Movie: "Gamer"

At last, a movie about us geeks. 'Gamer' is a movie about Kable (Gerard Butler), a death-row prisoner who takes part in an online multiplayer FPS deathmatch game known as "Slayers", where he is consciously mind controlled by an actual 17-year-old gamer Simon (Logan Lerman). Any death-row inmate who participates will be freed after 30 consecutive victories. The movie starts where Kable and Simon had already gone through 27 victories.


The basic setting is this: A technical and eccentric genius, Ken Castle, developed a sophisticated mind control technology and used it to create a game named "Society". It is like The Sims, only that a player mind controls a willing victim to do...er...stuff that they would like to do. You can either be paid to get controlled (for desperate people) or pay to control (desperate people, though in a completely different sense). It took the world by storm and Ken Storm became an instant billionaire surpassing even Bill Gates.

Then after some time, he created the FPS "Slayer", which revolves around the same mind control concept, only that it is catered to violence and its participants are death-row inmates, reassuring that even if the prisoners die, it wouldn't matter anyway since they are on a death sentence.

And the rest is history, I shan't spoil the show for you.

The special effects are rather sweet, especially when they replicated the FPS-like UI and the modern-day FPS third person camera (the Gears of War type). They also abused the static screen effects a lot to create an effect that there is lag/ping/loading/etc.

'Gamer' is what you might expect if Nintendo reached their ultimate goal (creating a completely immersive game aka The Matrix jack-in concept) and suddenly turned evil with mind control technology. You can try to imagine Miyamoto as Ken Castle, but Castle ain't japanese and too smooth so it's actually quite hard to think about it.

This movie has quite a few geek references that normies might not understand when they watch it. Terms like 'fag' or 'ghey' that are somewhat overused might not click in with normal audiences.

But for me, I had fun watching :)


Trailer: