Spielberg's Ready Player One was not a huge hit here -- though notably, a blockbuster in China, where MMOs are much more mainstream -- but here's Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy, Hollywood's latest attempt to turn the dynamics of virtual worlds into a mass market movie. Premise:
In the open world video game Free City, an amalgamation of Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite, Guy (Reynolds) is a non-player character (NPC), working as a bank teller. Thanks to a code developed by programmers Milly (Comer) and Keys (Keery) inserted into Free City by the publisher Antoine (Waititi), Guy becomes aware of his world being a video game, and takes steps to make himself the hero, creating a race against time to save the game before the developers can shut it down.
That sounds good as far as it goes, though as with Ready Player One, all the onscreen action has a flat, forced feel. Here's why:
Once you cue the audience that everything they're watching is just in a videogame, they unconsciously break their suspension of disbelief, and no longer engage with the action. (The Matrix movies got around this by explicitly showing that dying and suffering in the metaverse causes the user to die and suffer in real life.)
But the real problem with Free Guy may be a failure to go deeper into the premise: If an NPC in a GTA-type MMO was always surrounded by gunfire and explosions, wouldn't he prefer not to be the action hero -- and instead, try to have a normal everyday life where his workplace wasn't constantly blown up, and he could go home to his family at the end of the day, have a nice dinner, and maybe sit on the couch to play a GTA-type MMO?
Anyway, there's a hot take to hopefully hold you until the actual movie comes out next June.
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