You may be wondering if you should see Robert Zemeckis' new movie, Welcome to Marwen, partly because it seems to take place in a kind of avatar-inhabited, World War II-themed virtual world that the hero, a man brutalized by fascist thugs, builds as a way of helping to heal. (Virtual world fans on my social media feeds have noted the parallels to Second Life.) Rotten Tomatoes strongly suggests you should give it a hard pass. But I can definitely recommend that you see Marwencol, the documentary and the real story that Zemeckis' movie is based on. As I wrote back when that indie movie came out:
"When his world was stolen, Mark Hogancamp made a world of his own." Marwencol, an acclaimed new documentary now playing in select theaters, isn't actually about user-created virtual worlds, but it speaks, I think, to a shared motivation that makes them possible. Beaten into a coma by several thugs, Hogancamp recovers by creating an astonishingly realistic World War II-era town with lifelike figurines who represent himself, the woman he loves, his friends, and playing the evil Nazis, of course, the bastards who messed him up. I've met many metaverse creators who build virtual utopias for similar reasons as Hogancamp, as a catharsis and means of recovery, as a way of gaining control over a world that's all too often unfair. "Everybody wishes they had a double that could do things that they could never do," as Hogancamp says.
It's a powerful and endlessly intriguing movie with some surprises that only deepen the tragedy of Hogancamp's brutalization while heightening the triumph of his (partial) recovery. Compare the documentary trailer above with the forced Hollywood cheeriness of the fictionalized version:
For that matter, compare Rotten Tomato ratings.
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