Gamer

I think Gamer is a movie a lot of people passed over when it first came out, even it’s own FPS playing target audience. Which is a shame, because it’s great satire. I know it’s not considered a satire, but that’s what it is. It’s a dead-on look at the video game generation, right down to their screen names. It takes current ideas of the most popular games and takes them to the natural conclusion of people controlling other people as their avatars. The outcome isn’t attractive. If you know anything about the actual habits of gamers, you’d know enough to be wary. In a Second Life style open world game, obese men who dip waffles into buckets of syrup before cramming it into their faces control female character and engage in what is essentially gay sex. A female actress goes up to a male actor and the two get it on, without any choice in the matter, because their minds are being controlled. That’s what people are doing all day long on Second Life. The only change is that the avatars are being replaced with flesh’n’blood people. Your average gamers would take great offense to being portrayed as overweight, perversion-obsessed shut-ins who live through their game characters, but they’ll tell you this in the comment sections, with their outdated anime pictures as their avatar, and never in person.

The main bulk of the movie, though, is a Death Race 2000 style game, with criminals fighting in a FPS for freedom. They’re being controlled by greasy teenagers who’re treated like rockstars. Now: the movie hinges on a Mike Zucherberg-style villain and his invention of mind controlling nanobot technology. He uses it on criminals not to make them more compliant, but instead to force them to do violence. Seriously, the same nanobots being used to make them kill each other gladiator-style could also make them perfectly docile and productive members of society. If you watched Shaun of the Dead where they eventually train the zombies to put shopping carts away, the same idea could apply to this movie. Criminals could hold jobs and have ideal lives, and the general public would never have to fear for their safety. The guy who killed your uncle could make your latte, and then you could spit in his face, and he’d just stand there and smile at you. Is that a type of slavery? Yes, but less so than the one illustrated in the movie. After all, it’s just a lousy plot device to get people to kill each other.

The movie actually takes great pains to show how the participants are, for the most part, completely unwilling to take part in the bloodshed. Avatars have total mental breakdowns after each session, while the players look at their fans’ teenaged boobs on webcam. Only one dude is really into it, and he’s a psychopath rival to the hero. They’re all supposedly fighting for their freedom, which is exactly like Death Race 2000, especially since that promise is complete bullshit. You have to feel sorry for the characters in the movie who fall for it. Do you think they’d let the world’s most deranged killing machine free, after proving himself to be virtually indestructible? On the other hand, they use to do it in Ancient Rome.

The whole scheme seems like it would cost everyone involved a lot of money. Having your own human slave with accessories can’t be cheap. The one fat dude was living in the dingiest apartment imaginable, but he could still somehow afford a glamorous female avatar. The FPS player had an entire room that was a virtual projection screen, and he could afford new weapons and armour for his avatar to use in-game. Plus when your character dies in the game, you’re basically fucked. Imagine if you had to pay every time you respawned.

I was watching the movie, and I thought to myself, “This movie could use more Ludacris.” Then, Ludacris came on. That automatically makes this the best movie ever, because you know Ludacris would never attach himself to anything terrible.

Oh, wait.

There’s honestly not enough movies out there with rap stars in them.

Then we find out that Ludacris can hack anyone’s mind control nanobots and download useful apps. He could have gone mainstream and made a killing with his “Walkie-Talkie” program that lets two people talk to each other using only their brains. But no, he decided to take on an evil corporate empire by freeing one guy out of hundreds of potentially sympathetic victims. That didn’t turn out too well for him. Or he could have just hacked everyone’s mind with a virus and put a stop to the game that way by giving them their free will back.

There’s a lot of stupid plans in the movie. Like the bad guy having his team of elite killers perform a song and dance number, then let them be killed one-by-one. Then he challenges the deadliest man in the world to a game of basketball. Or the whole escape plan that involved the hero drinking himself stupid, then throwing up and urinating into the fuel intake of a truck to power it. For some reason, he couldn’t bring the bottle with him. He had to drink it, then pee it out. And somehow it was still potent enough to fuel a truck for a daring escape through an exploding city. He had someone sneak booze into his locker, which is in a maximum security detention centre. He could have just had the person fill up the truck with some fuel, which is in an unguarded garage. Was he so certain the truck was empty to begin with? In the same act, there’s a vehicle that a player uses to run over some chick in the street, so obviously there’s cars with fuel, and they’re easily accessible.

There’s people in the game that are there for the sole reason to get blown up. They’re just there for decoration. They walk mindlessly though the killing fields and get run over or turned into swiss cheese. On some level, they agreed to that. One of them is John Leguizamo, though, so it makes it okay.

Then the hero, who claims to be innocent in everything he’s done, and apparently abhors the violence forced upon him, breaks the spine of another avatar he catches about to have sex with his wife. The avatar is a completely unwilling participant, and a paid actor. Essentially, he’s being raped, and the hero knows this. But he sees a dude about to bang his wife, who’s basically a hooker anyway, and he kills him with a backbreaker. It completely goes against every other theme of the movie. If he was innocent up until then and just killing to survive and find his freedom, he completely blew it with an act of Second-Degree murder. If you catch yourself over-thinking that scene, though, you probably would have turned off the movie by now. That’s what’s so messed up about the whole movie. It brings up all these ethical sci-fi questions and then shits all over them.