Review of Gamer (2009) by Michael M — 09 Dec 2010

(originally posted September 2009, this movie got a lot of bad reviews, I was originally even embarrassed that I liked this movie, but like the best dystopian future films,it is a pitch dark movie so make sure you surround the viewing of it with happy activities, but I still think its a good and creative movie:).

Gamer is one of this year's person controlling another body movies. The next is Surrogates, and the last of the year, the longest in production (ten years) and probably the biggest and most anticipated, is Avatar. Only unlike the Surrogates, in which people remotely control robotic bodies, or Avatar, in which people remotely control alien bodies. In Gamer, people control the bodies of other people against their will and unlike the other movies Gamer is Rated R and is an extremely dark movie, after leaving the theatre you might feel a bit disturbed and want to put on happy sounding Christian music or dance in a field of daisies or kiss a puppy or something doing something happy afterwards is certainly recommended.

As for the scenario for Gamer a mad scientist (played by Michael C. Hall) who invented the mechanism for hijacking a person's motor cortex has created two programs to profit from his new technology, Society and Slayers.

Society is a real reality simulator, kind of like Second Life only you actually control a real person's body who is actually in another part of the world and who can see, feel and think, but not control their own body. The characters in Society are real people who get paid to forfeit their free will from nine to five ceding remote control of their bodies to video-gamers. These gamers can do anything they want with these characters. You know this happens in virtual reality games now but imagine a horny morbidly obese boy remotely controlling a beautiful REAL woman as his avatar and a dweeby pencil necked kid controlling a buff GQ type REAL bloke hitting on her, not being aware that the woman character he is kissing is also controlled by a man.

Slayers is a game involving death row inmates and death. if you get thirty victories you are set free. Kable (Gerard Butler) is almost the first Slayer to win the game and have his sentence thrown out. But the mad scientist will do everything in his power to prevent that from happening, including (what is almost a given for villains administering games in movies) breaking his own rules for his own game. Lag is a factor in the game, that is, as in current online games there is a delay (be it discernible or otherwise) between when a character presses the control to move a character and when that character responds to that button press and actually moves. The mad scientist knows this so he sends a vicious killer into the game who controls himself, and so doesn't have to deal with lag or a pesky bureaucracy of marionette strings .

Needless to say Kable's wife (Amber Valleta) is a character in Society being taken advantage of and Kable the slayer must rescue her and topple the mad scientist and essentially save the human race from the villain's plans to enslave it using the same tech used to make said games possible. Only, the mad scientist is holding the ace of Kable's daughter up his sleeve, so Kable must proceed with caution in a movie that is about anything but caution, but it is entertaining nevertheless.

The film makers predict that in the future the only people who can afford to play games are young rich kids, who shed well over the current next-gen price of sixty dollars for their real reality videogames. Presumably in this future games still haven't reached the resolution and molecular fidelity of reality (which games only capture ridiculous fractions of fractions of now and probably will still capture ridiculous fractions of one hundred years from now).

Slayers is a phenomenon with has a daily super-bowl sized audience of followers. Only I don't see how this massive audience can't see how barbaric this game is or even attempt to do anything about it. There is a group (led by a character played by Ludacris) who is trying to shut down the game, but it is a fairly underground organization. The set up for Luda's character, and his associates is good, but at the end of the script their characters are really shortchanged by screenwriters who are obviously aiming for a shorter runtime.

I would have appreciated the film makers investing more into the audience's emotions with the main characters. I would have liked to feel more heartbreak for Kable and his wife, but the movie invests about as much emotion in them as a morning newspaper story about these same characters would do. There is John Leguizamo's character who is an emotionally important side character but he exists almost entirely as a prop to touch us, and there ain't nothing wrong with that, but I would have liked them to put a little more tender care and affection into and through Leguizamo's character so I would feel more for him when what happens to him happens. And I would have liked to see a more satisfying ending to that of the morbidly obese player of Society and would have liked his character to be more three dimensional and not the evil Vladimir Harkonnen type character that they make him as it is now his story ends, but has no dramatic arc, although I'm glad they didn't off him as if he were a totally villainous character. There could have been a great movie here, but as it is Gamer is good though and a fun creative ride, but a very dark, simplistic ride. This is a strong R, not for the faint hearted.