title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: In nearly every level, players can collect Intel items that provide the player with information on the events preceding the main story, as well as insight into the psyche and motivations of certain characters.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Set before the events of the campaign, the competitive multiplayer divides players into two different teams: The Exiles and The Damned. Both teams have their respective perks. Six classes are available for players to choose: Gunner, Medic, Scavenger, Breacher, Sniper and Officer. Each have their own upgrades and advantages. Environmental hazards, including sandstorms, may also occur during a multiplayer match. The game modes featured in the multiplayer include:


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: A two player cooperative mode was added to the game after its launch with four missions to choose from. Players are tasked to defeat multiple waves of enemies and complete a series of objectives, similar to a horde mode.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Six months prior to the game's events, the worst series of sandstorms in recorded history began across Dubai. The city's politicians and wealthy elite downplayed the situation before secretly evacuating, leaving countless Emiratis and foreign migrant workers behind as the city was overwhelmed by the surrounding desert. Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad (Bruce Boxleitner), the decorated but PTSD-troubled commander of the "Damned 33rd" Infantry Battalion of the United States Army, was returning home with his unit from Afghanistan when the storms struck. Konrad volunteered the 33rd to help relief efforts, defying orders by the Army to abandon the city and its refugees and deserting with the entire battalion. The storms intensified and a massive storm wall engulfed Dubai, disrupting surveillance, air travel, and all but the strongest of radio broadcasts. Struggling to maintain order amid 80mph (128kmh) winds, riots, and dwindling resources, the 33rd declared martial law and began committing atrocities on the civilian population. Aggrieved by this, the staff of the 33rd staged a coup d'etat against Konrad but were defeated. The CIA then sent in a black ops squad to investigate, and as part of their plan organized the locals into insurgents to attack the 33rd, eventually resulting in a ceasefire. The last communication from Dubai stated that the 33rd was attempting to lead a caravan out of the city. The caravan never arrived, and soon afterward, the United Arab Emirates declared Dubai a no-man's-land. All travel to the city was barred, the 33rd was publicly disavowed for treason, and no further news left the city.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Two weeks before the start of the story, a looped radio signal finally penetrated the storm wall. Its message was brief: "This is Colonel John Konrad, United States Army. Attempted evacuation of Dubai ended in complete failure. Death toll... too many." The United States military decides to covertly send in an elite three-man Delta Force team to carry out reconnaissance, led by Captain Martin Walker (Nolan North), who served alongside Konrad in Afghanistan. Walker, First Lieutenant Alphonso Adams (Christopher Reid), and Staff Sergeant John Lugo (Omid Abtahi), are ordered to confirm the presence of any survivors, then immediately radio for extraction.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The game begins "in medias res" with Walker, Adams, and Lugo flying in a helicopter past the skyscrapers of Dubai, shooting down several pursuing helicopters until a sudden sandstorm forms, causing one of the pursuers to spin out of control and crash into the trio. The story then jumps back to the start, with Delta traversing the storm wall to the outskirts of a mostly buried Dubai. They later come into contact and engage a group of insurgents (who believe them to be with the 33rd) led by CIA agent Castavin. The insurgents have apparently renewed conflict with what remains of the 33rd. Throughout the rest of their journey, the team hears broadcasts by the Radioman (Jake Busey), a former journalist turned DJ that was once embedded with the 33rd and now speaks on their behalf. Deducing that the 33rd may have gone rogue, Walker then elects to disobey orders and find Konrad.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Receiving a broadcast of CIA agent Daniels being interrogated by the 33rd, the team chooses to intervene. Tracing the signal's origin, they find Daniels already dead; the broadcast was a trap set for fellow CIA agent, Gould. Gould helps Delta escape, but is later captured and killed while assaulting a location called the Gate. The team heads there and continues the attack. Finding it heavily guarded by the 33rd, the team employs white phosphorus to obliterate their opposition and advance further into the city. While walking through the aftermath, they realize they accidentally killed 47 civilians moved to the Gate for shelter by the 33rd. Vowing revenge, Walker blames Konrad and the 33rd.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Finding Konrad's executed command team, Walker uses a small radio to communicate with who he believes to be Konrad himself, who challenges the morality of his actions throughout the story. Konrad then manipulates Walker into executing an Emirati survivor or a 33rd soldier, who both committed serious crimes. Delta subsequently meet CIA agent Jeff Riggs, who is leading a raid on the city's last water supply. Delta aids Riggs with the aim of crippling the 33rd's operations, but Riggs destroys the supply instead, admitting he wanted to wipe out the remaining population of Dubai to cover up the atrocities of the 33rd, fearing that their revelation would lead to the region declaring war on the United States.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: With the city's residents now facing death from dehydration, Delta heads to the radio tower to silence the Radioman. After Lugo kills the Radioman, Walker informs the city of Delta's planned evacuation effort. Adams commandeers a Black Hawk helicopter to escape the building, and Walker destroys the radio tower as they flee the scene, leading to the helicopter sequence from the opening of the game (which Walker seems to remember). After the aforementioned crash, Walker awakens in the middle of the desert and reunites with Adams, but is too late to stop Lugo from being lynched by a mob of civilians. Walker and Adams make their way to the Dubai Seaside tower (a fictional tower which is the tallest building in the city in the in-game universe) to confront Konrad, but are soon pinned down by the last of his men. Walker, who surrenders, is pushed to safety by Adams, who fights to the death. Walker stumbles inside the tower, where the remnants of the 33rd surrender to him.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Walker finally meets Konrad at his penthouse. Konrad appears to be the charismatic, villainous force behind the atrocities that Walker was hoping for, until Walker finds his decaying corpse on the penthouse deck. Walker finds that Konrad committed suicide after his failed evacuation effort, and he has been communicating with a hallucination of Konrad created in his mind following the white phosphorus strike. Rationalizing the actions he had witnessed and carried out, Walker distorted many subsequent events of the game to make Konrad look responsible. With this revelation, "Konrad" forces Walker, at gunpoint, to decide once and for all if he is to blame for his actions in Dubai.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: There are four possible endings. Walker shooting himself or allowing "Konrad" to shoot him will immediately end the story, with Walker's and Konrad's corpses shown together on the penthouse deck and Konrad's original broadcast playing as the camera pans over to a burning Dubai.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: If Walker instead shoots "Konrad", he disappears after telling Walker that he can still return home. After the 33rd surrendering is shown to be a figment of Walker's imagination, Walker uses Konrad's radio to request immediate evacuation of Dubai. A post-credits epilogue shows a convoy of Army rescue Humvees locating a shellshocked Walker sitting near the Dubai Seaside wearing Konrad's uniform and brandishing an AA-12. Walker can either concede to the patrol or open fire on them. If Walker relinquishes his weapon, he evacuates with the patrol, and has a conversation with one of the soldiers where he questions his status. If Walker is killed by the patrol, he dies in a pool of blood, recalling a conversation between himself and Konrad during the War in Afghanistan where Walker casually remarked about returning home, but Konrad criticized him, claiming soldiers "do what's necessary" and then die. If Walker kills the entire patrol, he uses their radio to greet Army command with "Gentlemen, welcome to Dubai", one of the first statements Walker said to his team as well as one of the first statements "Konrad" said to Walker. Walker then returns to the Dubai Seaside as the camera pans to a ruined Dubai.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Following the release of several "Spec Ops" games in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the series met with low sales and poor reviews, causing a halt to the production of successive games. In 2003, Take-Two mentioned in their financial results that Rockstar Games was working on the franchise, but in 2004 the project was cancelled. It was later revealed that Rockstar Vancouver would have developed the canceled project, with Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme working on the soundtrack for the game.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: From 2005 to 2009, the series remained largely unmentioned, with the rights still fully belonging to Take-Two. In 2006, German-based Yager Development pitched a cover-based shooter to publisher 2K Games, who rejected the original concept of futuristic soldiers without Dubai as a setting. However, 2K offered them a chance to develop a reboot for the "Spec Ops" series, promising that they would have a lot of creative freedom. Development began in early 2007, with most other fundamentals of the initial game intact. While the game is an installment in the "Spec Ops" series, the team chose to use new ideas and intentionally avoided using existing elements of the franchise.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The developers drew inspiration from multiple media. The set-up and the game's foundation was inspired by "Heart of Darkness", whose story reveals the changes a person undergoes in chaotic times. The relationship between Walker and his squad mates was inspired by HBO's "Generation Kill", and the post-war traumatic experience suffered by Walker was inspired by "Jacob's Ladder". The story of the Tower of Babel was also an inspiration for the game. The story was originally set to be written by several German writers, but they were later replaced by American writers Richard Pearsey, who had worked on TimeGate Studios' "Section 8", and Walt Williams, who had previously worked on other 2K projects including "BioShock 2" and "Mafia II". One of the game's core features is violence, but the team hoped that it would not be "cheesy" or excessive. This led the team to focus on creating the game's storyline to motivate players to take the actions they choose. Writing the story became uncomfortable and rough for Williams as time progressed, due to the game's dark themes.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The game was designed to be a third-person shooter so that players can see the three characters change and evolve as it progresses, and that the perspective differentiates the game from others shooters in the market. The game was meant to feature narrative gameplay, in which the game was to be played without any cutscenes so that the entire story would be told through gameplay sequences only. However, the idea was downplayed as the development team realized that having cutscenes helps players to be more emotionally connected and allowed the team to create dramatic scripted sequences.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Although the lead player character, Martin Walker, was designed to be as simple as possible in order to help players to engage in the game, and relate to the character, the team gave him some personality which was expressed through his body language and his reactions during the game's battles. It was felt that by reflecting his emotions to players, they would share them. The squad was designed so that room was left for character development. The transformation of the squad's mentality serves as an important plot device during the game and has a significant narrative context. The changes in the cleanliness of their clothing, and their reactions toward each other, help to illustrate the story. According to Williams, the hope was that players would start the game with relatively low expectations, or they would consider the game another typical heroic war shooter, then by seeing the transformation of the characters, would be shocked by the game's narrative and be "engulfed by the darkness". To make the transformation process clear, the team found it necessary to show the characters' personality at the beginning of the game in order to create a strong contrast. Gameplay is also a plot device and is tied to the game's narrative, as players can choose whether or not to execute enemies, which reflects the brutality and horror of war.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Williams believed that most games on the market failed to create a correct representation of the war experience, or express the psychological changes that some combatants experience after participating in a war. He added that a war is not as straightforward and immature as it is often portrayed in various shooters. As a result, a central theme of the game revolves around the moral aspect of war. By using this theme, the team hoped to tell a story and provide an experience that feels realistic, covering the combatants' mental changes during and after a military conflict, similar to how movies in the 1970s and 1980s, such as "Platoon", "Full Metal Jacket" and "Apocalypse Now" convey these messages. The team had the intention to give players the opportunity to show that a shooter can also have a decent story capable of invoking emotions. To achieve this, the team simplified their original story setting of having Konrad as a "megalomaniac with messianic delusions" to a setting that is more similar to "Heart of Darkness".


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: "Spec Ops: The Line" includes several choices for players to make. According to Williams, it was a key concept to be featured right from the start of the game's development. The game does not feature a morality system, but instead has situations that give players some freedom of choice. The consequences of some of these choices were deliberately made unclear in an attempt to make them more realistic, encouraging players to explore the other potential options not directly presented by the game. These choices were inspired by "Fallout 3", and are often between: "what the character knows and what the player would maybe try and do". To make choices more realistic, and to increase the impact of the story, the team put in a lot of morally ambiguous choices and "bad or worse" decisions. Williams added that absolute good choices are not practical and sometimes may not exist in real-world situations, so to reflect that combat sequences sometimes force players to make split-second decisions and accept whatever the consequences are. According to Williams, this is something that people frequently do in real-world scenarios, and they must "live with it" after their decision. Williams added that they hoped that the game's players would have different feelings after making these choices, as this would show that they had created an opportunity for players to examine their own inner emotions, and that they had successfully provided different experiences for players without having a branching storyline. Replay value was also considered when the development team was designing these choices.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The game's moral choices do not have any connection to gameplay, as the team feared that players would view them as gameplay mechanics and disconnect them from the story. The consequences of each choice were designed to be unpredictable to create tension for the player. Both approaches are applied to let players make decisions based on their own will instead of "gaming the system". Williams also added that they attempted to make violence in the game "meaningful". While the game's basic premise is to have the Delta Squad rescue civilians in Dubai, the game by its nature tasks players to kill with their firearms. Therefore, the team added a lot of dialogue to justify and rationalize the characters' violent actions, creating complex plot points, drama and climaxes. The team also added conversations between enemy soldiers in an attempt to humanize them.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: A major theme of the game is heroism, where being a hero may bring more harm than help. During development, there was a point at the beginning of the game where players could choose to leave Dubai. This was cut from the game, as the team found it not effective enough, and it broke a player's immersion in the game. According to Williams, the choice system was originally designed to be similar to "Fable II", where after a player makes a decision, they cannot reload the game and choose differently unless they start a new game. This was later removed due to the game's structure as a shooter, as the team feared that it might make the game unwinnable and cause players to feel frustrated. Williams later added that adding achievements to the game was a mistake, as it disrupts the game's narrative.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: One of the main goals of the narrative was to depict war in a manner unlike it is portrayed in media such as TV and books. Another goal was to use the scenarios presented to cause players to raise questions about their thoughts of killing people in a video game as a form of entertainment. To achieve this, the team made the hints at the game's loading screen increasingly aggressive, while the game's overall narrative was designed with the aim of being "physically opposing", so that players could project themselves into the protagonist's position, especially when making choices that involve the killing of innocents. They hoped that players would be able to feel angry at the developers who "forced" players into killing civilians in the game. The team had a lot of debates regarding the imagery used in depicting violence towards civilians, as many considered it excessive and unnecessary. However, 2K approved their vision even when the team thought they had pushed the narrative to extremes.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Williams has stated that the game's events are open to interpretation. Many different theories have been discussed by the development staff. Davis described the game's pacing as "deliberate", but he added that there are moments where the pacing slows down significantly and allows the player to learn more about the game's story through inspecting environmental objects. The city of Dubai is filled with graffiti, which is used to give players information regarding the factions and the backstory. According to Yager, the graffiti was designed to give players a perspective that is different from the main game, and to help make the location more realistic. The team also hoped to make players feel lost when playing the game. As a result, the team added hallucinations to the game. The team hoped that by using hallucinations as a plot device, they could create a snowball effect and engage players more fully in the story as they complete the game. These hallucinations sometimes occur through the subtext, in which players may not realize their presence. Williams added that having subtext is important, and that the "best stories are the ones that have stuff hidden in them". The game fades to black when the game transitions from one scene to another, and it fades to white when Walker is hallucinating or otherwise deceiving himself.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The game is set in Dubai, which has been ravaged by sandstorms, a story set-up inspired by Davis' and Williams' personal experience with heat waves, hurricanes, and sandstorms in Louisiana and Lubbock, as well as a story about a Persian army that vanished in an Egyptian desert in a sandstorm. The two found that the chaotic forces behind sandstorms would help them to convey the message of how fragile humans are, as well as the harshness of war. The team believed that the location provided them with a "fantastic" real-world environment allowing them to produce great visuals. Using Dubai as a setting allowed the game's levels to have verticality and variety. The development team sent their art directors to Dubai to inspect the local environment. To prevent the game from featuring the typical "dirty, grungy brown environment", the team added more colors to the game, as well as objects such as glass, marble, gold, and crystals to make the location look vivid and vibrant.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Using Dubai as a setting allowed them to incorporate sand as part of the game's key mechanics. Davis described the Dubai in the game as "a mix of fantasy and real-world environment". To prevent the sand mechanics from turning gimmicky, the team introduced multiple ways for players to use sand as a weapon, such as the player's ability to trigger dust clouds by throwing grenades on sand and cause a sand avalanche by shooting weak structures and supports. In addition, the team added several scripted sequences regarding sand to keep the game dynamic. The occurrence of these moments were decided based on the game's production value. The team also consulted Wil Makeneole for military advice.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The game featured advanced artificial intelligence due to the inclusion of the game's squad command system. Adams and Lugo will assist Walker in battles and react to the battle situation accordingly even if they are not given any orders. They will also analyse the situation when instructed and decide the best approach to defeat enemies. The battle command system was designed to be accessible and easy to use, so that players would not have to spend a lot of time managing the squad. Lugo and Adams may get severely injured and if either or both of them die, the game ends. This mechanic prompts the player to rescue them as quickly as possible, and the system is designed to create tense situations. The AI for enemies is affected by various factors, including visibility and hearing.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The team did research on weapon sounds by consulting several military experts. The team spent a lot of time dealing with the audio mixing, so that the resulting sounds would not interfere with the narrative. To make the game's script unique, the team added more variety to character lines during gameplay moments, and had these lines correspond to scenarios the characters were facing in the game. Elia Cmíral was hired to compose the music for the game, and the soundtrack was described as "unearthly" and "rock-orientated". To establish the character of the Radioman, the team added licensed music, including "Nowhere to Run" by Martha and the Vandellas and Mogwai's "Glasgow Mega-Snake".


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Although "Spec Ops: The Line" has a strong single-player focus, it also features multiplayer components. Yager was only responsible for the single-player campaign; the multiplayer was outsourced to Darkside Game Studios. The multiplayer team at 2K Games, which previously developed the multiplayer of "BioShock 2", also assisted in creating the multiplayer.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: According to Davis, while 2K Games was supportive of Yager and "took a hell of a lot of risk with the project", they insisted that the game have multiplayer components to boost the sales. This was a decision that Yager thought would hurt the game. Davis described the project as a "waste of money" and a "low-quality "Call of Duty" clone". The president of Darkside Game Studios, Hugh Falk, responded by calling Davis' opinion "outlying". He added that Darkside participated in the project towards the end of the game's development cycle and that they had to revamp the entire multiplayer system within tight deadlines. Davis later claimed that his comments were not directed at Darkside Game Studios, and that he is satisfied with their final product after a long and troubled development cycle.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The game originally did not have a cooperative multiplayer mode, as the development team thought that it would distract from the tonally darker levels of the single-player campaign, not matching the game's narrative. However, a cooperative mode was still added to the game in August 2012 as free downloadable content; it does not follow the storyline of the campaign.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: On December 12, 2009, a ninth game in the series was announced at the Spike Video Game Awards; a trailer depicted several minutes of gameplay and showed off the setting. A subsequent press release detailed the premise, other game features, and a possible 2011 release date. An official site was soon launched, and a new trailer was released in November 2011. The game was later delayed to the first or second quarter of 2012, before the final fixed release date was announced. "Spec Ops: The Line" was released on June 26, 2012 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was released on March 13, 2014 for OS X. This version of the game was developed by Digital Tribe Games.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: No news about the game was made available for 18 months after it was initially announced. Davis thought the game was announced too early, causing excitement for it to die down too far from the release date. The developers carried out focus tests during this period, and the gameplay was found to be too slow-paced compared to competitors such as "Call of Duty". As a result, the team spent time to speed up the game's action so that it would more closely match the narrative.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: In addition to the game's standard edition, players could purchase a Premium Edition at a higher price. Players who pre-ordered the game at selected retailers were able to have their games upgraded to the Premium Edition at no additional cost. The Premium Edition grants players additional advantages in the multiplayer segment of the game, including an experience points boost and early access to the Officer class. A multiplayer beta for selected applicants on the Xbox 360 platform was held in 2010. A playable demo of the game, which featured two chapters from the beginning of the campaign, was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on May 8, 2012.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: According to Williams, the game was difficult to market, as the team wanted to prevent spoiling the narrative yet encourage people to buy the game. He added that the demo they released was unrepresentative of the final game. Williams expected the game to be sold through word of mouth promotion and that it would eventually become a cult classic.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Reviews of "Spec Ops: The Line" were mostly positive, with many critics praising the narrative, themes, and the provocative take on violence in video games, but noted that it failed to innovate or present a strong multiplayer component. Many critics consider the game to be underrated, or overlooked. Previews of the game, as well as the game itself, were banned in the United Arab Emirates for the depiction of Dubai in a state of destruction.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The overall gameplay received mixed reviews. Some critics believed that the gameplay was enjoyable, serviceable and acceptable by modern standards, but most others agreed that some of the gameplay mechanics, such as the cover system, lacked polish and were flawed. Some critics considered the gameplay generic due to its inclusion of typical shooter elements such as on-rail and turret segments, and stated that such mechanics are unable to help the game differentiate itself from other shooters such as "Gears of War", and give the game an identity crisis. Some critics lamented that gameplay occasionally disconnects players from the story, creating tonal dissonance. Many criticized the game for not having a roll mechanic. The artificial intelligence system was criticized for not being strong enough to make the game more gratifying, though some critics thought that the AI system for Adams and Lugo was well-crafted and did not suffer from severe or frequent technical problems, although they may not be able to carry out player's commands. Some critics criticized the game's low replay value, unbalanced difficulty level, and sudden difficulty spike.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The graphics and art design of the game was praised. Brandon Justice from "Electronic Gaming Monthly" stated that he expected the game to look "bland" due to its setting, but he was surprised at how much variety and color there was. The game's level design and vibrant colors were also praised. Critics agreed that the game's setting, Dubai, was excellent and well-realized; some critics praised Yager for adding different details to the game's world. The terrain and landscape was praised for being interesting, unique, and creating "fantastic set piece battles". Some commented that the sand mechanic sometimes became gimmicky. Many criticized the game's poor textures and the poor rendering of cutscenes.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The game's overall narrative was highly praised by critics; many considered it compelling, engaging, riveting, and mature, and viewed it as the standout feature of the game. Some believed that the story had an excellent presentation with decent voice-acting, memorable characters, and atmospheric soundtracks. North's performance was particularly praised. Many critics thought it was a bold attempt by Yager and that the story about mistakes and consequences allowed the game's narrative to exceed its competitors in terms of quality. Some critics believed that Yager deserves respect for successfully creating a message through the story and delivering it to the player, and trying to do something different. Mitch Dyer of IGN thought that the game's narrative made violence "meaningful", and that the story was unexpectedly good and personal. Some believed the story is impactful and at times shocking, and that the plot would make ""Modern Warfare 2"'s infamous No Russian look pretty tame". The game's choices were praised for being "powerful" despite not offering a branching storyline. Some critics believed that these choices are provocative, organic, impactful, upsetting, and thematically correct, though unsatisfying and sometimes hollow and binary. The endings of the game were praised. Some critics noted that emotionally "Spec Ops: The Line" is not a pleasant game.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: Critics have noticed that the mechanics of the gamethe actions available to the player, and the responses resulting from said actionscontrast pointedly with many mechanics of popular FPS games, and that the game deliberately used shooter genre clichés in order to illustrate how ludicrous they are in comparison to real warfare. In particular, unlike other games of its kind, some critics believe that "Spec Ops: The Line" does not intend the combat to be a fun experience for the player, but rather aims to engage the player by critiquing the shooter genre for being removed from reality and providing players with an unrealistic, morally dichotomous, escapist fantasy. The scene depicting the use of white phosphorus has been the subject of much scrutiny due to imagery that includes the corpse of a mother clutching her child, and was described as "troubling". In response to complaints that the massacre was unnecessary or exploitative, Williams justified the scene by saying that the plot device was intended to evoke players' anger, and that a valid way to end the game is simply for the player to put the controller down and stop playing. Nonetheless, the sequence is considered to be a defining moment of the game's story, and is praised by a large majority of critics.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: In 2014, Former IGN Senior Editor Colin Moriarty included "Spec Ops: The Line" in his list of Top 25 Favourite Games of All Time. He wrote, "What I found underneath its bro-shooter façade was perhaps one of the best stories I've ever experienced in a game, all built around an entirely awesome third-person cover-based shooter. "Spec Ops" is underrated, and it will never see a sequel (nor should it), but it's a must-play for the story alone."


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: The game debuted at No. 3 in the UK retail sales chart during the game's first week of release, behind "" and "The Amazing Spider-Man". "Spec Ops: The Line" was a commercial failure, selling less than anticipated by Take-Two. The sales of "Spec Ops: The Line", combined with "Max Payne 3", were lower than the combined sales of "L.A. Noire" and "Duke Nukem Forever". The low sales of the title contributed to Take-Two's disappointing financial results in fiscal year 2013.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: "Spec Ops: The Line" was nominated for Best Shooter, and the White Phosphorus scene was nominated for Best Gaming Moments at the Golden Joystick Awards. At the 2012 Inside Gaming Awards, the game won for Best Narrative and was nominated for Best Game Cinematography. At IGN's Best of 2012 Awards, the game won for Best PC Story and Best PS3 Story, and also received nominations for Best Overall Story, Best PS3 Action Game, Best Xbox 360 Shooter Game, and Best Xbox 360 Story. It was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Story at the 16th D.I.C.E. Awards.


title: Spec Ops: The Line

text: According to Yager Development, 2K never discussed the chance of developing a sequel during the game's development. Timo Ullman, managing director of Yager stated that the game failed to compete with other shooters, and that market for games like "Spec Ops: The Line" is too small. As a result, the team would not return to the franchise. Team members expressed a desire to move on and develop a game that has a much lighter tone.


title: Popular Front of India

text: Popular Front of India (PFI) is an Islamic political organisation in India, that engages in a radical and exclusivist style of Muslim minority politics. Formed to counter Hindutva groups, it was banned by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs under Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) on 28 September 2022 for a period of five years.


title: Popular Front of India

text: PFI was founded in 2006 with the merger of the Karnataka Forum for Dignity (KFD) and the National Development Front (NDF). The organisation described itself as a "neo-social movement committed to empower people to ensure justice, freedom and security". It advocates for Muslim reservations. In 2012, the organisation conducted protests against alleged use of the UAPA law to detain innocent citizens.


title: Popular Front of India

text: PFI has often been accused of involvement in anti-national and anti-social activities by the Indian Government. In 2012, the Government of Kerala claimed that the organization was a resurrection of the banned terrorist outfit Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), an affiliate of the Indian Mujahideen.


title: Popular Front of India

text: PFI has often been in violent clashes with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in parts of Kerala and Karnataka. Activists have been found with lethal weapons, bombs, gunpowder, swords by the authorities. Several allegations have been made on the organization for having links with terrorist organizations such as Taliban and Al-Qaeda.


title: Popular Front of India

text: The organisation has various wings to cater to different sections of society, including the National Women's Front (NWF) and the Campus Front of India (CFI). Including these wings, the ban by Ministry of Home Affairs extended to 8 affiliate organizations of PFI.


title: Popular Front of India

text: The PFI started in Kerala as successor to National Development Front in 2006. It went on to merge with the Karnataka Forum for Dignity of Karnataka and the Manitha Neethi Pasarai in Tamil Nadu and later in 2009, with Goa's Citizen's Forum, Rajasthan's Community Social and Educational Society, West Bengal's Nagarik Adhikar Suraksha Samiti, Manipur's Lilong Social Forum and Andhra Pradesh's Association of Social Justice.


title: Popular Front of India

text: A common platform was formed in cooperation with the South India Council as an outcome of a regional discussion attended by Muslim social activists and intellectuals from the South Indian States at Bangalore on 25 and 26 January 2004. It has taken up the issue of reservation in government and private sector jobs and Parliament and Assemblies and in cooperation with the Confederation of Muslim Institutions in India, it organised a two-day workshop on Muslim Reservations on 26 and 27 November 2005 at Hyderabad, inaugurated by Rajya Sabha member Rahman Khan.


title: Popular Front of India

text: The various allegations include connections with various Islamic terrorist groups, possessing arms, kidnapping, murder, intimidation, hate campaigns, rioting, Love Jihad and various acts of religious extremism. In 2010, the assault on Prof. T. J. Joseph who published a controversial question paper, supposedly insulting the Islamic prophet Muhammad, was linked to the PFI. One of its founding leaders has also states that PFI's goal is to establish an Islamic State in India. However, the charges were denied by the organisation, which added that the accusations were fabricated to malign the organisation. An IB officer said that PFI preaches to its cadres that killing of right-wing activists would provide them 'religious rewards in the afterlife'.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2012, the Kerala government informed the Kerala High Court, in an affidavit, that PFI had active involvement in 27 murder cases, mostly of cadres of CPI-M and RSS. In 2014, it again submitted before the Kerala High Court that activists of the NDF/PFI were involved in 27 communally motivated murder cases, 86 attempt to murder cases and in 106 communal cases registered in the state. The affidavit was filed in response to a petition filed by Thejas, spokesperson of PFI in the State, challenging the refusal of the government to give government advertisements to the daily. A carpenter Abid Pasha was arrested for six murder cases. He had links with PFI.


title: Popular Front of India

text: On 6 July 2012, N. Sachin Gopal, a student of Modern ITC, Kannur and the district leader Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, was allegedly stabbed by members of the CFI and PFI. Student leader Vishal was murdered. Gopal later died of his injuries at KMC Hospital in Mangalore on 6 September 2012 A Special Investigation Team (SIT) was formed to investigate the case.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In February 2019, at least 1 member of PFI was arrested for murdering Ramalingam, a member of PMK after an argument with some Muslims about conversion activities. In August 2019, charges were framed against 18 members of PFI. Investigations claimed that Ramalingam was murdered as part of a conspiracy after he tried to interfere in the conversions lead by the Dawah team of PFI. In August 2021, the key conspirator Rahman Sadiq was arrested for the murder who was in hiding since 2 years.


title: Popular Front of India

text: On 21 May 2022, in a rally organised by PFI in Alappuzha, Kerala called "Save the Republic", a child sitting on the shoulder of another person raised the slogan "“Hindus should keep rice for their last rites and Christians should keep incense for their last rites. If you live decently, you can live in our land and if you don’t live decently, we know Azadi (freedom). Live decently, decently, decently.”"


title: Popular Front of India

text: After a video of the rally went viral, Alappuzha Police arrested the district president of PFI along with another activist. Police stated that the child cannot be booked due to the Juvenile Justice Act, but his parents instigated him. On the same day as the rally, Bajrang Dal had taken out a bike rally against terrorism. FIR was registered against Bajrang Dal members as well.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2010, the PFI was alleged to have links with the banned Islamic terrorist organisation Students Islamic Movement of India. The PFI's national chairman, Abdul Rehman, was the former national secretary of SIMI, while the organization's state secretary, Abdul Hameed, was SIMI's former state secretary. Most former leaders of SIMI were either identified with PFI or were holding various portfolios in the organisation. The alleged SIMI connection has been dubbed baseless by the leaders of the PFI claiming that the Front was launched in 1993, whereas the SIMI ban came much later in 2001. Retired Indian army officer P. C. Katoch has claimed that the PFI maintains links with the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2012, the Government of Kerala informed the High Court of their opinion that the activities of the PFI are inimical to the safety of the country and that it is "nothing but a resurrection of the banned outfit Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) in another form", in its argument to ban the organisation's Independence Day programme, dubbed "Freedom Parade". The High Court dismissed the Government's stand, but upheld the ban imposed by the State Government.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In July 2010, the Kerala Police seized country-made bombs, weapons, CDs and several documents containing Taliban and Al-Qaeda propaganda, from PFI activists. The raids conducted were subsequently termed "undemocratic" and "unconstitutional" by the organisation. As of 6 September 2010, as informed to the state high court by the Kerala government, no evidence has been found by the police in its probe into the allegation of links to Hizbul Mujahideen, Lashkar-e Taiba (Let) or Al-Qaeda. However, in April 2013 a series of raids by the Kerala Police on PFI centres across North Kerala found lethal weapons, foreign currency, human shooting targets, bombs, explosive raw materials, gunpowder, swords, among other things. The Kerala Police claimed that the raid revealed the "terror face" of the PFI. In January 2016, 1 member was sentenced to 7 years and 5 members were sentenced to 5 years of prison by National Investigation Agency (NIA).


title: Popular Front of India

text: In November 2017, Kerala Police identified 6 members of PFI who had joined the Islamic State, possibly by moving to Syria using fake passports.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In November 2019, the Central Government provided Z category security to Justice S. Abdul Nazeer, one of the judges of the Supreme Court of India and part of the bench which passed the Ayodhya verdict.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In April 2013, Kerala Police raided a training camp in Narath, Kannur and arrested 21 activists of the PFI. Two country-made bombs, a sword, raw materials for making bombs and pamphlets in the name of PFI were seized by the police. The raid was conducted at the office building of Thanal Charitable Trust. A document with names of several leading personalities and organisations was also seized, which police suspect is a hit-list. The PFI leadership and those arrested claimed that it was a Yoga training programme organised as part of a personality development programme and asked for a judicial probe by a sitting judge to inquire into the alleged training camp. PFI's state president claimed that this police case was fabricated in a bid to tarnish the organisation's image. On 18 May 2013, the NIA arrived to investigate the alleged extremist activities in Narath.


title: Popular Front of India

text: Two boys were kidnapped on 8 June 2011 from SBRR Mahajana College premises in Mysore and murdered by members of Karnataka Forum for Dignity (KFD), who sought ransom of 5 crore rupees to raise funds for their organisation. Following the arrest of these KFD members, Karnataka state government requested the Union government to ban Karnataka Forum for Dignity.


title: Popular Front of India

text: After the Assam riots in 2012, an SMS hate campaign was launched in the South of India threatening people from the North-East with retribution, particularly after Ramzan. Investigators traced the source of these hate messages to Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI) and the PFI, along with its affiliate organisations Manita Neeti Pasarai and Karnataka Forum for Dignity. More than 60 million messages were sent in a single day on 13 August 2012. Some 28-30 percent of the messages were found to have been uploaded from Pakistan. The SMS campaign was designed to create a panic among the people from the North-East, forcing them to flee. This led to a mass exodus of 30,000 people from cities of Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and national capital Delhi. Union Home Ministry banned bulk SMS and MMS for 15 days to quell rumors and threats.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In Jan 2011, Kerala Police filed a charge sheet against 27 alleged PFI activists in conjunction with an incident in which they severed the hand of a Kerala professor who had allegedly made derogatory references to the Islamic prophet Muhammad . At the time of the attack, Joseph was coming back from his duties at a private Christian college in Muvattapuzha and had been accused of blasphemy.


title: Popular Front of India

text: It is reported that the attack resulted from the ruling from one of the "Taliban-model" courts (Darul Khada) operating in the state. The Kerala state police claimed to be "unearthing the vast network" of the PFI, and after a series of raids on the houses of PFI members, the district secretary of the PFI "threatened the officer with dire consequences if he continued raiding the houses of its activists." On 9 July 2010, it was reported that PFI installations were being raided by police, and that they had found propaganda videos from the global Islamic network al-Qaeda in the possession of one alleged PFI member, and a rifle, fake SIM cards, and fake identity cards in the possession of another member of the PFI. As a result of the incident, the BJP has called for a ban on the PFI and an examinations of possible links between the PFI and the Taliban by the National Investigation Agency.


title: Popular Front of India

text: One of the chief accused in this case, Prof. Anas was acquitted. He had contested to win the local elections from jail. He alleged the accusation is a scheme devised by the NIA and the police to deliberately target the PFI.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2015, PFI staged a rally in Karnataka's Shimoga during which stones were thrown on vehicles, as alleged by the locals. Three people riding a bike were stabbed by PFI activists in which 32 year old Vishwanath Shetty, succumbed to his injuries. 56 arrests were made in connection with these communal clashes. Around the same time, the body of Manjunath was found and it was believed that he too died in the rally and the communal riots, but later it was proved that this killing was not related to these communal clashes.


title: Popular Front of India

text: On 1 January 2020 Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad stated that PFI may have played a part in violence surrounding some protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). The Enforcement Directorate also informed the Ministry of Home Affairs and is investigating a Prevention of Money Laundering Act probe. However PFI has denied any link with any protest against the CAA in the country and called it a cheap campaign against it.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2017, India Today, in an undercover operation, interviewed Ahmad Shareef, a founding member of PFI and the managing editor of PFI mouthpiece Thejas. In the interview, when questioned whether the motive of PFI and Sathya Sarini is to convert India into an Islamic country, he said "All over the world. Why only India? After making India an Islamic state and then they will go to other states". He also admitted that PFI had picked up funding from the Middle East in the past and transferred it into India through "hawala" channels"."


title: Popular Front of India

text: In late 2017, videos from a sting operation of Zainaba AS, president of NWF, showed that she admitted on camera that National Women's Front – the PFI's women's wing – was carrying out mass conversion to Islam at "Sathya Sarini". Zainaba had earlier been questioned by NIA for her role in conversion of Hadiya/Akhila which was also termed a case of Love Jihad. Zaibana retracted her recorded statement and claimed that the allegations were fake. Following the sting operation, NIA questioned her for her involvement in the mass conversion.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2012, PFI launched a nationwide campaign "Why the Popular Front", detailing the alleged false accusations and attempts by mainstream media and other organisations to tarnish its image. The organisation maintains that it strives hard to restore the rights of the depressed and marginalised sections of the Indian society.


title: Popular Front of India

text: Further, the organisation filed complaints with the Press Council of India against 10 newspapers—both Hindi and English—for their attempts to tarnish the image of the PFI.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2013, in line with the PFI's counter charge, "Coastal Digest" reported that the NIA and the IB denied that they had shared any such information, denying the claims by the media. This was in response to the 2012 complaints against 10 newspapers. In March 2015, Indian intelligence agencies reported that the role of the PFI in the 2011 Mumbai bombings, 2012 Pune bombings and 2013 Hyderabad blasts had been found; claims which were subsequently denied by the PFI.


title: Popular Front of India

text: The public meeting on 17 February 2009 which marked the conclusion of National Political Conference saw the merger of social organisations in eight states into the PFI. Along with the state presidents of NDF Kerala, MNP Tamil Nadu and KFD Karnataka which had already merged with PFI, heads of social organisations in Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Manipur joined hands on the dais with the PFI chairman.


title: Popular Front of India

text: The PFI and its allies conducted a freedom parade on 15 August in 2009 and 2010 in celebration of Indian Independence Day. The parade was followed by a public meeting. In 2010, the parade was conducted in Udupi and Mettuppalayam. In the previous year it was conducted in Mangalore and Madurai.


title: Popular Front of India

text: The Kerala state government banned the Freedom Parade stating it would jeopardise communal harmony. The ban was challenged in the Kerala High Court which upheld the ban. The Intelligence wing of Kerala Police had informed the High Court that PFI is the new face of banned Islamist group Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and is engaged in fundamentalist and anti-national activities.


title: Popular Front of India

text: The Social Justice Conference was held at Ramlila Ground in New Delhi on 26 and 27 November 2011. The conference was addressed by Syed Shahabuddin, a former MP and Mulayam Singh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party leader, and Thol. Thirumavalavan the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi leader. The key address of the conference was to plea the UPA government to implement the findings of Sachar Committee Report and the Ranganath Misra Commission.


title: Popular Front of India

text: 21 activists of PFI were charged with UAPA for involvement in anti-national activities. Following which, in May 2013, the organisation conducted a statewide campaign in Kerala, it started on 8 May from Kasargod and how the UAPA is being misused, and how they believe it is terrorising citizens who resisted oppression from a ruling elite. The campaign concluded with a mass gathering at the State Capital, Thiruvananthapuram on 30 May.


title: Popular Front of India

text: KM Shareef, the National General Secretary of PFI has asserted that reservation is the most immediate need of Muslims, referencing a report submitted by the Prime Minister's High Level Committee (Justice Rajindar Sachchar Committee) in November 2006, which identified the Muslim community as more backward than any other, and claimed that insufficient discussion on this topic was taking place in assemblies and parliament. In the context of the Central Government's decision on reservation in higher education, the South India Council organised three Regional Conventions on Reservation: in Calcutta on 4 August 2006, in Bangalore on 5 August 2006, and in Chennai on 17 August 2006. A National Convention on Reservation in Higher Education was organised by the South India Council jointly with All India Milli Council at New Delhi on 29 August 2006. Former Prime Minister V. P. Singh also addressed the convention.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2010, the National Executive Council of the PFI demanded a ten percent reservation for Muslims across India.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In November 2012, it organized protests outside the Israel Embassy in New Delhi against the attacks in Gaza conducted by Israel raising slogans against USA and Israel. Similar protests were organized in 2014.


title: Popular Front of India

text: In 2015, the PFI protested against the death sentence given to a democratically elected leader and Islamist affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi and his followers. The protest was in front of the Egyptian embassy in New Delhi.


title: Popular Front of India

text: On 22 September 2022, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) with other probe agencies conducted a large-scale midnight operation termed "Operation Octopus" in the premises of the organization across the country, on charges of terror-funding and money laundering. The raid resulted in the detaining of at least 100 PFI leaders and activists.


title: Popular Front of India

text: The following day, PFI called hartals (strikes) in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which turned violent. In Kerala, the strike resulted in property damages worth approximately ₹5 crores and arrest of thousands of protestors.


title: Popular Front of India

text: A second round of nationwide raids were carried out on 27 September 2022, resulting in further 247 activists being arrested.


title: Popular Front of India

text: On 28 September 2022, the Government of India declared PFI as "unlawful association" and temporarily banned the organisation for five years under the UAPA act. The government reasoned that the organisation was "prejudicial to the integrity, sovereignty and security of the country" and citied PFIs alleged connection with terror organisations like Students Islamic Movement of India, Jamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.


title: Popular Front of India

text: PFI's 8 associate organisations Rehab India Foundation, Campus Front of India, All India Imams Council, National Confederation of Human Rights Organization, National Women’s Front, Junior Front, Empower India Foundation and Rehab Foundation, Kerala were also banned.


title: Galangal

text: The word "galangal", or its variant "galanga" or archaically "galingale", can refer in common usage to the aromatic rhizome of any of four plant species in the Zingiberaceae (ginger) family, namely:


title: Galangal

text: The term "galingale" is sometimes also used for the rhizome of the unrelated "sweet cyperus" ("Cyperus longus"), traditionally used as a folk medicine in Europe.


title: Galangal

text: Various galangal rhizomes are used in traditional Southeast Asian cuisine, such as Khmer kroeung (paste), Thai and Lao tom yum and tom kha gai soups, Vietnamese Huế cuisine (tré) and throughout Indonesian cuisine, as in soto and opor. Polish Żołądkowa Gorzka vodka is flavoured with galangal. While all varieties of galangal are closely related to common ginger, each is unique in its own right. Due to their unique taste profiles, galangals are not typically regarded as synonymous with ginger or each other in traditional Asian dishes. It was popular in medieval Europe, where it was generally known as "galingale".


title: Galangal

text: In ethnobotany, galangal has been reported to be used for its purported merits in promoting digestion and alleviating respiratory diseases and stomach problems. Each galangal variety has been attributed specific medical virtues.


title: Galangal

text: In commerce, galangals are commonly available in Asian markets as whole fresh rhizome, or in dried and sliced, or powdered form.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Silent Hill: Revelation (also known as Silent Hill: Revelation 3D) is a 2012 supernatural horror film written and directed by M. J. Bassett and based on the video game series "Silent Hill" published by Konami. The film, produced as a sequel to "Silent Hill" (2006), stars Adelaide Clemens, Kit Harington, Martin Donovan, Malcolm McDowell and Carrie-Anne Moss, with Deborah Kara Unger, Sean Bean and Radha Mitchell returning from the previous film. The film follows Heather Mason (Clemens), who, discovering on the eve of her eighteenth birthday that her presumed identity is false, is drawn to the town of Silent Hill.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Talks for a "Silent Hill" sequel began in December 2006, with Christophe Gans returning to direct and Roger Avary writing a script for the project. However, after Gans dropped out from directing and Avary was imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter, the project entered development hell. Later, in early 2010, Bassett was hired to direct and write the film, replacing Gans and Avary. She had expressed her openness to fans' suggestions of actresses for Heather's role. On a total estimated $20 million budget, filming lasted from March to May 2011 in Canada, with the 3D RED Epic camera used for the process; audio mixing took place in France.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: "Silent Hill: Revelation" was released theatrically in Canada on October 26, 2012, by Alliance Films; in France on November 28, by Metropolitan Filmexport; and in Japan on July 12, 2013, by Presidio. The film grossed over $55.9 million worldwide against a $20 million budget and received negative reviews from critics.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In January 2011, Sharon Da Silva (Adelaide Clemens) and her adoptive father Christopher (Sean Bean) have spent the past few years moving from town to town and assuming different identities, including the names Heather Mason and Harry Mason. Heather believes that they are on the run from the police because Harry killed a man in self-defense and that her adoptive mother Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) died in a car crash. In fact, he has been protecting her from the Order, a cult of Silent Hill. Rose was able to free Heather from the fog world using one half of a talisman called the Seal of Metatron, but she remained trapped in Silent Hill.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Heather meets fellow student Vincent Cooper (Kit Harington), but she is haunted by hallucinations of Silent Hill. She is approached by private investigator Douglas Cartland (Martin Donovan) regarding her identity. Heather warns her father, but he is abducted by the Order and taken to Silent Hill. Unaware of this, Heather goes to a mall to wait for him, but enters the mall's Otherworld. Douglas explains he was hired by the Order to find Heather, but decides to help her when he discovered who his clients were. A monster, the Missionary (Liise Keeling), kills Douglas. Heather returns to the real world and flees, unfortunately leaving her a suspect of Douglas' murder.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Vincent escorts her home, but they find a message instructing Heather to go to Silent Hill. On the way to rescue her father, Heather reads a letter from her father detailing the truth of her background and lost memories. Heather and Vincent travel to the town, but stop at a motel, where Vincent reveals that he is the son of the Order's leader Claudia Wolf (Carrie-Anne Moss), and was sent by her to ensure Heather came of her own volition to Silent Hill. He reveals that Heather is a part of Alessa Gillespie (Erin Pitt), a girl whose immolation 38 years earlier by the Order led to creation of the town's shifting dimensions. The resulting argument triggers a shift to the Otherworld. The Missionary grabs Vincent, but not before he tells Heather to find his grandfather Leonard (Malcolm McDowell), who possesses the other half of the Seal of Metatron.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Heather ventures into the foggy dimension to find her father. She encounters Alessa's mother Dahlia (Deborah Kara Unger), who reveals that Claudia intends to complete the purpose intended for Alessa at her burning. After a shift to the Otherworld, Heather finds Leonard who, after informing her that the Seal of Metatron will reveal "the true nature of things," fuses Heather's half of the amulet with the one he possesses and becomes a monster. After being knocked out and carried off, Heather regains consciousness and grabs the amulet from within his body, killing Leonard. As she runs away, she summons Pyramid Head (Roberto Campanella), the entity created to protect Alessa (and by extension Heather), with her pleading and hides from him. Shortly after, she witnesses Vincent being taken away by the Order after being deemed insane by Claudia for betraying them.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Heather saves Vincent and they go to Lakeside Amusement Park where the Order's sanctuary is hidden. Dark Alessa (Erin Pitt and Adelaide Clemens), the manifestation of Alessa's wrath, confronts Heather who embraces her counterpart, absorbing her, and making Alessa complete once again. Heather confronts Claudia, who is holding Christopher and Vincent hostage. Claudia explains that Alessa's destiny was to be the incubator for a deity worshiped by the Order, who would punish all sinners upon its birth, completing Heather's destiny as well. Remembering Leonard's words, Heather gives Claudia the Seal of Metatron, revealing her to be the Missionary. Heather summons Pyramid Head, who kills the Missionary, allowing Heather to rescue Vincent and Christopher.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: As the fog fades from the town, Christopher decides to stay in Silent Hill to find and free Rose, leaving Heather and Vincent to care for each other. They manage to hitch a ride away from the place in a truck driven by Travis Grady (Peter Outerbridge). Travis mentions to Heather - now referring to herself as Sharon - and Vincent that they were lucky he was there since A couple of police cars, , enter the area of Silent Hill, which is then consumed by the fog. In a post-credits scene, Pyramid Head is seen walking through an unknown area in Silent Hill.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In December 2006, "Silent Hill" writer/director Christophe Gans announced that Sony had officially ordered another installment in the "Silent Hill" film series. Gans stated that he would like to return to the franchise, if his commitment to "Onimusha" did not bar him from participating. Gans also confirmed that Roger Avary would be back to write the script.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In 2007, producer Don Carmody stated that a screenplay was slowly being developed and that "[Gans is] involved pretty heavily in another project right now" and would likely not return as director. As well, Avary said that he would not be returning to collaborate on the next film on the account that Gans would not be returning, either. In September 2009, Sony Pictures announced that Roger Avary and producer Samuel Hadida were officially signed on the project and that filming would begin in 2010. Hadida stated that production would begin upon completion of "". However, later that month, Roger Avary was sentenced to a 1-year jail term for vehicular manslaughter, and was unable to participate in the film's production.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In November 2009, Carmody told "Shock Till You Drop" that Gans was unlikely to return for the sequel, and that they were going to make the sequel "more accessible to a wider audience". Carmody stated that the film would feature a character from the first movie who is now older, implying that Sharon Da Silva or Alessa Gillespie would be returning, although actress Jodelle Ferland announced that she had not been contacted for the role.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In August 2010, Carmody said the sequel had "stalled" due to Avary's imprisonment, but that he still wanted to be involved with the film and had a basic outline for it.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In November 2010, it was announced that Lionsgate had begun pre-sales on the next installment and that M. J. Bassett would direct the film, titled "Silent Hill: Revelation 3D". Bassett revealed she had written her own screenplay, replacing Roger Avary. She added that she would bring back as many of the core creative team as she could from the first film to keep its look and feel, but add "more darkness and fear into the mix as well".


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: On July 14, 2012, M. J. Bassett appeared at San Diego Comic-Con. She showed two clips from the movie. The first was a short clip showing the Mannequin Monster, and the second showed Vincent tied to an operating table surrounded by Nurses. A movie trailer was released later that month, and from then on, more TV spots, posters and promotional stills were released in anticipation of the film.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Bassett has stated that while "Silent Hill 3" would be the best game of choice to adapt from, it is a sequel to the first film first and foremost, and still needed to make sense with what the first film had established, such as the mythology and relations between characters. People who watched the film expecting "Silent Hill 3: The Movie" would be disappointed in that it differed from the game in many places, as it took different directions in many areas. The film was supposed to be a sequel to the first film that used Silent Hill 3 as groundwork.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Despite this, there were supposed to be many nods to the games that only gamers would catch, and the way many scenes were shot in the film were supposed to reminiscent of Silent Hill 3. An example of this is how the filmography is shot during the carousel scene.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In an interview years after the release of "Revelation", Bassett spoke about her feelings towards the film. She said it felt more like a collaboration and didn't have complete control, but since she wrote and directed it, admits many aspects of its failings are also hers. She felt like she had to satisfy either the gamers or the audience and that it felt impossible to do both. She said shooting in 3D was a pain, and felt obligated to claim it was a great movie for the press, but in the back of her mind, she didn't wholeheartedly agree. She wished she stood up for her vision of the movie and for the fans, and for a more personal, tense, sexual, and less accessible for non-fans. She regretted trying to tie the game and film canons together, as it created contradictions and retcons. She apologized, saying she was very sorry to everyone who did not like the movie.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Before filming began, Bassett was open to suggestions in casting the woman to play Heather, allowing fans to post the names of actresses on her blog that they believed could play her, provided that the actress could realistically portray an eighteen-year-old and had experience in other films. Adelaide Clemens was eventually chosen for the role of Heather, though no one had suggested her. Bassett made another post asking for suggestions for Claudia's actress and some fans suggested Donna Burke, but Bassett was disappointed by the suggestions, feeling it was not a "very imaginative selection", and removed the post.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Kit Harington acknowledged Vincent's character had been changed from the game version in order to give some leeway as a support character for Heather. Heather was somewhat less of a "smartass" to give her a more realistic personality. Bassett was interested in a character who shows "some genuine human responses to the terrible things she experiences."


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Original cast, including Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Deborah Kara Unger, and Roberto Campanella were all contacted to reprise their characters, which they accepted.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In March 2011, the production team began filming in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. Production was delayed when a freak snowstorm hit the set in Cambridge on March 23, 2011. On May 15, 2011, Bassett announced that filming had ended and was in post-production. It was eventually announced that the film would be released on October 26, 2012 by Open Road Films.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Principal photography began in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on 7 March 2011 and wrapped in May 2011, with the 3D RED Epic camera used for the process. Street and bridge scenes were shot in Galt from 21 to 26 March, and scenes set at Silent Hill's Lakeside Amusement Park were filmed at the Cherry Beach park on 7 April 2011. The final theatrical mix for the film was completed on 2 February 2012. The film's audio mixing took place in Paris, France, and was handled by a team of six people.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In 2009, video game artist Masahiro Ito, who participated in the development of multiple installments of the "Silent Hill" series of video games, was asked to design the creatures and the look of the "Otherworld" dimension featured in the film, but declined the offer because of other obligations. Jeff Danna and Akira Yamaoka composed the film's soundtrack. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn sung the official theme of the film ""Silent Scream"".


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: "Silent Hill: Revelation" had its premier in Hong Kong on 25 October 2012. It was theatrically released in the U.S. through Open Road Films on 26 October 2012. Two clips were screened at San Diego Comic-Con International 2012, and a trailer was issued on 27 July 2012. The film was released direct-to-video in Australia on 6 March 2013.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: "Silent Hill: Revelation" opened at #5 at the box office, taking in a weekend number of $8 million, and grossed a total of $55,975,672 worldwide.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: "Silent Hill: Revelation" was panned by film critics. The film holds approval rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on critics, with an average rating of . The site's critical consensus reads, "Mediocre effort even by the standards of video game adaptations, "Silent Hill: Revelation 3D" features weak characters and an incomprehensible plot with a shortage of scares." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 16 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "C" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Dennis Harvey of "Variety" said that "Silent Hill: Revelation 3D" is a "cheaper, cheesier sequel that's worse than its predecessor on every level (save being a half-hour shorter) and takes no special advantage of the stereoscopic process." Andy Webster of "The New York Times" criticized its poorly written characters and plot, which he considered "thumbnail sketches at best", and stated that the film "reduces its human players to plastic action figures in tired genre settings." Kenneth Brown of Blu-ray.com expressed that ""Revelation" is terrible. [...] Every time Maxime Alexandre's cinematography and the sequel's rusty boiler room atmosphere delivers, every time writer/director M. J. Bassett [...] transplants a still-beating heart from the "Silent Hill" videogame [sic] series that's genuinely chilling, the film descends into direct-to-video mediocrity".


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In October 2012, M. J. Bassett stated that if she was to make a sequel, instead of adapting from an existing game, she would prefer to use the stories in the graphic novel adaptations.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In January 2020, Christophe Gans told French magazine "Allocine" that he was in the process of writing new screenplays based on the "Silent Hill" and "Fatal Frame" series with producer Victor Hadida. He stated the production of his previous "Silent Hill" film was a beautiful memory for him and he chose not return for the sequel "Silent Hill: Revelation" because his vision did not match that of the producers. He told the next film could be set in a small American town ruled over by Puritanism.


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: Gans and Hadida developed the concept and pitched it to rights holder Konami. According to Gans, the company felt galvanized by the success of Capcom's "Resident Evil 2" remake and greenlit the film as part of an initiative to get "Silent Hill" back into the public consciousness. In June 2022, Gans stated that he finished the script under Konami's supervision while isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic and the project was eyeing a 2023 release. He clarified that it is not a direct sequel to the 2006–2012 film series and that his sensibilities had evolved since the release of the first film:


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: In September 2022, Gans told in a interviewer he had finished the planned film's storyboards and it takes inspiration from "P.T.", the playable teaser for the cancelled game "Silent Hills". He said:


title: Silent Hill: Revelation

text: By October 2022, the movie was officially green-lit with the title of "Return to Silent Hill". Based on the story from the "Silent Hill 2" video game, principal photography will commence in February 2023, and is expected to be completed in late-2023.


title: Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting conspiracy theories

text: The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. The perpetrator, Adam Lanza, fatally shot his mother before murdering 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and later committed suicide. A number of fringe figures have promoted conspiracy theories that doubt or dispute what occurred at Sandy Hook. Various conspiracy theorists have claimed, for example, that the massacre was actually orchestrated by the U.S. government as part of an elaborate plot to promote stricter gun control laws.


text: The more common conspiracy theory, adopted initially by James H. Fetzer, James Tracy, and others, and further popularized by Alex Jones, denied that the massacre actually occurred, asserting that it was faked. The massacre was described by Fetzer and Tracy as a classified training exercise involving members of federal and local law enforcement, the news media, and crisis actors, which they claim was modeled on Operation Closed Campus, an Iowa school-shooting drill that was canceled in 2011 amid threats and public outcry. Jones described the shooting incident as "synthetic, completely fake with actors; in my view, manufactured [...] it just shows how bold they are that they clearly used actors."


text: No evidence supports the conspiracy theories, which make a number of implausible claims. Moreover, many Sandy Hook conspiracy theories contradict one another. A number of sources have published articles debunking various claims put forward by conspiracy theorists. In 2018, the parents of several children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting launched a lawsuit against Jones and other authors of conspiracy videos for defamation, accusing them of engaging in a campaign of "false, cruel, and dangerous assertions". In 2019, Jones reversed his stance and stated that the massacre was real.


text: Some conspiracy theorists claim that the shooting was a hoax and a false flag operation staged by the United States government. Others say the attack is being used by politicians to push through new gun control legislation, or to otherwise persecute gun owners and survivalists.


text: Lawyer and dentist Orly Taitz—best known for her promotion of Barack Obama citizenship ("birther") conspiracy theories—was quoted as asking "Was Adam Lanza drugged and hypnotized by his handlers to make him into a killing machine as an excuse as the regime is itching to take all means of self defense from the populace before the economic collapse?"


text: Talk show host Clyde Lewis wrote: "Don't you find it at all interesting that Adam Lanza, the alleged shooter at Sandy Hook, woke up one day and decided to shoot up a school and kill children at about the same time that Barack Obama told the U.N. that he would sign the small arms treaty?"


text: According to Live Science, "No one, regardless of what side of the gun control issue they are on, can deny that guns played a key role in the Sandy Hook killings. So the conspiracy theorists must instead challenge the claim that the attack even occurred. They believe it's all a hoax to scare people into supporting more gun control and a step toward an outright repeal of the Second Amendment." They also found that the vast majority of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to support the concept that Sandy Hook was a hoax is contradictory. Snopes.com also debunked several claims of alleged United States government involvement in the shootings.


text: Fetzer, Tracy, and others have claimed the shooting was a classified training-exercise modeled on Operation Closed Campus, a "full-spectrum" school-shooting drill involving the Department of Homeland Security, Iowa emergency-management agencies, state and local police, prosecuting attorneys, emergency radio operators, emergency medical personnel, moulage, local doctors and hospitals, the Red Cross, medical examiners, news media reporters, and crisis actors that was canceled in 2011 amid threats and public outcry.


text: Press TV, the official state media outlet of Iran, has promoted various antisemitic conspiracy theories blaming "Israeli death squads" for the shooting. Press TV interviewed "Veterans Today" website Gordon Duff, who quoted Michael Harris, a former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, who made the "Israeli death squads" claim. Harris has publicly associated with neo-Nazi groups in the past and has previously claimed that Israel was responsible for the 2011 Norway attacks. Duff asserted that the attacks were an act of "revenge" for the perceived cooling of Israel–United States relations under President Obama, especially as a response to Obama's decision to nominate former senator Chuck Hagel, a perceived critic of Israel, for the position of United States Secretary of Defense. In another broadcast by Press TV, Holocaust denier James H. Fetzer claimed that the massacre "appears to have been a psy op intended to strike fear in the hearts of Americans" that was conducted by "agents of Israel."


text: "The Washington Post" reported that claims broadcast on Press TV contain a large number of "obvious logical fallacies" typical of Iranian propaganda, which "has a well-earned reputation for incendiary anti-Israel stories and for wild conspiracy theories." "The Atlantic" wrote that the story "obviously plays on the worst fears of those who believe in secret Jewish cabals that run the world, but it's a pretty pathetic attempt at slander, even for Iran."


text: Ben Swann, a Cincinnati news anchor for Fox affiliate WXIX-TV, has suggested on his personal YouTube channel that Adam Lanza was accompanied by another shooter; he has made similar claims about the Aurora shooting and the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting from earlier in 2012. Other conspiracy theorists have claimed that as many as four shooters were present.


text: There is no credible evidence that any additional shooters were present at the event. Some such reports may have been influenced by confused early news reports of the events.


text: Other conspiracy theories have focused on the claim that Adam Lanza's father was an executive with GE Energy Financial Services. According to these theories, Lanza's father was supposed to testify before the Senate Banking Committee with information about the Libor scandal. However, no such hearings were scheduled. Similar claims had been made about the father of James Holmes, the convicted perpetrator of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting.


text: Conspiracy theories have claimed that various timestamps for creation dates, whois records, and Google caches of various memorial websites, fundraising sites, and Facebook were created before or immediately after the date and time of the shooting and are therefore "evidence" of a conspiracy or cover up. However, timestamps are frequently incorrect, particularly on search engines. Some timestamps are initially created and assigned to URLs that are then repurposed, meaning that a URL linked to a current event can have a much older date.


text: In September 2014, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who runs the website "InfoWars", which had previously claimed that the murders were a "false flag" attack perpetrated by the government, made a new conspiracy claim that "no one died" at Sandy Hook Elementary School because the Uniform Crime Reports showed no murders in Newtown for 2012, and that the victims were "child actors." This claim is false and misrepresents the FBI report. In reality, because the Connecticut State Police was the lead investigator after the attack, the Sandy Hook victims were included in Connecticut's statewide records (under "State Police Misc.") rather than under the Newtown statistics.


text: In November 2016, Erica L. Lafferty, daughter of Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, the school principal who was shot and killed at Sandy Hook School, wrote open letters to then-President-elect Donald Trump (published in "Medium" and "USA Today"), calling upon him to denounce Jones, after Trump had appeared on "InfoWars" during his presidential campaign and lavished praise on its presenter, saying that the conspiracy theorist had an "amazing" reputation and pledging not to let him down. On February 20, 2017, the Newtown School Board wrote to President Trump and urged him to recognize the murders of 26 people at Sandy Hook and to "remove your support from anyone who continues to insist that the tragedy was staged or not real." Trump did not respond to the letter.


text: On April 16, 2018, parents of two victims of the shooting sued Jones in Travis County, Texas (where Jones' media company is based), for $1 million each. The trial was expected to be scheduled by the end of 2020.


text: On May 23, 2018, six families of victims of the shooting, as well as an FBI agent who responded to the attack, filed a defamation lawsuit in Bridgeport Superior Court in Connecticut against Jones for his role in spreading conspiracy theories about the shooting.


text: In a deposition in the last week of March 2019, Jones acknowledged the deaths were real, stating he had "almost like a form of psychosis", where he "basically thought everything was staged."


text: By 2021, Jones did not provide information to support his claims, defaulting in favor of the plaintiffs.


text: James Tracy, a former professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) who taught a course on conspiracy theories, has suggested the shooting either did not actually occur or occurred very differently than accounted in mainstream reports, claiming political motives for the coverup. FAU president Mary Jane Saunders issued a statement that Tracy's views were "not shared by" the university. In response to his comments, the university opened an investigation of Tracy, who had tenure.


text: In December 2015, after the family of Noah Pozner—one of the children murdered at Sandy Hook—claimed that Tracy had harassed them, FAU moved to fire Tracy. Chan Lowe of the "Sun-Sentinel" speculated that the comments were a publicity stunt by Tracy. Tracy later declined an appearance on CNN with Anderson Cooper, suggesting that Cooper wanted to bring him and his family members harm by identifying him in a prior broadcast. The university fired Tracy on January 5, 2016, citing his refusal to file required paperwork related to outside employment for several years.


text: In 2016, James Fetzer and Mike Palacek published the book "Nobody Died at Sandy Hook", which claimed that the event was a classified Federal Emergency Management Agency drill involving federal and local law enforcement and the media, and that the government had created false death certificates to claim there were victims. Fetzer stated that the parents displayed old photos of their real children and made up new names for the photo subjects, thereby creating non-existent younger siblings. Fetzer also claimed that several of these older-age real children, who were unnamed and billed as "Newtown's Children," sang "America the Beautiful" at the 2013 Super Bowl with Jennifer Hudson, arguing there were strong facial similarities with the victims. Lenny Pozner, father of victim Noah Pozner, filed a defamation lawsuit against Fetzer and Palacek. Pozner won a summary judgement from the court in June 2019. The book's publisher, Moon Rock Books, apologized to the Pozner family and agreed to take the book out of circulation at the end of June. On October 16, 2019, a jury awarded Leonard Pozner $450,000 for defamation by James Fetzer. Fetzer announced his intention to appeal against the decision. A video similarly questioning official accounts of the shooting received several million views on YouTube within a week of its posting, although the video has since been modified to display a disclaimer explaining that its creators "in no way claim this shooting never took place, or that people did not lose their lives."


text: Other sources have continued to claim that the entire event was a hoax. On September 12, 2014, during a political debate, Colorado Republican Party candidate Tom Ready (who was running for Pueblo County Commission) was accused by his opponent, Sal Pace, of posting an article on his Facebook page claiming the Sandy Hook shootings "never happened". Ready responded: "Well, there is some question of whether it happened, Sal." This was followed by more statements of the same tenor, prompting outraged yells from the audience. After allegedly receiving a death threat the next day, Ready reportedly apologized for his remarks.


text: Other conspiracy theorists have tried to connect the shooting to references in popular culture. Prison Planet, a website owned by British conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson, mentioned that Newtown-based author Suzanne Collins wrote "The Hunger Games" books, in which 23 children are "ritualistically" killed, while 20 children were killed in the shooting. Some conspiracy theorists have referred to this as "predictive programming". Others pointed out that "Sandy Hook" can be seen on a map of Gotham City in the 2012 Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises"—the New Jersey peninsula just south of New York Harbor is named Sandy Hook.


text: Several conspiracy theorists have also claimed a six-year-old victim of the shooting subsequently appeared in a photograph with President Barack Obama. In fact, the child in the photograph is actually the victim's sister, wearing her deceased sister's dress.


text: Writing about the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, Benjamin Radford argued that most conspiracy theorists who allege contradictions in official accounts ignore contradictions in their own accounts, citing research from the University of Kent that conspiracy theorists selectively focus on or ignore particular details in order to fit their preferred narrative. The conspiracy theories have also been called evidence of "the need for a national debate on mental illness."


text: The debunking website Snopes ran an editorial debunking the "Sandy Hook Exposed" video, explaining how many of the theories make little sense, and answered many questions conspiracy theorists wanted answers to.


text: Gene Rosen, a Newtown resident who was reported to have sheltered six Sandy Hook students and a bus driver in his home during the shooting, has been subject to harassment online alleging he was complicit in a government coverup, among other things. Some journalists have cited such incidents as part of a "Sandy Hook Truther Movement" analogous to the 9/11 Truth movement. A writer for the "Calgary Herald" reported that the movement self-identifies as "Operation Terror."


text: In May 2014, Andrew David Truelove stole a memorial sign from playgrounds dedicated to victims Grace McDonnell and Chase Kowalski. He then went on to call the parents of Grace McDonnell, proclaiming that he stole the sign and that he believed their deaths were a "hoax". He was arrested on May 30, and the signs were found in his home. Truelove was convicted of the theft and sentenced to one year in prison.


text: After doing a CNN interview on the day after the shooting, Robbie Parker, the father of victim Emilie Parker, became the target of conspiracy theorists, who claimed the interview was staged. Parker has been attacked by theorists who believe he is a "crisis actor" and was "getting into character" before going on CNN to grieve over the loss of his child.


text: In April 2016, Matthew Mills, a man from Brooklyn, accepted a plea agreement with prosecutors on one count of interfering with police arising from an incident in November 2015, when Mills angrily approached the sister of murdered teacher Victoria Soto—who is regarded as a heroine for her attempt to protect her students from the shooter in the Sandy Hook attack—shoved a photograph in her face, "and began angrily charging that not only did the Sandy Hook tragedy not take place, but that Victoria Soto never existed." Mills entered an "Alford" plea and was thus found guilty; he was given a suspended sentence of one year in jail and two years' probation.


text: In December 2016, Lucy Richards, a woman from Tampa, was charged with four counts of transmitting threats in interstate commerce for sending death threats to Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was the youngest of 20 children murdered. Pozner has been particularly targeted by Internet trolls and conspiracy theorists because he has vocally fought back against them. Richards had been expected to plead guilty to one count of transmitting threats, with both the prosecution and defense to recommend a sentence of probation and house arrest. However, in March 2017, Richards—who was free on bond—failed to show up to court for a change-of-plea hearing and sentencing. An arrest warrant was issued, Richards' bond was revoked, and she was soon apprehended. On June 7, 2017, Richards was sentenced to five months' imprisonment.


text: Lenny Pozner, the father of Sandy Hook victim Noah Pozner, founded an organization called the HONR Network, which takes legal action against harassers of Sandy Hook survivors and families.


text: Wolfgang Halbig, a past contributor to "InfoWars", was arrested in January 2020 for unauthorized possession of personal information of Lenny Pozner. Halbig had illegally obtained Pozner's private information and attempted to dox Pozner by sending those to a long list of recipients. Under Florida law, unauthorized possession of such information carries a maximum prison term of one year.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: Johnny Got His Gun is a 1971 American drama anti-war film written and directed by Dalton Trumbo, in his directorial debut, based on his 1939 novel of the same name, with an uncredited writing collaboration by Luis Buñuel. The film stars Timothy Bottoms, Kathy Fields, Marsha Hunt, Jason Robards, Donald Sutherland and Diane Varsi. It was Trumbo's first and only directorial effort.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: Although a minor success on initial release, it was largely forgotten soon after by mass audiences. It became far better known when clips of it were incorporated in the music video for Metallica's song "One", whose popularity subsequently turned "Johnny Got His Gun" into a cult film. Eventually, Metallica bought the film rights in order to keep showing the music video without having to pay additional royalty fees.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: Joe Bonham (Bottoms), a young American soldier hit by an artillery shell during World War I, lies in a hospital bed. He is a quadruple amputee who has also lost his eyes, ears, mouth and nose. He remains conscious and able to reason, but his wounds render him a prisoner in his own body. As he drifts between reality and fantasy, he remembers his old life with his family and girlfriend (Kathy Fields). He also forms a bond of sorts with a young nurse (Diane Varsi) who senses his plight.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: Eventually, Joe tries to communicate with his doctors via Morse code by tapping his head, saying "help". He wishes for the Army to put him in a glass coffin in a freak show as a demonstration of the horrors of war. When told that his wish may be impossible to grant, he responds begging to be euthanized, repeatedly saying "kill me".


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: He ultimately realizes that the Army cannot grant either wish, and will leave him in a state of living death. His sympathetic nurse attempts to euthanize him by clamping his breathing tube, but her supervisor stops her before Joe can succumb. Joe realizes that he will never be released from his state of entrapment and he is left alone, weakly chanting, "S.O.S. Help me."


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: In 1966, Bruce Campbell teamed up with Trumbo, who wrote a film script and was attached to direct. The project was initially set up at Warner Bros. but fell through. Campbell and Trumbo invested $80,000 and attracted 25 investors to invest $600,000 in the film. The total cash outlay for the film was $750,000 but deferred technical fees put the budget over $1 million.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: The film distinguishes between Joe's reality and fantasy with black-and-white for the hospital, and color for his dreams and memories. His dreams are drug-induced, as when he talks to his dead father and Jesus Christ, with the color being saturated. His memories are in a clearer color, such as the fishing trip and his last night with Kareen. Joe's injuries are never seen in the hospital scenes; his face is covered by a mask and his body by the hospital sheets.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: The film was entered into the 1971 Cannes Film Festival and North American distribution rights were acquired by Cinemation Industries. The film opened on August 4, 1971 at the RKO 59th Street Twins in New York City. All servicemen were admitted free.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: Roger Ebert gave the film a full four-star grade and wrote that Trumbo has handled the material, "strange to say, in a way that's not so much anti-war as pro-life. Perhaps that's why I admire it. Instead of belaboring ironic points about the 'war to end war,' Trumbo remains stubbornly on the human level. He lets his ideology grow out of his characters, instead of imposing it from above."


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: Roger Greenspun of "The New York Times", however, stated that much of the film was "a mess of clichéd, imprecise sentimentalizing and fantasizing. On any terms that I might recognize and possibly credit, 'Johnny Got His Gun' is a stultifyingly bad movie." Gene Siskel of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four. He reported that he saw it twice and found it the first time to be "as savagely effective as any antiwar film," but the second time "it didn't work at all," with the color flashback scenes "poorly acted and scripted" and the dreams "frequently much too detailed and barely illusory. In the black-and-white sequences, Trumbo is much more disciplined and effective." Charles Champlin of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that the film "seems too late—a passionate anti-war sermon arriving at a time when the sermon has been done often and better, and more to the point has long since been accepted by the congregation. Paradoxically, the particular horror which Trumbo lays before us is at once so special and terrible and so manifestly symbolic, that by the end it has lost much of its power to move us. You admire the passion but cannot be sure what it achieved." Tom Shales of "The Washington Post" said that the film "means well," but "Trumbo is not nearly sophisticated enough as a writer, nor proficient enough as a director, to either grip or alarm us for very long ... Trumbo can't decide whether to fill his movie with symbols or people, so the screenplay is usually hollow and vague and never quite true." Tom Milne of "The Monthly Film Bulletin" thought the film "might have worked" if Trumbo had "treated the whole film in the black-and-white, expressionist manner of the hospital scenes," but the flashback and fantasy sequences "not only reveal influences as varied and ill-advised as Fellini and "M*A*S*H", but provide Joe with a very mundane and rather lachrymose biography; the Unknown Soldier is no longer an awesome symbol when he is provided with a name, rank and serial number."


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: By September 30, 1972, the film had earned theatrical rentals of $767,794 in the United States and Canada.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: In 1989, heavy metal band Metallica released the song "One" and used clips from the film in the song's music video.


title: Johnny Got His Gun (film)

text: In the 2008 remake, actor Benjamin McKenzie performed as Joe Bonham in the "live on stage, on film" version of the 1982 Off-Broadway play based on the novel. In October 2010, a special educational DVD of the 2008 film version starring McKenzie became available free of charge to every high school library in the U.S. The educational DVD contains both a pre-screening and post-screening discussion guide for students in addition to a 15-minute featurette on the making of the film, the original movie's theatrical trailer, and a history of the original novel.