There are loads of great things about Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, loads of very immersive and funny things, but one thing you notice before anything else—and this is obvious even from watching trailers, let alone playing the game is that it's visually breath-taking. I don't want to take anything away from the amazing animators and modellers and concept artists who worked on it, the whole game looks incredible, but for this blog in particular I wanted to talk about how Great Circle (and particularly its many, many cutscenes) has been framed and lit.
There are moments playing and watching this game when I've simply taken my hands off the keyboard and mouse and gasped. So many moments when what I'm seeing on the screen looks cinematic not in the over-used video game sense of the word, but in actual motion picture sense of the word.
There are of course good reasons for this! Great Circle is, if nothing else, a painstaking labour of love from a team who knows exactly what makes Indiana Jones tick. It's an adaptation that hasn't just slapped a license on a generic experience, it's been designed from the ground up to make you feel like you're spending hours in Dr. Jones' shoes. The game's music is the music you remember from the films, Troy Baker's voice acting is perfect and even stuff like the animation is a work of reverence, nailing Harrison Ford's mannerisms down to the most minute detail, from his smirks to his finger-wagging.
That love can also be found in the game's eye for the cinematic. Watching Great Circle--the framing, the colours, the lighting, the emphasis--looks just like watching an actual Indiana Jones movie, or at least it looks like watching the first three films, which all featured the cinematography of Douglas Slocombe, a legend in the field who was nominated for three Academy Awards across a career that saw him work on everything from The Italian Job to Rollerball to The Great Gatsby to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
It's the latter where Slocombe first met Steven Spielberg, and the director was so impressed that he brought Slocombe on to work on 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film that Spielberg thought he had very specific noir-like ideas for, but whose look ultimately gave way to something else when running into Slocombe's penchant for practical considerations and high contrast shooting.
Spielberg recalled this transition in a feature he wrote for American Cinematographer back in 1981 (and published online in 2017):
I originally wanted a much moodier, almost neo-Brechtian style of light and shadow for this film. I wanted the film to resemble more, say The Informer — the film being more film noir than I eventually accomplished. But I found that the movie was beginning to paint itself out of the corner I put it in, by the kind of sketchy brightness which is Dougie's forte and I began to see what Dougie was doing. He was giving it a fuller look, not a flat look; he was giving it a very nice backlit look, but a very full backlit look and because of that he was getting amazing depth of field due to the number of lights he was using. In the dailies, of course, it looks very dark and moody and atmospheric, while on the set it looked very bright, but he was not shooting wide open, to say the least. He was stopping down. So between my original discussions with Dougie about film noir and subsequent results from our collaboration, and seeing a couple of days' dailies that looked kind of sketchy — very sketchy — perhaps film noir, and then seeing other scenes that were fatter and richer in contrast, I began to say, "Hey, this movie is much prettier in color than it is in black-and-white."
I believe that the photographic style of this movie happened by itself through an interesting compromise between what Dougie loves to do and what I wanted from him. We each came halfway and we found what will now be, hopefully, the continuing style of the Raiders saga.
The result was a trilogy with a visual style so distinctive that Slocombe was nominated for an Oscar in 1981 for his work on Raiders, and one so memorable that someone like me with only a passing knowledge of the films and the people who made them could look at Great Circle's cutscenes and think, boy, they sure do look like they're shot exactly the same as those movies they're based on. Just like the early films, Great Circle features a ton of heavy contrast, a lot of incredibly moody lighting relying on candles and sunlight, loads of thick shadows and plenty of very, very close shots of Indiana's face.
Raiders went on to become Slocombe's most recognised work (even though it cost him the use of one eye after a freak jeep accident!) and while he's sadly no longer with us--he lived until the grand old age of 103, only passing away in 2016--the fact he left behind such a legacy while being self-taught is incredible. How many other cinematographers do you even know, let alone could so quickly point to the visual signature they've left behind on modern pop culture?
It's impossible to play Great Circle and not see Machinegames' best attempts at building on that legacy. Just look at some of these shots! Most are from cutscenes where the inspiration can be most literally seen, but there are even moments during gameplay when some light pours through a mysterious tomb's door and you think, uh huh, this is Indiana Jones all right. When you're watching something like this and John Williams' score kicks in and Troy Baker is channelling Harrison Ford you realise this isn't just something cashing in on a beloved license, it genuinely understands every aspect of it and feels like a continuation that could have involved Spielberg and George Lucas themselves.
I've read reviews of this game that are almost critical of Great Circle's cutscenes; they wish this had been a movie and not a game, or that the cutscenes had focused less on action scenes and allowed the player more agency over them. I think Machinegames got the balance just right, because the cutscenes here don't feel like a lesser version of Indy's story, they feel like a thoughtful continuation of it, in ways infinitely preferable to sitting down and watching the last two dogshit movies.
Great Circle is an adaptation so considerate and understanding of the source material that it didn't just stop at copying Indy's voice and hat, it made sure his mannerisms were correct, that his limitations were made clear, that the music was perfect and that down to the most minute, oft-overlooked detail--like the lens through which we view the action and the cutscenes--it understood what made Indiana Jones Indiana Jones.
