It's funny you mention cyberpunk because I just finished watching Gamer and as a big cyberpunk fan, the subplot of Gamer is as cyberpunk as you can get. It even has the compulsory run down market street scene.
I can see why Gamer is a movie you either love or hate. I can see why some get hung on the aesthetics and visuals or a lack of plot or bad acting, perhaps because you focus far more on it being an action flick than a critical comment about where society is going.
Personally though, I think Gamer is smart. Much smarter than it looks like on the surface. The plot is simple to understand and easy to justify into an action flick. The characters are perhaps to a point made to be one-dimensional but I think there's actually a point to that too. The ending is riddled with ironies about free will versus fate/determinism.
What really makes it stand out to me though is the constant feeling of not knowing what is real or not. Gamer has a strange level of surrealism I haven't encountered in any film or TV series that pretends to be surrealistic. Somehow you know that in these stories it's not real, all of it is fiction.
With Gamer, the way the camera work and colors are created makes it feel very surreal, but it's to the point where I start questioning whether I am just being mislead, that I am supposed to think it's surreal when it's not and I'm in fact watching reality. Clever, very clever.
And honestly, some people might say, this kind of dystopian future is far off into the future and won't happen but I am not sure that's true. That the ending almost hinted at this was simply a game within a game of course makes it more interesting, because not only does it open up questions about corporate control, it opens up questions about who really is in control.
If Gamer is about the ability of consumer choice, the question is what we actually choose? There's actually a point being made about the "freedom of lack of choice", that the mind enters a state of paralysis when we have to choose between tooo many things and we still tend to pick what we are already familiar with.
Another kudos that I give to the direction is how faithful it is to the camera direction of first person shooters. I won't stop play games but of course, next time I do it, I'll probably ask myself a bit more closely what it means when I kill an NPC on my screen.
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eps_leon
10 years ago
I won't stop play games but of course, next time I do it, I'll probably ask myself a bit more closely what it means when I kill an NPC on my screen.
Really? It will simply mean the pixels that the pixels drawn will no longer be drawn in a sequence that presents animation and instead no longer be drawn or drawn in a way that depicts a dead body.
There is no deep meaning, no insight into our society and the future we're heading towards. It is simply a film where someone said "lets remake running man, but update it so it's relevant to the youths".
A bog standard copy-paste of an action flick. That's why it's full of plot holes (even in the tiniest amount of plot they strung together), the characters are all one dimensional and 90% of the film is fighting, boobs and blood.
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