It’s one of those movies you start watching out of boredom, because there’s nothing else good to see or do. You also do this because you are curious, expecting to be disappointed. And instead. And instead, Free Guy (in Italian, Hero for fun) is a great movie. If you are a nerd and you like video games and science fiction, of course.
The film, which was supposed to be released in American cinemas in July 2020, then postponed to the following December, then again to May 2021, then to last August, arrived in streaming on Disney Plus on September 29th. The main performer is actor Ryan Reynolds, who plays the lead role even though he is not the protagonist. He is an extra, an Npc (in Italian, Png), as in video games are called the non-player characters placed there to entertain the players in the flesh and enrich their world. The Png played by Reynolds is called Guy, he lives in an imaginary city, a vast environment in which you can do everything, but in which he always does the same things, like all NPCs: he wakes up, has breakfast, leaves the house, goes to the bar, go to work, go home, start over. And he is often beaten up by the players.
When you see him, when you see him being robbed, attacked, beaten for no reason, made fun of, you can’t help but think about when, more or less twenty years ago, you were wandering around Liberty City during a game a Grand Theft Auto III and with the car you went back and forth on the sidewalks to kill as many people as possible. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth for no reason other than to get chased by the police, start a spectacular shooting and have some fun. Before turning off the PlayStation and forgetting everything. Here, in Free Guy this happens, albeit on a larger scale and in multiplayer: there are players who connect to the game world, do what they like, take on missions or simply they enjoy tormenting Pngs, then they disconnect and go back to their world, the real world. Guy no: Guy stays there, trapped in his always the same routine. Until the day he wakes up.
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youtube: the trailer for Free Guy
The world of video games, today and 40 years ago
Here is the first merit of the film directed by Shawn Levy, which is capable of rekindling in today’s forties memories of things that seemed forgotten. But there is not only this, because Free Guy manages to touch the right chords even of a decidedly younger audience, that of the twenty-year-olds, who let’s hope Gta iii they have never seen it (and if they saw it, they would laugh at it), but who follow the matches online a Fortnite, Minecraft, Rainbow Six e Fifa, watching them live on YouTube and Twitch. And in fact in the film they often appear, playing themselves, youtubers and streamers like Jacksepticeye, Ninja, Pokimane, DanTDM and LazarBeam: they comment on what happens to Guy exactly as they do every day in the real world.
It’s not over: the film is beautiful, and worth watching, because it is able to convey quite faithfully the idea of what the life of a videogame programmer is like, squeezed between his desire to develop something original and unique and the requests of large publishers (the film’s one is called Soonami, and any reference to Konami is probably deliberate), who just want follow-up and follow-up and follow-up and spin-off of hit titles. There are numerous references to code writing difficulties, bugs, debugging, what happens when you put an untreated or badly maintained product on sale, God Mode, trolls, secret passages, ai Easter Egg and hidden areas, al role of artificial intelligence (which is what allows Guy to wake up) and the moral implications of the decision to turn it off and pull the plug.
Free Guy and the The Truman Show of modern times and somehow pushes the viewer (and video game player) to a small or large reflection on the role of extras in video games, on those who live to make others live better. It’s like somewhere in between Last Action Hero e Ready Player One (but better done), it’s a look thrown the other way, behind the scenes of our fun.
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The cameo of Captain America and Ralph
And when you think that nothing else can happen, that the film is already much better than you expected when you press play on the remote control, here is that in the finale it becomes even more beautiful: there is Guy who has to defend himself from a super muscular copy of himself, he chooses a weapon from the inventory, he is a round shield, he is framed from behind and while the camera turns to show you, you already know it will have a star in the center and the colors of the American flag. You already know it’s Captain America’s. What you don’t know, what you don’t expect and leaves you speechless and makes you laugh, is that the director has also included a cameo of Chris Evans (the cinematic Captain America) who is sitting in a bar and watching that on his smartphone. same fight in which his shield appears.
Then? And then the quotes from Half-Life e Portal, a weapon is extracted that has become an icon, shown for the first time in the cinema in 1977 and since then entered the collective imagination of everyone, male and female, young and old, in their twenties or forties, like practically no other product of the imagination managed to do. And when you hear it right after the unmistakable initials of Ralph supermaxieroe, understand that Free Guy managed to do what seemed impossible to do: find a point of contact between generations of nerds distant in time and who until now thought they had no point of contact, and somehow connect parents born in the seventies with children born after the two thousand.
Not bad, though a film you wouldn’t have given two lire. Two euros, on the contrary.
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