Gamer, Hardware and Other Tech Movies

[RPG Post]

Gamer and Hardware

Despite recommendations to the contrary on this very site, I watched Gamer.

It had Gerard Butler, whom my wife is quite taken with, and I figured a big budget should at least pay for some special effects. It was, at best, a convoluted mess, with earnest technobabble filling in for plot and violence filling in for everything else. Gamer treads ground explored in many other stories, parts lifted from oh so many sources combined with Second Life and Modern Warfare and left to percolate to little. The percolation was not enough to grant the movie any insight into gamers, the desire to recreate ourselves online, to be anyone else for a while. Nor does it do anything with its potentially interesting story of people who agree to be avatars

Surrogates

Surrogates, the Bruce Willis movie of virtual reality, a life lived through robots explored some of the same ground.

It too featured a military industrial complex, the seemingly benign revealed as nefarious, a machination of the machinists so to speak. Surrogates was a mediocre movie. Gamer ... Gamer is an insulting mess of a movie with one surreal moment, of Dexter, Michael C. Hall, performing a song and dance routine. There are so many unanswered questions and stupid moments I don't know where to start a critique. But the Song and Dance routine and the sweaty fat guy will stay with me a while.

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Perverted Fat Guys Who Drool

Hardware was a disappointing movie. Richard Stanley directed this derivative post-apocalyptic film starring Dylan McDermott, which had one particularly memorable character: a grotesque, drooling, voyeuristic fat man. Iggy Pop was in it too, to its credit; he just couldn't save it. The voyeur is dwelt on with the camera, itself worshiping the figure it renders, in every repulsive detail. Drool builds and runs with sweat. A saliva string forms. The scene is one of those non-horror scenes that creep me out. [Nothing recently has been as effective as Mama and Papa bear in Running Scared, but the squick factor is high.] Likewise the scene(s) in Gamer, dwelling on the grotesqueness of the voyeur in all of his bared rolls and beads. Gamer felt less creepy, whether that is a testament to Stanley's directorial power or Gamer's shallow portrayal of gamers it is difficult to say.

I know I complained about portrayals of gamers in media before. Gamer ... fails. But it would be giving it too much credit to say it tried. A few stereotypes--Asians play, fat people play, teen age boys play--and it has painted its gamers in strokes so wide they hold no resolution. The movie is called Gamer, yet we see minimal gaming and no focus on the gamers. Not character development, not motivation, not anything about gaming. This is a movie about violence as entertainment which can't even recognize what it's about--it has not the sense of The Running Man and certainly none of the intelligence of Ender's Game. Even Toys, which seems to owe a debt to Ender's Game, explores a link between violent play and violence.

I don't recommend Gamer, even if you put your mind in idle for a while. There's nothing to be had, except frustration if you give it any thought later.