Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Taika Waititi, Lil Rel Howery, Joe Keery, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Aaron W Reed
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios
Runtime: 115 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2021
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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More than 20 years ago, there was The Truman Show, a good man living in a television program. Now Free Guy, a good man programmed to live in a computer game. What is the role of the creators, the avatars? What if Guy became artificially intelligent? And made choices? Comic adventures, and some philosophy.
This reviewer is not a gamer (though seeing many films of games and gamers), so expectations of watching and enjoying were not particularly high. However, advertisements were around for a long time during lockdown, with Ryan Reynolds bemused face looking out at us, so there were some hopes for comedy.
Being of a generation where a tutorial on how computer games work is essential for appreciating the creativity of the minds behind them, and the imagination, I was not so caught up in the technology but in the emerging themes. Free Guy! Free City! Freedom? (After the final credits I glanced at the IMDb and began to scan the many bloggers to find how many mentioned themes of the quality of human life, human choice, freedoms – and found two (all the rest gleefully commenting on what a fun movie it is) and one of the commenters thought the screenplay was too preachy.
A word is in order to praise the technological ingenuity of bringing a computer game world to the screen – the characters, dialogue, behaviour, adventures and dangers, the inventiveness of the CGI. But, I am more prone to notice and investigate themes.
So, Guy turns out to be a technological breakthrough, a non-playable character (NPC) with artificial intelligence, on the edge of moving to decision-making. Guy puts on avatar sunglasses and sees aspects of the game he never dreamt of. And he sees Molotovgirl (Jodie Comer) and is attracted. She turns out to be part of Millie, one of the creators of the game, working with her friend, Keys.
So, we have something of an online romance, poor old Keys (young Keys, pining in the background for Millie) committed to developing Guy and letting him, as Jesus had said, have life and have it to the full. Obviously philosophical issues and, by implication, religious. People always complain that God should intervene in times of suffering. However, here is Free City, the inhabitants, no matter what, living a kind of happy fatefulness. And then the discovery of freedom, choice, free will – and most of them initially reluctant. There are moments of great joy as we follow Guy and Millie in discoveries from bubblegum ice cream to the implications of Guy’s first kiss. I especially enjoyed the appearance of Dude, Guy’s inner self, inner alter ego, big, tall, musclebound, and the moment when the laser sword appears in Guy’s hand, the Star Wars’ theme commences and, intimations of transcendence, The Force is with him.
But, if the games creators are the equivalent of God, there is also a devil-figure. He is CEO, Antwan Taika Waititi’s New Zealand accent always enjoyable. He is jealous of the creations as Lucifer had been. Profit is his goal. Any thwarting leads to destruction.
Antwan is too clever for himself: greed his downfall and self-deception. Millie and Keys realise that the games characters were computer incarnations of themselves and find love, Guy able to tell Molotovgirl that, despite her love, she could not live in his world. And he and Dude, along with Buddy his security guard close friend and the various characters in Free City, now have lives of their own.
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