Gamer

For the second movie of our Saturday night double feature, Greg and I headed over to the Malco Paradiso on the eastern edge of Memphis by the freeway. The Paradiso is probably the premiere multiplex in the city. The parking lot was crammed.

The interior lobby was a two-story adaptation of a Mexican hacienda. It reminded me of Casa Bonita in Denver in its heyday.

I didn't have much hope for the Gamer, the movie we were seeing. I hadn't even seen a trailer, but the theme: about controlling people inside a live-action shooter game set in the near future, seemed ripe for absurdity on screen.

The first couple lines of dialogue in the movie seemed to verify my suspicions. They were crammed with disgusting obscenities yelled at a fast pace. This was going to be a very crude movie, I thought to myself.

But it turns out I had misjudged it. The obscenities of the first few lines were not throwaways, but mostly just to set the tone for the future sci-fi world.

In fact, after about ten minutes I really began to like this movie. By the end, I was totally hooked. For sci-fi, it seemed to have original concept, based on a mutation of trends from such movies as Running Man, Freejack, Barbarella and Logan's Run, among others. This kind of derivative borrowing didn't bother me, because it felt like a fresh spin on these themes, updated for the latest develoments of technology in our society.

The story worked very well as narrative, leading up to the appropriate climax between the good guy and the bad guy. The correct good characters were "sacrificed." The resolution worked just as one would need it to. There was a tiny little Blade Runner (original version) epilogue that I probably didn't need, but that's a very minor complaint, given how well the rest of the story worked.

I couldn't help think that not only was this one of my secret favorites of the year so far, but that this was one of those movies that would come and go fairly quietly from the theaters, but which would in future years remain a closet cult favorite, referenced in blog posts ten years from now as various now-outrageous aspects of it come "true."

"Wow, that's just like in the movie Gamer," people will be saying ten years from now.

But unfortunately it won't be a good thing, when they say this. But that's how things have been going lately.