On DVD: Woody Allen Meets Halo in Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles

You can't toss a rock up in the air over a city street without braining someone who has definite but vague ideas about how new electronic media is going to "change everything." And of course they're mostly right, while at the same time you wish you could do that all day -- toss that rock, brain those people. Movies are still movies, pop songs are still pop, crummy TV shows are still crummy, etc. (The big change is now we expect to get it all for free.) Yet some things have arisen spontaneously, like mushrooms, from the keyboard-console-screen mode of cultural intercourse we're so enjoying. The epic new, remastered, five-season box set collecting Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles is a perfect example.

Of course I'm talking about "machinima," the new genre (?) invented in the mid-90s by users of Quake, who, having apparently decided that the game wasn't sufficiently interesting, used captured video shots of gameplay to form a distinct narrative, a short film. Like all kinds of cinema, the first machinima were capable of being just awful, until a group of Halo devotees (led, more or less, by Burne Burns) agreed that the game's pointless warfare and inexpressive helmeted soldiers were ripe for redubbing. Red vs. Blue began as online videos, but has now evolved into a five-season, 100-episode epic of dry yocks and deadpan mayhem, remastered and DVD'd in a box set like it was Gone with the Wind or something.

Despite the beguiling simplicity of the thing, it's not easy to get at the gist of Red vs. Blue. As pure experience, it's Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? adapted for the new millennium, and in measured doses the comedy that Burns and his cohort have devised for the Halo grunts is Tarantino-lite. They begin by simply wondering what the point of the titular combat is -- like, man, why are we here? -- and from there do little more than argue in a foul-mouthed, gangster's-kitchen kind of way about armor color, weapon instructions, habits of hygiene, who's supposed to do what, what the hell the other team is doing, and, often, who the hell is actually in those armored suits.

Aliens and sentient weapons and ghosts proliferate, all of it inspired by Halo's inherent palette, but sarcastic riffs by one Halo-ite about another can last for half an episode; punchlines can be evasive. A little goes a long way -- ideally, I see the almost-nine-hour DVD set as being ideal watching in the crapper, if you have a TV or laptop in there, the way collections of Dilbert strips are perfect bathroom reading. Try to watch Red vs. Blue in stretches of hours instead of minutes, and you'll want to take charge just so you can kill everybody.

But as text, the series is rich freak -- is this "found footage"? It's certainly corporate imagery co-opted and reused for subversive purposes, kinda in the manner of filmmaker Craig Baldwin or, more to the point, culture jammers like the Barbie Liberation Organization (which, in the '90s, stole hundreds of Barbies and G.I. Joes, switched their voice boxes, and returned them to stores.) I mean, Halo is about "endless war," and it did debut online in 2003.

In that tradition, it's a devilish swipe at its own audience. However repetitious the series is as a whole, every scene is a toast-dry mockery of the dull-witted nature of Halo and most first-person shooters, and, therefore, an endless derisive guffaw had at the expense of an entire generation of earthlings, who have used up their adolescence transferring their egos into that closed canyon (or virtual environments like it) and trying to kill those soldiers and never even needing a reason why. That Red vs. Blue's faceless drones are dumb as sacks of golf balls, and spend a good percentage of screen time motionless, trying to think of what to say, feels just about right.