Wolfenstein: Legacy Of Defiance

In an alternate timeline where the Nazis won the Second World War (yawn) two adversaries sit down opposite each other at a table to talk about who the biggest ‘Billy Big Bollocks’ is, as they desperately try to play their one-upmanship on just who is getting out of that room alive.

Based on the long running video game series, Wolfenstein, this first episode in what is to be a web-series, Legacy Of Defiance, throws us into a world where something unknown (to us) happened which allowed the Nazis to win WWII. William ‘B.J.’ Blazkowicz (Liebowitz) has been captured and has been brought before Ken Von Hermann (Smith) to suffer his fate, but of course, not before the nasty Nazi gets to play the Bond villain in teasing and torturing his prey before the final twist of the knife. At least one of these characters has been brought directly from the games and therefore cannot be attributed to the writer/director, while the other appears to be an amalgam of stock Nazi enemies. Both of these characters, however, are the most basic, bland, stereotypical, and useless caricatures of video game heroes/villains, with no depth or saving grace to their background or development.

As the two sit in the deeply darkened room opposite each other, we see that B.J. is wounded and bleeding, while Von Hermann is dolled up in his starched uniform and sitting himself down to tea. This is apparently London in 1964, but actually it’s just a table in the dark, and there is no sense of anything beyond the blackness of the room, not even the two guards who are apparently there but we don’t see until they come forward at Hermann’s command. The Nazi goes about his usual soliloquising business while B.J., and us, are forced to listen to his inane ramblings. Without any inkling of the games or the backstory that surrounds them, we too are in the dark as to what’s going on, as the horribly bad dialogue offers us only snippets of history that reveal nothing about how the situation came to be or any detail as to how the war was won.

We are then introduced to the fact that in 1964 there’s somehow mobile communications technology, and not just that, but mobile holographic communications technology, that never gets explained away either, we just have to have played the games and know it, or take it as it is without questioning it. This is an indication of how poor the writing is and how as viewers we are just left to flounder in the dark while some fan gets to indulge his pubescent fantasies and offer lip-service to the games that shaped his formative years. This fan-made film is an entire homage to those games, stealing their ideas and characters, but offering nothing cinematically or narratively to push the franchise forward, or to bring new fans into the fold by expanding the universe into new media. The fact that Blazkowicz can somehow survive five shivs to the sides and what sounds like the ripping out of a kidney, is probably all testament to the character in the game, too, but when put into the first episode of a filmed series with no explanation it just comes across as grossly stupid.

To say that the conclusion of this episode is then beyond belief, would be an horrendous understatement. The switching around of the situation and the level of control makes absolutely no sense at all, and the final stand-off is unshakably poor in how it plays out. If the head Nazi who was going to take over the world and ‘rebuild the Empire’ can’t even shoot one guy, then what even were we doing here in the first place trying to understand this turgid monstrosity. There is absolutely no saving grace in the writing or playing out of Wolfenstein: Legacy Of Defiance and it should be avoided by everyone at all costs, apart from those who childishly believe that Nazi killing is the be-all and end-all of good, honest fun. If you really want to see Nazis getting killed then go and play the games instead. They were really bad, too, but you might actually get some feeling from that which isn’t utter betrayal and disappointment.