After what happened with Red Notice, I feel the need to reiterate the point that I have no problem with Ryan Reynolds and what has become his schtick since reconnecting with his inner Deadpool. It’s just a matter of finding the right story to put him in, rather than just expecting his usual mannerisms to make things interesting. And that is most certainly the case with this film, as it’s basically a massive pisstake and deconstruction of modern video games, with Reynolds as an NPC that decides that he wants something more out of his digital life.
The story reads like a sanded-down version of Black Mirror’s USS Callister, where the advancement of artificial intelligence is contrasted with its regular use in video games to ask questions about what players are really doing in the digital plane. The visual aesthetics do well to establish this early on, presenting the game world of Free City as being like Grand Theft Auto Online and other such shooter MMOs, and there’s quite a few nice background gags where player-characters are glitching up against walls and the like. Sure, it feels slightly neutered in terms of presentation thanks to the ‘we’re trying to be more family-friendly’ self-censorship going on, but it still checks out… on the surface, at least.
The journey that Reynolds’ Guy makes is one of self-actualisation, where he sees all the ‘heroes’ that populate his world and decides that he wants to be a good guy, going viral in the real world for showing people that there’s a different way to play. It’s a nice sentiment, but quite frankly, it just doesn’t match up with how the gaming world actually functions. There’s some initial worry since it’s trying to plaster a message about the real world onto a fictional one that exists primarily as a reprieve from the real world, but that’s far from the main issue here. It’s that the core message here about being kinder to characters you get to know in fictional worlds is not only a bit condescending and assumes that gamers are inherently misanthropic and need to ‘learn’ this, it’s not even that accurate.
Sure, it fits in with this specific kind of shooter MMO, but
as a blanket statement on gaming as a whole, it doesn’t fit with the
statistical evidence. When it comes to morality choices in video games, where
players are presented both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ decisions to make in the game
world like in the Mass Effect series or the catalogue of Telltale Games, the
vast majority of players choose good. A Mass Effect developer went public lamenting how all the work the team put into the Renegade paths went unseen by 92% of players,
and in the case of Telltale, it actively shows you what every other player
chose alongside your own choice, and sure enough, most of them went with the presented ‘right choice’.
Hell, most games are designed to be played as the good guy, with the ultimate
good ending being the canonical one for the series going forward in a lot of cases.
What I’m saying with all this is that, for as much as it tries to pull geek cred with references to Portal and Fortnite, it’s lacking in the real understanding of video game philosophy that most gamers actually possess. I mean, games have been exploring the nature of free will and control for decades by this point; it’s not like this is a revelatory idea.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a quite likeable film thanks to the efforts of Reynolds and Jodie Comer (even if the latter dips into some less-than-ideal video game tropes), and the main message here about becoming the hero of your own story and making your world better for your involvement is a nice one. Hell, the scene where Buddy (Lil Rel Howery) talks about optimistic nihilism and finding joy in an inherently meaningless existence is one of the stronger and more relatable ideas I’ve seen all year. And there’s certainly something to be said about how the term ‘NPC’ has become a go-to insult for online edgy bois, with this film as a bladed answer to that idea. Then again, insulting people by calling them NPCs has never made much sense to me, since the NPCs in most games are what give the game world its colour, objectives, and emotional investment beyond just the player inputs. I’m not exactly going to feel insulted because I’m being put on the same level as Angel from Borderlands 1 and 2.
But for as entertaining as it is, there’s something about the film’s overall tone and intent that I find quite uncomfortable. It reads less like a love letter to gamers and more like a sternly-worded email to the management of Gamer Community Inc. that’s meant to talk down to people who just want to have fun with the freedom presented by these kinds of fictional worlds. The fact that this shares a writer with Ready Player One is quite confusing to me, since this has the diametrically opposite approach to acknowledging its gamer audience. Look, I’m not saying that there aren’t toxic elements within gaming communities; I’m just saying that there are ways of commenting on them without throwing everyone under the bus in the process.
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