"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?" - Andrew Ryan - Bioshock

I resently played through the game Bioshock after being told about it by my friend Isaac. (trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymg2HzHF9-4 ) Having played the game, I found it a brilliantly intellegent, political and creepy game and I found myself inspired to do something similar.

The game is set in the underwater distopia of rapture, you play as a plane crash suvivor who unwittingly stumbles upon the city and in doing so is caught in the middle of a civil-war that engulfed the city.

*Spoilers*

Most of the games plot is a comment upon the writings of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Industiralist Andrew Ryan, who could be easily argued to represent Ayn Rand in the game, built Rapture as an Objectivist and Laissez-faire utopia, where "The Great", artist, scientists etc are free from the opression of governments and religion and aren't held back by "The Parasite". However, his plan works little too well when a con-artist arrives in rapture with nothing and builds a crime/bussiness empire. The con-artist eventually starts a coup, attempting to take control of rapture from Ryan, it rapidly escalates into a civil-war that proves to be Rapture's downfall.

What I like about the game's story is how well it represents the ideas of Objectivism and takes an ideaology to it's extremes. It's multi-layered plot is wonderfully intellegent. Some of my favourite characters in the game could well be discribed as monsterous because in rapture no-one is bound by mortality or ethics, for example Dr. Steinman, a plastic surgeon who believes he is the picasso of plastic surgery and as he pursues beauty he often kills his patients.

( Dr. Steinman in bioshock:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wxb8HjiDLQ )

This has inspired me to explore how characters and monsters can represent ideaologies gone wrong. I would really like to start exploring various political ideaologies, their pros and cons etc and work on representing them in a character in a film.

(First part of a 10 part series of videos analyising Bioshock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPkGZy1aoqM )