Starring Ryan Reynolds and Judy Comer, "Runaway Player" has been in the spotlight since its release.
Not only has it won the North American box office for two consecutive weeks, bringing dawn to the North American market under the epidemic, but also filling the gap in the introduction of films in the mainland.
It has added a little life to the hugely shrunken summer slot.
As an original film that is "neither IP nor sequel",
The reason why "Out of Control Player" can break through is not only its visual effects and imagination, but also its approachable creative attitude.
1 NPC becomes a big hero
The story told by "Out of Control Player" seems very simple and can be summarized as: the counterattack of a human flesh background board.
The male protagonist is an NPC (non-player character) in the game "Liberty City".
NPCs have no personal will, and their only role is to create a sense of realism for the player and make the player have fun.
After meeting the heroine Millie, Guy unexpectedly awakens and helps Millie fight against the owner of the game company, Antoine, in search of Neverland, which belongs to the NPC.
The director borrowed Joseph Campbell's "Journey - Enlightenment - Test - Return" narrative method of "Hero with a Thousand Faces", and showed the growth of Gai's character in an intuitive way of "game monster upgrading".
Through Gai's growth path, we can see a lot of familiar film and television elements.
For example, Cover wears glasses to see the "real world", which can be reminiscent of John Carpenter's "Extreme Space"; Cover is trapped on the same day, repeating everything day after day, which can be reminiscent of "Groundhog Day"; Cover's awakening of love and the setting of fighting for the right to live can be reminiscent of "Truman's World" or "Westworld"...
All of this gives the film a hodgepodge of texture. At the story level, it has almost no original settings, and many settings will give the audience a familiar look.
But its attitude towards the virtual world and the general audience is very sincere.
In the past, most science fiction movies were hostile to the virtual world, feeling that it was illusory, dangerous, and elusive, and once indulged in it, it would bring serious consequences. Many films, including "Extreme Space", "Soul Shifting City", and "The Matrix", have adhered to this creative attitude.
However, "Out of Control Player" lowers its posture and deals with it with a gentler attitude, telling the audience that the virtual world can also be another kind of reality, and npCs living in it can also have their own sense of truth.
In the process of counterattack, Gai has always adhered to the value of "even if the world is chaotic, I will be a good person".
He will take care of the goldfish seriously, will taste the beauty of a cup of coffee, will be eager to help others, will treat friends sincerely, will treat lovers affectionately... These feelings of truth have greatly enriched the character level of this character, making him look not only the NPCs in the game, but more like ordinary people living around us.
2 Little strikes hard
Ryan Reynolds once said in an interview that "Runaway Player" is the freest and coolest movie he has ever made besides Deadpool. Because this time, he not only worked as a producer, but also started his own team.
Director Sean Levy is his helper through his good friend Hugh Jackman. Sean has directed the Museum Fantastic Nights series and the Stranger Things series. The works he creates often have an optimistic and positive creative style, no matter how desperate and heartbreak the protagonist in front of the camera experiences, in the end it will lead to goodwill, unity and hope.
This time, directing "Out of Control Player", Sean once again injected such "positive energy" into the work: in order to save "Liberty City", the NPCs in the game and the programmers in reality made positive resistance, exposing the villain's conspiracy while preserving the existence of "Liberty City".
At the same time, after all the dust settled, the director borrowed the mouth of the cover, handed out the virtual world to stimulate, and do not forget the admonition to establish a connection with the real world, "I am just a digital love letter sent to you, and the person who wrote this letter is in your world." ”
However, what attracted the audience the most about the film was Ryan Reynolds's success in the role of Guy.
Like Deadpool, Guy is also a very typical "mouth hi" type character, who will often hang funny lines on his lips and will also use exaggerated actions to enrich the expression. Ryan gave the character a strong sense of humor, but not the cynicism of Little.
Many of the laughs in the film come from the information gap between the player and the NPC and the self-deconstruction of the character
For example, the heroine Millie and Guy's feelings heated up, hoping to develop towards Ben, she thought that Guy was a real player, so she seriously introduced herself: "My real name is Millie, and I am a programmer. ”
As a result, Guy could only respond foolishly: "My name is Guy, my real name... Also called Cover, a bank clerk. ”
They are unknown in the game, so only you and I from The perspective of God know how funny the verbal misunderstanding caused by this information gap seems.
In order to stop Guy from finding the truth, the villain designs a muscle man named Dude (Dude) for Guy to stop him. Dude uses Cover's appearance, but behaves much more clumsily, with a distinctly self-spoof.
Although this muscular man shares a face with Guy, they symbolize two extremes – Dude is absolute control, and Guy is absolutely awakened.
When the two get together, they will not only contribute a variety of self-deconstructing contrasting laugh points, but also lead to different reflections on the "double-edged sword" of AI: Can we firmly control the AI characters in our hands? Does the awakening of AI always pose a threat, and is there any benefit at all?
3 "Left-right wrestling" awkwardness
However, to be fair, Runaway Player itself is not perfect, and there are still many obvious shortcomings.
Among them, the most intolerable thing is its "left-right fighting" logic loophole.
The starting point of this film is to let Cover escape from the miserable life of a tool man and obtain a sense of "rebirth" through consciousness awakening.
Through Gai's daily life, the director consciously or unconsciously reflects us in real life-
The same step-by-step, the same nine-to-five, every day is wearing a suit, eating breakfast, drinking coffee, working for capitalists...
This kind of reflection makes us wonder if we are also in some kind of anxiety out of control. Are we also acting as background boards in a world designed by others?
And "Out of Control Player" starts from this, bringing out a very cheesy story core, telling the audience that "small people can also have big achievements.".
But near the end of the movie, the creator punched himself in the face - the free will that Cover was hard to obtain, and the backhand was deprived.
The reason why Guy woke up to Millie at first sight is because the real programmer wrote his love for Millie on Cover's body, so that he invisibly has a "wake-up setting". Therefore, after some operation, the cover for Millie to go to the soup is just an "electronic love letter", which only has a sense of existence that is not worth mentioning.
In the first half of the film, the screenwriters imitated "The Matrix" to give the game a powerful alarm system, which will prompt once the NPC deviates from the track.
For example, Guy wants to order a cappuccino in a frequented café, but the waiter is unknown, so because she does not include a cappuccino production method in her code, the alarm goes off and the other NPCs are hostile to the cover.
This means that a small bug can cause the game to cause an exception and trigger an alarm. However, in order to show Cover, the later screenwriter gave him a green light, let him counterattack all the way, organized all THE NPC strikes, and launched a protest.
This inconsistent plot setting obviously has obvious logical hard wounds.
It can be seen that like many popcorn movies, "Out of Control Player" also wraps beautiful lies with a cool appearance, seemingly full of subversion, so that the NPC who is not valued is liberated, but in fact, they are still trapped in a cage, let them live for programmers, and become a light and fluttering love letter.