All That Power: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Story Trailer

SMASH CUT to Graham bored in his pants

News by Graham Smith Deputy Editorial Director

Published on July 30, 2014

FADE IN

INT. SKYSCRAPER - NIGHT

JONATHAN IRONS is hanging from a window ledge. We can see shards of broken glass, but the camera pushes in on his face. He looks like Kevin Spacey. Or a sort of facsimile of Kevin Spacey's head, smooshed on to a Vince McMahon wrestling figure.

This scene doesn't appear in the new Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare story trailer, I'm just guessing at where this whole thing is headed. Trailer and more thoughts below.

IRONS

(narrating)

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time... For me, it was starting my own wars because I thought that was a good, profitable idea... Studying the measured diction of James Bond villains... Or that soldier's hands, and the way his skin seemed like paper, as he pushed me through a window in a slow-motion quicktime event...

READER

Hang on, isn't that grossly unfair? Call of Duty - and this trailer - might not have the most nuanced writing, but it seems preemptively cruel to insult the ending of a game that isn't even out yet. Aren't you always aiming to be less cynical and less mocking of things you don't enjoy but others do?

GAME JOURNALIST

Yes, but that's the thing. I like many of the Call of Duty games. They sometimes tip over into leering, geopolitical disaster porn, but at their best they're silly action romps. I can embrace gleeful explosions, scenery-chewing villains, and first-person shooting mechanics that have more in common with rail shooters than Quake. For all its pontificating about Private Military Companies, Advanced Warfare looks to be on the right side of this. I'd like to have a Crysis-style nanosuit in more games, for starters.

READER

Fair enough. In that case, isn't it just a bit shit to make American Beauty references just because the game's got Kevin Spacey in? At least the House of Cards references everyone else is making aren't fifteen years old. In fact, it's a bit trite to write this post in script format as well - it's barely even a joke, and a clumsy rhetorical device for delivering the information readers need from a story like this. When's Advanced Warfare out?