Critical Watch II Hath Ended, Long Live Critical Watch III - Andrei Zanescu

Figure 1: Lights, Camera, Fiiiiiiiiiiiiire! (Dungeons & Dragons, 2000) - Marc and Me, but who is who?

As we open another year at Concordia, and TAG, we also open a new year for TAG Critical Watch. If you’re new to TAG, welcome! If you have no clue watch Critical Watch is, you’re in the right place. Critical Watch is a programmed movie slate, curated by me, and Marc! Back in 2024, we wanted to revive the dormant TAG movie nights, but also program movie showings that were more in tune with TAG’s mission to study and think about games and game media critically. So, Critical Watch allows us to show you one movie each month of the school year, that either adapts a game or is involved with game culture or thinking in some way.

I want to take a second to talk about how Critical Watch unfurled last year, and then we’ll be announcing the new slate for this year!

2025-2026: Year Two in Hindsight

The previous slate was a bit different than Year One’s.  In our first year, we basically had carte blanche, but we also didn’t know how folks would respond. Marc and I let our sensibilities take the wheel and we got to showcase formative movies like WarGames (1983) or Jumanji (1995), but also contemporary adaptations like The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023), Sonic: The Hedgehog (2020) and Uncharted (2022). One commitment we made was that the movies didn’t need to be good. There’s a lot to be gained from watching a bad movie, or even an ok movie that is a bad adaptation. We were mostly concerned with getting movies that were good for discussion.

So for Year Two, we wanted to move past the recognizable hits or cult hits, into more specific installments. We opened the year with Tron: Legacy (2010) to prep for the imminent release of Tron: Ares (2025) and to sort of approach the mythos of Tron from a more contemporary vantage point. But we wanted to have something new and groundbreaking, at least in terms of industry perspectives, so we went with Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023), which broke box office analyst brains a few years ago. Marc continued to champion the cause of vintage game cinema, with 1989’s The Wizard, while I opted for 1994’s Mortal Kombat, a film that hyped six-year-old me so much that I destroyed a lounge chair (sorry Mom and Dad). We added Warcraft (2016) and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) for our big hits, and we rounded the year with Tetris (2023), a bizarre legal-comedy-thriller about game publication and distribution rights.

Overall, the year was in tune with what we wanted, but sometime in Noevember we went off-script. Marc and I kept having back and forth discussions about hosting another event, where we watched The Game Awards. If you’ve had the misfortune of running into me over the past two years, you may have heard me rant about game awards, and Marc was game to invite folks into my madness. So we pushed Sonic 2 off the slate, and we watched that instead. Students were equal parts enthused at the prospect and annoyed during the cast, critiquing how and which games were being recognized. Mission accomplished!

Year Three: Time to Get Weirder

So for this year, we’re going even more off script. Here’s this year’s slate!

It’s always hard to know how things will land, or what students take away from our choices. Our plan for a few reasons is to repeat the Game Awards, not least of which is because of GTA VI looming on the horizon. We also want to get in some oldies, and how better to start the year than with a Jean-Claude Van Damme steamed ham of a movie: Street Fighter (1994). Then in October it’s the first Resident Evil (2002), to run back some Paul W.S. Anderson shlock, before we move onto Dungeons & Dragons (2000) for some fantasy.  In Winter, we’ll be opening with Prince of Persia (2010), so I can annoy everyone with my Ubisoft fixation. Then in February, Detective Pikachu (2019) arrives on the scene, and in March it’s the first of the new Jumanji (2017) trilogy. Finally, we have a mystery cap for the year in April! But as always, for a ship with two captains, who knows where we land, or where students ask us to land. So, who knows if we make changes!

Welcome back, or just welcome to any new folks, strap in and get ready for another weird year of the TAG Critical Watch series.