Look, I’m a Sam Rockwell mark, especially when they let him just run with it. Michael Pena (even though we lost him to scientology) he’s still one of the few Mexicans on the big screen, so I gotta support. Gore Verbinski? check. A title that’s a vague reference to online video games. Sign me up.
Its well made, looks good, craftsmanship wise all is good. But, this movie wants to do a little too much for 90 minutes.
The TLDR: 12 monkeys meets Groundhog day and they learn that they both hate AI and cell phones.
For a while it touches on “phone bad”, cool, ya. Then it goes into “AI bad” ok, still here. It goes a little into “clones bad” territory, but that just turns into a thing about being force fed ads.
Along that path, there’s just so much left up in the air, unsaid, or just unconnected to anything. After a couple flashbacks, the movie sets on its path to get something done and things happened, then it eventually stumbles across the finish line. There’s characters that show up to be creepy, but just end up with zero pay off, no cool back story, just dudes doing what they are told.
The movie kind of touches on the “good luck have fun” part as a sort of game show audience chant thing, but there’s never any sort of tie in. Then I thought, oh maybe there will be some gamer twist, but that too was unfulfilled.
I figured it out the movies twist too soon and blurted out what I thought was going on, and I ended up being right. Boo, I’m a big dummy, if I’m figuring your shit out early, get back to the drawing board.
I figured out years ago that social media is bad, and hey, maybe don’t live with your phone in your hand all the time right? But I can’t help but feel that the people who this movie ‘targets’, for a lack of a better term, are just going to get turned off by having the mirror pointed at them in such a way, if they even have enough media literacy to see it.
over all, meh. Watch it on a plane, and forget you watched it later that day.