Free Guy
Ahh, what seems like The Truman Show turns into Wreck It Ralph for teenagers (with a Cyrano love story). Shame, it reached for the stars, but faltered towards the end.
The Truman Show is more like a GTA Online game, an urban environment with maximum cruelty potential, giving points for brutality, and revolving the game around the capitalist accumulation of capital in the forms of guns, cribs, and cars. Our false protagonist Guy is a random NPC, just an extra that serves as background noise for the real players. Big Dick Players, swinging past their knees…
When our Guy sees The One Girl, he works out the guts to talk to her, but she dismisses him. She only notices him after he played the game successfully, and is all the rage on Twitch and YouTube.
IRL, she was an indie programmer that created a Minecraft-like game with her pal, but they sold out to some megacorp and they turned it into GTA. The guy accepted a lowly job on the company, but she sues the boss for her dues and intellectual property rights.
She plays the game religiously to uncover proof for her lawsuit. With inside help for her pal (and clearly Cyrano), she finds the proof, but the boss goes nuts and persecutes whistleblowers, until he can’t control it anymore, and literally smashes the servers with an axe, to avoid losing face.
The boss is exposed as a fraud, his cash-grab sequel fails, while the new hotness is the original vision from the bedroom developers. The girl is pretty oblivious, but after being told by the AI to go touch grass, he finds true love on his long friendzoned business partner.
Taika Waititi is a pitch perfect modern asshole techbro, he is introduced coming from Burning Man. He’s either a very talented actor (debatable) or his character is pretty close to his personality.
This is no Sorry To Bother You, but there are cool messages: digital avatars go “on strike”, they have a “digital walkout”, and that leads them to paradise. Too bad “paradise” is a city just like it exists now, but with more expensive cars, more trees in the concrete jungle, and no jobs for anyone, just free ice cream. Baby steps.
Attaching a millionaire like Ryan Reynolds allows for a large budget for effects and stunts and Disney cameos, but blunts the message a bit, with the whole End of History themed ending.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.