that ginor­mous city of 1940s Los Angeles, and the cin­e­matic influ­ences behind it which include “Mad Men”, “L.A. Confidential” and “Chinatown”, clas­sic film noir such as “Naked City” and “Detour”, as well as crime nov­els of the past.

Au con­traire, L.A. Noire is not Grand Theft Auto. While it might be an open-world game, it is not a sand­box game. It is very much like an episodic tele­vi­sion series that is strung together in a semi-linear fash­ion, with a cast of stars, recur­ring char­ac­ters, and one-off bit-players much like a sea­son of Mad Men or The Mentalist.

With all of that in mind, one must remem­ber that L.A. Noire is nei­ther a CGI tele­vi­sion show, nor ‘Grand Theft Auto where you play as a cop’. It seeks to espouse both film and video game ele­ments in order to weave together a mas­ter­piece of what will be a new age of the nar­ra­tive story: the inter­ac­tive nar­ra­tive.

L.A. Noire is out now for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 world­wide. It is rated M for Mature by the ESRB. Order your copy of L.A. Noire from Amazon today.