 State comes with an inherently simple story. Space creatures take over the Earth and humans fight back. The basis of many an alien invasion flick, this seems like “don’t fix what isn’t broken” territory.
State fashions itself as less of a “war movie” and more of a tale about the underground resistance – which might be fine if the story didn’t meander so much. As noted, we lose characters - major characters – for extended amounts of time and never get a good handle for most of the participants we see.
Ostensibly the heart of State<, Gabriel vanishes often, and the movie fails to introduce others in a satisfying way. This means we go into “who’s that guy?” and “what’s she doing?” mode far too often.
As mentioned, the film ties these parts together at the end, but patience evaporated long before the finale. The clumsy, awkward attempt to tell this confusing story guarantees that no climax can fix its problems.
And in truth, we don’t get an actual “big finish” of the sort one might expect. I’ll avoid spoilers other than to say that the ending revolves almost entirely around explanations for the character connections, so don’t anticipate an Independence Day-style action extravaganza.
Which would be fine if the movie didn’t frustrate and bore so much of the time. As it stands, State becomes a tedious, confusing sci-fi effort that really disappoints.
In terms of palette, State went with a stylized look. In an unsurprising move, the film emphasized teal to a substantial degree, with some amber involved as well. Those tones seemed acceptable given their limitations.
When I examined the DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack of State, I thought it was moderately active and involving, as the mix used music and atmosphere to nice advantage. These elements created a good sense of place and movement that brought us an engaging soundscape, with the best material found in the smattering of action sequences.
In terms of extras, the set launches with an audio commentary from co-writer/director Rupert Wyatt and producer David Crockett. Both sit together for this running, screen-specific look at story/characters, cast and performances, design choices and effects, music and related domains.
Though the commentary presents a decent array of notes, it disappoints as a whole. Wyatt and Crockett go MIA a little too often, and their notes lack a ton of insight. While this never becomes a bad track, it also fails to provide much substance.
Two featurettes follow, and Igniting a War runs five minutes, 20 seconds. It involves Wyatt, Crockett, and actors John Goodman, Ashton Sanders, Jonathan Majors, and Colson Baker.
“War” examines influences and inspirations, story/character, cast and performances. A few decent notes emerge, but most of the reel feels promotional.
Building the World of Captive State spans five minutes, 10 seconds and provides remarks from Wyatt, Majors, Crockett, Sanders, production designer Keith P. Cunningham, costume designer Abby O’Sullivan, location manager Stefan Nikolov and visual effects supervisor Eric Pascarelli.
“World” covers the depiction of the film’s slightly future society. Like its predecessor, it boasts a few insights but it can be puffy.
The disc opens with an ad for Fighting With My Family. No trailer for State appears here.
At its core, Captive State offers the bones of a good twist on the old alien invasion genre. Unfortunately, the film provides a mushy mess that never connects. The Blu-ray offers solid picture and audio along with a few bonus materials. State squanders a lot of potential.CR2’s BankWorld Mobile App Driving Rapid Customer Acquisition.
Rapid adoption rates reported in Ethiopia
CR2, one of the world’s leading providers of retail banking software, has reported strong adoption rates of its mobile app in Ethiopia, which is used, among other channels, to access the Amole digital wallet, a pioneering mobile payment platform offered by Dashen Bank. Amole is attracting over 50,000 new customers each month, with over a quarter of a million subscribers signed up since its launch in July 2018.
CR2 also announced new transformational capabilities that will further drive adoption rates for banks wishing to grow their customer base and increase revenues. By introducing end-to-end digitisation of the entire onboarding, KYC (Know your Customer) and account opening process, CR2’s BankWorld Mobile App allows banks to avail of mobile onboarding capabilities, collect relevant KYC details in the app and register non-bank customers in minutes.
This latest version helps banks across Africa, the Middle East and Asia achieve full digital transformation through innovative customer-focused financial technology that drives growth and profitability.
Integrated with Secure Messaging via the BankWorld Mail service, customers of the bank can easily communicate with bank staff, upload documents and files safely, and access options for a designated Personal Banker.
To provide maximum customer engagement, the Mobile App’s user interface is built with multi-language support.
BankWorld Mobile App offers significant benefits to banks:
- Onboarding: Drive customer acquisition with integrated KYC and account opening features.
- Payments: Manage and schedule payments and transfers along with a convenient option of instantly sending cash to anyone by texting a code to the recipient, who can collect the cash at an ATM or lodge to their account.
- Sales: In-App campaign advertising with direct actionable responses along with account opening allow the bank to significantly improve account to customer ratios.
- Communications: Engage with your customer via BankWorld Mail, a secure messaging channel inside the App, online chat, Facebook feed merged with live news feed, ticker tape for financial information, contact centre links and online chat.
- Personal Financial Management (PFM): Graphically assign, analyse and visualise spending by type and track account balances.
- Personalisation: Increase customer adoption with personalised features including name and address, passwords, preferred language and personal photo. Notification updates of account activity, rate movements and bank news.
- Card Control: View credit and debit cards within the app; turn off your card when not in use; and report lost or stolen cards directly from the app.
- Multi-language support
- Convenience:
- Nearest branch and ATM locator: Convenient real-time Augmented Reality branch, ATM and kiosk locator tools
- Access to account balance without having to log in: View account balance directly from the home screen, without even starting the app.
- Convenient login options: Faster and more convenient login options with Biometric fingerprint and facial login options
- Continued access to banking even with no data connection: The app presents an indicator if the phone has no data connection and can be configured to offer a link to backup USSD service if desired.
Fintan Byrne, CEO of CR2 commented “we are delighted to see real market evidence that our BankWorld Mobile App is helping to accelerate new customer acquisition in markets such as Ethiopia.Native onboarding and KYC capabilities means that banks can rapidly expand their customer base at a fraction of the cost offered by a traditional branch and reach significant population levels via mobile that were previously unreachable”.Yes, you read that right. According to the leaker “Kimachi”, Sony’s upcoming console is going to be faster than expected. If the leaked GPU clock samples of 2.00 GHz are correct, the PS5 might truely be faster than the RTX 2070 and on par with RTX 2080.
Since we know that the PS5 will be using an AMD Navi based GPU, an overclocked RX 5700 XT with a clock speed of just over 1900 MHz might be our best prediction. This comes to 9.2 teraflops on RDNA architecture and 14 teraflops on GCN architecture, which is on par with the earlier claimed 12 – 14 TF for the PS5.
What we know so far about the PlayStation 5
We know that the upcoming PS5 will have 8K support, although it might mostly be limited to videos. The console will also have ray-tracing capabilities and some kind of 3D audio output. Apart from this, the PS5 will have a faster storage capability with Sony’s proprietary SSD, 3.3 GHz Zen2 based CPU with 8C/16T. For GPU, we can expect some kind of custom AMD Navi GPU whose performance is on par or higher than the RX 5700 XT.
Although GeForce RTX 2080 level performance sounds neat, take it with a grain of salt. It would be a remarkable achievement if Sony fits that amount of performance in a console priced under $500. If the rumors are actually true, expect the upcoming PS5 to be pricier than previously anticipated.
Do you think that the PS5 is going to be on par with the RTX 2080? Let us know in the comments below!
Further Reading:
- AMD Ryzen 3000 Mobile CPU Lineup Surfaces with Vega 9 Graphics
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3rd Gen ‘Sharkstooth’ CPU with 32 Cores Spotted, 20% Faster than 299WX
Well close to RTX 2080’s performance would mean a much higher price tag, cuz the card itself is pricey and a gaming console crossing 700 USD would certainly HIT the consumers in a pretty bad way as it would be double or more of what the ps4 was launched at. Don’t think the prices would cross 500 USDFor environmentally conscious travelers, a true “home-away-from-home” experience may mean staying