As long as you are a veteran movie fan or American drama fan, you will realize that there are too many shadows of its predecessors when you sit in the cinema to watch "Runaway Player".
Released at the end of the summer season, the popcorn movie tells the story of the NPC (non-playercharacter) character Guy (Ryan Reynolds) who suddenly wakes up from his daily life as a bank teller who is set up every day in a killing sandbox game called Liberty City, and decides to become a hero and shoulder the fate of saving the game world.
In terms of discussing game culture, "Runaway Player" looks like a second generation of "Ready Player One", and the two are almost the same in the use of Easter egg culture.
In terms of thinking about the authenticity of life, there is more or less a shadow of "Truman's World" - the truth is behind that sea.
In the setting that you can see a different world with glasses on, this film is borrowing from "Extreme Space".
While reflecting on game ethics and discussing npc human rights issues, this film is very much like "Westworld".
It can even be said that the life of the protagonist Gai Gai reshuffling the cards day after day is also set by the high concept of playing happily from "Groundhog Day".
So, we probably shouldn't look at this movie with a mindset of expecting a new milestone in Hollywood science fiction.
It's less reflective and avant-garde, and in a sense it's more like a popcorn movie that makes standard moves as perfect as possible in its comfort zone.
It may be precisely for this reason that this movie can be slightly honored at the end of this summer for the already depressed summer slot. Its properness and conservatism are like standing on the shoulders of the predecessors and tiptoeing slightly, tickling the audience.
In the more than three decades from the 1980s to the present, the Internet has been continuously embedded in people's lives at a rapid pace, and the Internet has gradually become the theme of most people's lives, and the boundary between illusion and reality is now quite blurred.
And open-ended games like GTA, Fortnite, and SimCity are arguably one of the most fascinating parts of the virtual world.
To put it bluntly, "Runaway Player" is a fairy tale film about the game world, which embraces the dream that utopia still exists, and has no intention of bloody displaying cruel truth.
Nowadays, such a dream is being accepted by more and more people, and people are gradually beginning to oscillate between the real world and the virtual world.
If Ready Player One's confession of the game still carries a bit of a rebellious, reflective punk spirit, by the time it comes to Out of Control, the audience is clearly eager to delve into this dream of games, the Internet and movies.
Therefore, in "Out of Control Player", the most basic emotional logic is not rebellion and resistance, but first of all helplessness and powerlessness -
There is no way to completely change your situation with your efforts, and you must eventually choose to accept a utopian life after compromise.
That's why I think this film looks a little mournful.
The most crucial point in the film's setting about the awakening of the protagonist Gai is that only when he puts on his glasses can he see the most real side of the world in which he lives.
Real and beautiful, exciting and tense, but also complex, cruel and cold.
When Guy realizes that the freshness of even another dimension of reality will one day dissipate, the orderly reality of his original life will instantly disintegrate in front of this reality, becoming a completely meaningless repetitive action.
The most different thing from the previous science fiction movies with similar themes is that Guy has no way to completely escape this unreal life.
He can't be like Neo in The Matrix, who can completely wake up and return to real life after eating the red pill.
In Guy's worldview setting, there is no way to reach the so-called real world outside the game.
Because he boils down to stringing digital codes, he has no real flesh.
He can only kiss the heroine in the game, and for the heroine in the real world, it is likely to be just an animated picture.
The saddest thing is not that you realize that players are manipulating what you think is a good life like a god, but that you can never talk to this group of gods on the same dimension.
You are numeric codes, and they are human.
While you can see the meaninglessness and falsehood of the world in which you live, you also realize that you cannot get rid of this falsehood after all.
Therefore, while restoring the game setting, conceiving and designing a romantic story in the game, this film is also consciously or unconsciously borrowing the setting of the game to metaphorize our real life.
Who knows that their daily social life at three o'clock and day after day will be better than those game NPCs who have to get up every morning and have to smile sideways and greet their goldfish?
Who knows that the love, hatred, hatred, and hatred in the virtual world that we are increasingly obsessed with and obsessed with are, after all, just one dream bubble after another that does not allow the physical body to truly arrive?
In multiple senses, the rapid expansion of the virtual world has enhanced people's sense of experience with life, but it is also making people feel an increasingly strong sense of burnout for the real world outside the virtual world.
Philosophical propositions about reality, about the self, have never been more pervasive to everyone than they are today.
The coolness of "Out of Control Player" comes from the fact that the audience is really fond of the experience of Gai getting a God perspective that the people around him can't have, and then growing up all the way, but he is also constantly reflecting on the sense of nothingness and absurdity brought about by this God perspective.
You can stand outside the fourth wall and experience the thrill of team shields, Hulk fists, Deadpool posters, and Jedi's lightsabers appearing in the same movie.
This kind of pleasure is routine, stereotyped, cheap and superficial, but because you and I are the audience watching the movie from god's point of view, we can experience infinite pleasure from this information gap between the audience and the characters.
The big villain "Big Guy" will not know why Guy suddenly has the shield of the US team.
But you will also realize that on another level, we, like Guy, are placed in an unreal social situation, and there is no such thing as a pair of god perspectives behind us.
The truth in which you and I live is equally questionable.
So, on the philosophical question of reality, perhaps the point that Runaway Player really wants to convey is that none of us can gain absolute power to grasp self-consciousness and define the world as true or false in a world where virtual and reality have long been conflated.
No one's world must be more real than anyone else's, and no one's life experience must be more real than anyone else's.
In essence, when the sense of real boundaries is infinitely blurred, the only thing that can support the sense of reality is the will of the individual.
In the second half of the film, Gai's police friend explains to him that it is actually this truth, that believing in a relatively true, individual free will is in a sense much more important and meaningful than to struggle with whether the world is absolutely real.
When I first saw this conversation in the theater, I was actually quite surprised, thinking that the film was going to explore some serious philosophical propositions, after all, realism has always been a very interesting philosophical topic in the field of digital technology and artificial intelligence.
The question of authenticity contained in Cover is actually almost the continuation of the philosophical speculation about whether fully digitized artificial intelligence has life in the second season of "Westworld", and does the life that has been completely digitized still have real free will?
Stills from the second season of Westworld
But perhaps because the film had to make a little concession for the sake of commerciality and popcorn properties, this philosophical proposition that could have been dug deeper is actually very shallow in the film, and it boils down to two points:
One is that Millie's (Judy Comer)'s love for Guy is really unreal;
The second is whether the utopia hidden behind the sea level can be counted as a real utopia.
First of all, let's talk about the love line of the film. Millie's affection for Guy is unquestionable, but it's hardly 100% love because it's always been functional love—I'm attracted to you because it's necessary to trigger the resurrection of your code.
And you can attract me because your program has already written down my preferences and habits.
So, in the end, the film's love line is handled as a kind of preaching.
Guy does gain free will because of this emotion, realizing that he cherishes every moment of his life in the moment, but this love is also denying his free will—The cover becomes a love letter from the keyboard to Millie, and the emotional details in the program are designed.
This love letter not only expresses the keyboard's love for Millie, but also calls for her to return to real life to accept this love, abandoning the virtual love between the cover and the cover.
Let's talk about the so-called original game, a utopian city that can help the game characters grow freely, in fact, it has been avoiding a big bug in the logic of the film itself.
That is, in any case, it is still just a game, and the day the server is cut off, the free will of these characters will still be cleared back into a string of digital codes.
What underpins and secures this utopia is the belief that Keyboard and Millie will not become an Antoine-style evil capitalist—a belief that has to be said to be too fairytale and too commercial.
Believing that by changing a good, conscientious company, NPCs can gain true freedom is the same as believing that there will really be such a brainless and grumpy capitalist in the real world as Antoine who is eager to find his own death (R stars laugh).
So, in the final analysis, "Out of Control Player" actually can't be stuffed into how deep and serious sci-fi ambitions, at most it makes everyone happy to watch and cool to watch.
But there is nothing wrong with being cool, who makes this lackluster summer slot difficult to find even a popcorn movie that can make people brainless?
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Did you go to see Runaway Player?