Ripten Movie Review: Gamer
Gamer unseats The Happening as the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It’s a disgusting, abrasive movie made by someone who doesn’t understand or appreciate games and can only see the negative in the youth and culture that surround them.
Most gamers weren’t interested in seeing Gamer. It’s because Gamer’s premise doesn’t appeal to gamers to begin with. In the future teenagers won’t be playing Halo 3, they’ll be playing Slayers, a multiplayer shooter where they control real people, death row convicts (because there’s always so many hanging around) via engineered cells injected into their brains. So in short, it’s a movie about a kid playing a soldier. What the producers trying to cash in on the gaming craze didn’t realize is that when gamers play games, we are the kid playing the soldier, and Gamer is a movie where we sit and watch a kid play a soldier. The film reduces gamers to passively experience what they already interactively enjoy. Why watch Gamer when you could just play a game? Watching Gamer is like having an older brother who wont pass the controller for an hour and a half.
The action in Gamer is supposed to feel like video game action, with all the supposed earmarks of the medium like flashing lights, quick camera movement and big explosions. The accumulative effect is jarring and hard to watch. It feels more like what someone might see if they’re not used to playing games and can’t understand the pacing and the context of the action that’s happening on screen. It would look frenetic to them, almost incomprehensible.
The attempt at video game action reminded me of the awkwardness produced when Ang Lee tried to nail why comics are appealing in Hulk by using a split screen camera technique to mimic comic book panels. Didn’t Lee understand that progressing through the panels of a comic produces the same effect as simple film editing? Two uneducated attempts to appeal to audiences who love mediums they don’t understand. Their efforts to make comic book movies “comic booky” or video game movies “video gamey” just become trivializations of the mediums themselves. I’ve never purchased a comic for its panels and I wouldn’t be a gamer if the action in video games was as painful to watch as the action in Gamer.
Most prevalent and intolerable of all, Gamer hates gamers. The movie is strewn with negative, loathsome amoral gamer stereotypes. They’re stomach turning, profane bastards wallowing in a movie obsessed with putridity. The youth is demonized ; new media is demonized. Are there any humans in this movie? None of the characters deaths have any emotional weight and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a movie so devoid of a sense of place. This is not how a feel when I play games, this is not how I feel when I talk with gamers. Much like its protagonist in his proudest moment, Gamer is a loud, wandering, barfing mess that marginalizes the audience it’s supposed to appeal to.
