Gamer
2009 action movie staring Gerard Butler. It was an interesting film this one because all the reviews seem to pan it as generic trash and as largely a waste of time and effort and complained that the story was bad and made no sense. But I actually have to say that I found it quite watchable and it made perfect sense, if that sense was largely a bit ludicrous and sort of got squished around a bit as they hop from one thing to the next.
The world is close future, the internet is our close and intimate friend and the world of “on-line” gaming has been expanded to become a situation where “meat puppets” are the next big thing. Enter Kable, a death row convict and FPS style combatant in a game called Slayers (run by the Zuckerbergesque Ken Castle (Michael C Hall). Kable (Gerard Butler) is the character controlled by Simon (Logan Lerman), your typical rich teenage internet gamer who has more money than personality. Simon's only real claim to fame being that he (and Kable) have gotten as far as levle 29... Kable is in the running to possibly win his 30th round in Slayers, and so reaching the impossible, gaining a pardon from his criminal sins, his freedom and world notoriety - Now take a small stab in the dark as to what is about to happen to the story here?..
Apparently in this world you can “volunteer” to have your brain replaced by a nano-created construct which wifi’s you into the internet and allows you to become a meat puppet. In Butlers case it is a chance to win a "get out of Jail free" card, but to do so it makes him a competitor in the meat grinder FPS game Slayers. And in the case of his wife it means that she has done th eonly thing she can to "get a job". She has prostituted her body for a FPS, second life style “game” where she is the avatar for a rather grim, obese sweaty male pervert who has a thing for the pvc clad avatar Rick Rape (Milo Ventimiglia). Please then enter stage right the sub-sub plot, A computer militant group called Humanz (cool huh, they substitute the s for a z).. who are sure I think against humans becoming meat puppets and are sure that there is some sort of nefarious corporate conspiracy going on which is encouraging people to "give up their humanity" etc.etc.. I think it is because of the whole puppet thing.. but to be honest I am not sure you know there is a lot of talk but no real meat to their manifesto.. Then arrives the sub-sub-sub-sub-plot which then turns out to be the main uber plot that Mr Castle is actually leading a nefarious one man conspiracy, he is in fact bat shit insane and wants to rulez them all! By making everyone a meat puppet and making the world dance to his tunes and possibly even burn to see what colour it goes..
This film has two writers/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor and to be serious it really shows.. The film has two obvious agendas.. the hard gritty FPS stuff and the not so hard but flashy and in your face (and slightly softcore pornographic) "real world". I am really surprised that his got th ebudget it did because it really does watch like a high budget action B-movie than a "hollywood" A-lister...
The main issue I have with the film is that it doesn't actually stick to a main single plotline, or rather it can't decide what is, its main plotline and so flitters around makign little digs at things but does not follow through the the conversation as it were.. I mean to start with it apears to be a comment on the ethicacy of basically using human beings as toys. Then is moves into the area of the way society as a whole apears to feel that anyone on death row should be treated as below human (regardless of their reasons for actualyl being there). If they are on death row this some how makes it okay for them to be used as toys by spoilt rich kids for the amusment of the masses.. which in itself woudl be a fair film commentary (and is pretty much the basis for a large number of movie plots) but the story doesn't stay there and deal with it.. it moves over and grabs hold of another similar idea..Basically question of how ethical is it to have extreme fantasy lives through the computer and an almost clumsy attmept at "well if this was a human would you do that with them?" (which the answer is plainly yes. once a human looses empathy with another thing.. it becomes fair game).
And then to just complete the package the writers make a quick swing at the whole mass media/corporate pandering that goes on, and of course the inevitable allusion that the political landscape is directly influenced by corporate pressure.. Then the film randomly gets distracted by shiney things (in this case flashing lights, dayglo colours and neon and the occasional flash of boobage).. and then randomly it snaps back to what apears to be it's original purpose but instead of having a moment where the whole society ethics thing is confronted.. its runs to the age old device of "well the uber powerful monied corporate CEO dunnit!".. it couldn't Possibly include a large number of politicians who have to sign off on the whole "using prisoners as meat puppet" thing, or an whole entire corporation and it's shareholders who have actively and cynically put profit over human life.. and society for dehumanising the lifers to a point where they can be used as meat puppets. Nope its all one mans idea as he has the POWAH!
As with a good many movies i have watched recently, you can see a story inthere, but it is hidden by swathes of inconsequential stuff or it has been edited to crap.. and so the point is lost. This movie has a huge number of little themes all of which are covered individually in other films or books. Of the top of my head I can tell you:
The decadent city scape is from anything by William Gibson (particularly the Necromancer stuff) with the city being a generically dark and crappy underhive world, with the people in it suitably young, unsympathetic, sexually decadent (not to mention a bit deviant) mostly nude (when it comes to the female of the species) and completely emotionally divorced from anything of note.
Death Row criminals made to fight to the death: well that is pretty much the staple diet of cheap b-list action moves and of course the likes of The Running Man(film)and Death Race.
Computer games being played for some form of personal gain, Avalon is a good example of this, and of course a whole slew of b-list action movies..
The filming style itself sort of odd too all wavy angles, crash zooms flashing lights and random flicking to close-ups of ladies rather under-developed décolletage. (yes we know they are boobs).. You do get a feeling with some of the not-FPS shooter scenes that the director just went bonkers and filmed anythign that "Looked cool"..with every other shot of decadant city life appearing to contain a lot of women who have the intense desire to show you their boobs...
There seems to be an endless supply of flashy OTT IN YOUR FACE.. stuff for no good reason, its just filler with less actualy time on the atual plot stuff.. which to be fair they could have put in the flashy filler. But to ofset this, the actual combat scenes and the FPS Slayers stuff is well thought out and well filmed.
I also have to sya that I cannot fault the actors, they did well to cast who they did and i think one of the main reaosns that the movie stays even vaguely sane is because of the calibre of those actors. Gerard Butler is ideally cast, he is big and heavy, but also light on his feet. He looks like he can pysically take on the BIG hitters as well as working out an escape plan.. Michael C. Hall is as always an excellent choice as the morally decadent and a touch psychotic head of the computer corporation, i don't know how he does it but there is alwaus soemthign goign on behind his eyes. You can see it in Dexter.. Logan Lerman, again a very good actor (one that i am keepign my eye on, he's done a lot of fluff parts but acted them well) his Simon is just the right ammount of cocky teenager to pull the character off (again to be honest the writers seriously missed a trick.. this character could have been a lot more than he was.. they set him up as an A-character then just pushed him into the background and ignored him, he was in the perfect possition to work similar to the Quaid character in Inner Space, Kable's support man as well as being in a great place to get the needed info out into the world. but I digress)
I think that if I have to put a circle round what I found intrinsically wrong with this movie, it would haev to be that it can’t quite decide what it is actually trying to say. It is such a mish mash of various ideas from various third party sources that about a third of the way in it looses itself completely and when it reaches the end it skips back to an ending which will do, but seems a little tacked on.
I mean the whole film itself could be a statement on how the internet and first person/third person combat games are de-humanising people and de-empathising the gamers to consider their meat puppets just that. You could have the snotty smart arse teenage gamer get to know his gladiator and then decide that maybe it isn't fair to just drive him out into the field to get shot to shit so that he can have his 15 minutes of FPS glory. with teh subplot being that a computer militant group of humantarians are working to break the WiFi connections as they are a complete affront to a humans basic freedoms. which can then include the storyline of the basic corruption of power and money on corporations and governments which lead to People becoming Objects.
Instead the story skips through basic concepts like a stone on water.. so you are going, right so.. The game is bad because people die.. Ok, Oh the players are bad, because they have no empathy and enjoy watching the people die/do perverted stuff.. okay got that... and oh no the society is bad because it lets all this happen... right.. is teh wife bad? on no the wife is not bad because she is doing her best in a crappy situation.. got ya... oh right so the fat pervert is bad because he's got a pretty meat puppet whom he uses to fulfil his perverted jollies.. okay I can get with that.. ah and of course the Media is bad because it hypes everything up with no conscience. but it can also be good because it can support the little guy with no moral agenda of it's own. And of course the little guy is fine to break out prisoners from lifers jail and hack computers because they are "the underdog" and are able to out think a multibillion dollar company with mega awesome resources and the police don't count because they don't exist.. oh and behind it all is of course THE BIG BAD GUY! the mighty corporate CEO, the embodiment of pure evil because he has the resources and money to have a go at becoming and Evil Overlord... which nobody notices at all.
Which to be honest I couldn't really work out at all because.. he coudl have just done it.. his big plan.. and no one woudl have noticed. just deliver the item into the wild and become the Evil Overlord. Why faff about with Kable and all that .. just launch the plan. and have POWAH!.. literally the only thing in this film stopping him is the writers.
and of course society and all that is reprieved of taking responsibility for anything because in the end it was all the fault of the Evil CEO..
Strangely enough though. Even with these problems in the story and script I really found the movie to be watchable.. Which I think I put whole heartedly at the door of the actors. They did a bloody good job with a naff script and poorly organised story. Overall the film is no worse than say Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity or even Running Man. All of which have equally ludicrous storylines and dire dialogue but you don’t actually have a problem just sitting and watching it. Believe me I don't consider it to be a waste of your life, seriously I have watched such movies.. I experienced nothing on the level of psychological pain watching this movie as I have watching those movies. This is just one of those movies where if you go in expecting epic intellectual property.. you are probably going to be disapointed.
This is not a full price blu-ray movie.. this is probably a cheap bargain bucket DVD film. Just get ur beer n popcorn, leave your brain at the door and enjoy..
The world is close future, the internet is our close and intimate friend and the world of “on-line” gaming has been expanded to become a situation where “meat puppets” are the next big thing. Enter Kable, a death row convict and FPS style combatant in a game called Slayers (run by the Zuckerbergesque Ken Castle (Michael C Hall). Kable (Gerard Butler) is the character controlled by Simon (Logan Lerman), your typical rich teenage internet gamer who has more money than personality. Simon's only real claim to fame being that he (and Kable) have gotten as far as levle 29... Kable is in the running to possibly win his 30th round in Slayers, and so reaching the impossible, gaining a pardon from his criminal sins, his freedom and world notoriety - Now take a small stab in the dark as to what is about to happen to the story here?..
Apparently in this world you can “volunteer” to have your brain replaced by a nano-created construct which wifi’s you into the internet and allows you to become a meat puppet. In Butlers case it is a chance to win a "get out of Jail free" card, but to do so it makes him a competitor in the meat grinder FPS game Slayers. And in the case of his wife it means that she has done th eonly thing she can to "get a job". She has prostituted her body for a FPS, second life style “game” where she is the avatar for a rather grim, obese sweaty male pervert who has a thing for the pvc clad avatar Rick Rape (Milo Ventimiglia). Please then enter stage right the sub-sub plot, A computer militant group called Humanz (cool huh, they substitute the s for a z).. who are sure I think against humans becoming meat puppets and are sure that there is some sort of nefarious corporate conspiracy going on which is encouraging people to "give up their humanity" etc.etc.. I think it is because of the whole puppet thing.. but to be honest I am not sure you know there is a lot of talk but no real meat to their manifesto.. Then arrives the sub-sub-sub-sub-plot which then turns out to be the main uber plot that Mr Castle is actually leading a nefarious one man conspiracy, he is in fact bat shit insane and wants to rulez them all! By making everyone a meat puppet and making the world dance to his tunes and possibly even burn to see what colour it goes..
This film has two writers/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor and to be serious it really shows.. The film has two obvious agendas.. the hard gritty FPS stuff and the not so hard but flashy and in your face (and slightly softcore pornographic) "real world". I am really surprised that his got th ebudget it did because it really does watch like a high budget action B-movie than a "hollywood" A-lister...
The main issue I have with the film is that it doesn't actually stick to a main single plotline, or rather it can't decide what is, its main plotline and so flitters around makign little digs at things but does not follow through the the conversation as it were.. I mean to start with it apears to be a comment on the ethicacy of basically using human beings as toys. Then is moves into the area of the way society as a whole apears to feel that anyone on death row should be treated as below human (regardless of their reasons for actualyl being there). If they are on death row this some how makes it okay for them to be used as toys by spoilt rich kids for the amusment of the masses.. which in itself woudl be a fair film commentary (and is pretty much the basis for a large number of movie plots) but the story doesn't stay there and deal with it.. it moves over and grabs hold of another similar idea..Basically question of how ethical is it to have extreme fantasy lives through the computer and an almost clumsy attmept at "well if this was a human would you do that with them?" (which the answer is plainly yes. once a human looses empathy with another thing.. it becomes fair game).
And then to just complete the package the writers make a quick swing at the whole mass media/corporate pandering that goes on, and of course the inevitable allusion that the political landscape is directly influenced by corporate pressure.. Then the film randomly gets distracted by shiney things (in this case flashing lights, dayglo colours and neon and the occasional flash of boobage).. and then randomly it snaps back to what apears to be it's original purpose but instead of having a moment where the whole society ethics thing is confronted.. its runs to the age old device of "well the uber powerful monied corporate CEO dunnit!".. it couldn't Possibly include a large number of politicians who have to sign off on the whole "using prisoners as meat puppet" thing, or an whole entire corporation and it's shareholders who have actively and cynically put profit over human life.. and society for dehumanising the lifers to a point where they can be used as meat puppets. Nope its all one mans idea as he has the POWAH!
As with a good many movies i have watched recently, you can see a story inthere, but it is hidden by swathes of inconsequential stuff or it has been edited to crap.. and so the point is lost. This movie has a huge number of little themes all of which are covered individually in other films or books. Of the top of my head I can tell you:
The decadent city scape is from anything by William Gibson (particularly the Necromancer stuff) with the city being a generically dark and crappy underhive world, with the people in it suitably young, unsympathetic, sexually decadent (not to mention a bit deviant) mostly nude (when it comes to the female of the species) and completely emotionally divorced from anything of note.
Death Row criminals made to fight to the death: well that is pretty much the staple diet of cheap b-list action moves and of course the likes of The Running Man(film)and Death Race.
Computer games being played for some form of personal gain, Avalon is a good example of this, and of course a whole slew of b-list action movies..
The filming style itself sort of odd too all wavy angles, crash zooms flashing lights and random flicking to close-ups of ladies rather under-developed décolletage. (yes we know they are boobs).. You do get a feeling with some of the not-FPS shooter scenes that the director just went bonkers and filmed anythign that "Looked cool"..with every other shot of decadant city life appearing to contain a lot of women who have the intense desire to show you their boobs...
There seems to be an endless supply of flashy OTT IN YOUR FACE.. stuff for no good reason, its just filler with less actualy time on the atual plot stuff.. which to be fair they could have put in the flashy filler. But to ofset this, the actual combat scenes and the FPS Slayers stuff is well thought out and well filmed.
I also have to sya that I cannot fault the actors, they did well to cast who they did and i think one of the main reaosns that the movie stays even vaguely sane is because of the calibre of those actors. Gerard Butler is ideally cast, he is big and heavy, but also light on his feet. He looks like he can pysically take on the BIG hitters as well as working out an escape plan.. Michael C. Hall is as always an excellent choice as the morally decadent and a touch psychotic head of the computer corporation, i don't know how he does it but there is alwaus soemthign goign on behind his eyes. You can see it in Dexter.. Logan Lerman, again a very good actor (one that i am keepign my eye on, he's done a lot of fluff parts but acted them well) his Simon is just the right ammount of cocky teenager to pull the character off (again to be honest the writers seriously missed a trick.. this character could have been a lot more than he was.. they set him up as an A-character then just pushed him into the background and ignored him, he was in the perfect possition to work similar to the Quaid character in Inner Space, Kable's support man as well as being in a great place to get the needed info out into the world. but I digress)
I think that if I have to put a circle round what I found intrinsically wrong with this movie, it would haev to be that it can’t quite decide what it is actually trying to say. It is such a mish mash of various ideas from various third party sources that about a third of the way in it looses itself completely and when it reaches the end it skips back to an ending which will do, but seems a little tacked on.
I mean the whole film itself could be a statement on how the internet and first person/third person combat games are de-humanising people and de-empathising the gamers to consider their meat puppets just that. You could have the snotty smart arse teenage gamer get to know his gladiator and then decide that maybe it isn't fair to just drive him out into the field to get shot to shit so that he can have his 15 minutes of FPS glory. with teh subplot being that a computer militant group of humantarians are working to break the WiFi connections as they are a complete affront to a humans basic freedoms. which can then include the storyline of the basic corruption of power and money on corporations and governments which lead to People becoming Objects.
Instead the story skips through basic concepts like a stone on water.. so you are going, right so.. The game is bad because people die.. Ok, Oh the players are bad, because they have no empathy and enjoy watching the people die/do perverted stuff.. okay got that... and oh no the society is bad because it lets all this happen... right.. is teh wife bad? on no the wife is not bad because she is doing her best in a crappy situation.. got ya... oh right so the fat pervert is bad because he's got a pretty meat puppet whom he uses to fulfil his perverted jollies.. okay I can get with that.. ah and of course the Media is bad because it hypes everything up with no conscience. but it can also be good because it can support the little guy with no moral agenda of it's own. And of course the little guy is fine to break out prisoners from lifers jail and hack computers because they are "the underdog" and are able to out think a multibillion dollar company with mega awesome resources and the police don't count because they don't exist.. oh and behind it all is of course THE BIG BAD GUY! the mighty corporate CEO, the embodiment of pure evil because he has the resources and money to have a go at becoming and Evil Overlord... which nobody notices at all.
Which to be honest I couldn't really work out at all because.. he coudl have just done it.. his big plan.. and no one woudl have noticed. just deliver the item into the wild and become the Evil Overlord. Why faff about with Kable and all that .. just launch the plan. and have POWAH!.. literally the only thing in this film stopping him is the writers.
and of course society and all that is reprieved of taking responsibility for anything because in the end it was all the fault of the Evil CEO..
Strangely enough though. Even with these problems in the story and script I really found the movie to be watchable.. Which I think I put whole heartedly at the door of the actors. They did a bloody good job with a naff script and poorly organised story. Overall the film is no worse than say Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity or even Running Man. All of which have equally ludicrous storylines and dire dialogue but you don’t actually have a problem just sitting and watching it. Believe me I don't consider it to be a waste of your life, seriously I have watched such movies.. I experienced nothing on the level of psychological pain watching this movie as I have watching those movies. This is just one of those movies where if you go in expecting epic intellectual property.. you are probably going to be disapointed.
This is not a full price blu-ray movie.. this is probably a cheap bargain bucket DVD film. Just get ur beer n popcorn, leave your brain at the door and enjoy..