My cat has urinary issues. Taking him to the vet, they sometimes need to run ultrasound tests on his abdomen to see if everything’s fine. Cats, being the free spirits that they are, don’t like being prodded and having their bellies felt up, but this has to be done. What, then, can you do about it? Well, the vet taught me an amazing technique, wherein you tap the cat’s head rapidly and lightly with your hand, just hard enough so that it bothers him and distracts him from what’s going on in the other part of his body, without outright hurting him. Thus, the poor feline, being perturbed by the constant tapping, lets the vet do their job, harm free.
I recently saw Free Guy in the cinema. I felt like a cat at the vet. Despite not making any sense and having an absurd amount of plot holes, I was able to enjoy the ride as it was slapping me across the face with supersonic pacing. It was, despite the upcoming rant, an entertaining movie. The action scenes were well directed and its plot was light suckingly dense.
This is a classic “turn your brain off” movie. Just sit down and enjoy the ride and try not to think too much about it. It kind of works, due to the aforementioned rapid fire head slapping. It works, that is, until you leave the cinema and your brain reboots, trying to piece together what you’ve just witnessed. It’s met by an instant, overwhelming lack of logic.
FULL SPOILERS AHEAD!
The story, as best (and briefly, this movie has so many redundant plot points) as I can summarise, is as follows (skip this section if you know the story and don’t want to see it again):
Two indie game programmers, Mills and Keys, made an indie game that was about watching an in-game AI evolve and grow in some idyllic fantasy setting where everything is perfect and made of rainbows. Their game gets acquired (I think) by a big, Activision-esque games company, headed by an eccentric, extremely unfunny and irritating CEO named Antwan. Keys starts working there as a sort of GM (think world of warcraft admin), while Mills correctly believes they were betrayed by Antwan and doesn’t follow her former partner.
Antwan’s company takes the original Rainbow Game and (illegally (for some reason — wasn’t the game acquired?)) use it to make their own GTA online style game called Free City.
In this game, the NPCs are built using the AI for the original Rainbow Game. They act out various roles, including police officers, baristas, bank tellers, and exist to play the role of quest providers, as well as dummies to be abused by players.
Players (or, sunglasses people) in this game can actually “play the game” and not simply exist in the game world as the NPCs do. They can use power ups, heal themselves, earn vast amounts of money, and so on. They are seen as a higher class by the NPCs, and are to be left untouched, like gods.
Guy is an NPC in this world. He’s a happy-go-lucky bank teller in this hell city where murder rates are through the roof. His bank gets robbed multiple times a day, and he plays along with it, same as all the other NPCs, getting robbed is just his daily routine. He seems to understand that this is wrong, and he doesn’t enjoy getting robbed, but it just seems like this is reality to him. Guy longs for a romantic relationship with a woman, and he’s got a specific woman in mind — she likes Mariah Carrey songs. So, when he meets Mills, who’s playing the game and humming some Mariah Carrey tune, he falls in love with her, which causes him to break free from his daily programming.
Mills is playing the game in order to try and find video footage of a method to access a secret level that exists in the game. This secret level will help prove that Antwan stole their game’s code (which was, for some reason, illegally acquired). The video is the only footage of that method of access and it is stored in-game in some player’s well guarded mansion. She’s also suing Antwan for copyright infringement, but apparently America in the movie’s world isn’t a place where your right to intellectual property comes second only to your right to own guns. Mills is trying to convince her former colleague Keys that he should help her with this goal, but he’s too much of a loser to do anything about it.
As Guy breaks free from his programming, he gets a pair of sunglasses from a player, and as a result, experiences a They Live moment where the true world reveals itself to him. He meets Mills, who doesn’t realise he’s not a player, and mocks him for only being level 1. Determined, Guy wants to reach level 100, by being a law keeping player and preventing crimes.
In the meantime, it’s revealed that Antwan wants to shut down Free City and destroy its code in order to make a sequel, Free City 2, which will be far worse and not use the original, stolen AI code. Why he wants to do this is anyone’s guess but the movie tries very hard to play this off as some commentary on the games industry. This poses an imminent threat to Guy’s existence as a sentient AI in Free City. This shut down is going to happen in 48 hours, adding a pointless, arbitrary ticking clock element to the story.
Guy ends up becoming a viral sensation, due to his pacifistic way of playing the game, and he makes a mark on the gaming world. This is shown through an extremely cringy sequence where a bunch of real world streamers react to Guy’s ability to prevent crime, rather than commit it. Antwan originally likes this as it gives the game more popularity, but then changes his mind when he realises that too many people are now watching twitch streamers react to Guy, rather than play the game, which is probably the most idiotic thing I’ve heard in a long time.
Guy and Mills end up falling in love, as Guy kisses her. She is then taken aback at the fact that someone kissed her in this game where kissing is impossible. She is then disturbed by a knock at the door in the real world, to be met by Keys, who notifies her she just fell in love with an AI, much to her dismay (for the next 2 minutes), and that Antwan is going to shut down the game soon.
Mills meets Guy, letting him know that he’s a fake person and begging his assistance at preventing the shut down of Free City. This leads to Guy suffering from 2 minutes of an existential crisis followed by a newfound determination to stop Antwan from shutting down the game. How do they intend on doing this? By showing the world that Antwan stole the code for the original Rainbow Game (how will that stop the shut down?). Guy retrieves the footage that Mills was trying to get, and, showing it to Mills, realises he knows how to get to the secret level.
Antwan, hell-bent on killing off Guy, reboots the game’s server right before Guy can tell Mills about the secret level. This will reset Guy’s AI and revert him to his original state, before he broke out of his programming. He, of course, manages to stop Guy from telling his secret. Antwan knows that Guy is a fully sentient AI, but despite knowing about this absolutely monumental discovery, he decides that it’s more important to get some people to play his game.
Mills finds Guy, reverted to his happy go lucky original personality, and tries to get him to regain sentience. She is distraught that she can’t do this but eventually figures that the best way to get him to come back is to kiss him (bearing in mind, of course, that the movie went well out of its way to say that kissing is impossible in this game). He then regains his memories, and lets her know that the original Rainbow Game is fully present in Free City, and can be seen in the game’s reflections (how nobody noticed this up until this moment is anyone’s guess).
And so, with the help of Keys, Mills and Guy set out to cross the ocean, where somehow the original build of Rainbow Game is located. Antwan is furious at the fact that Guy is still alive (not that he’s about to be revealed as a felon) decides to take the axe on the game’s servers, LITERALLY and smashes them apart one by one. Guy manages to reach the secret island (located in the middle of the sea, which SOMEHOW gets revealed to the world at large when he reaches it). The island contains a fully functional build of the Rainbow Game and shows it to the world, somehow stopping Antwan in the nick of time. Mills then negotiates with Antwan, demanding that he give her the code back for the Rainbow Game, in return for her leaving him alone.
The movie ends with the newly made Rainbow Game being very popular, Free City 2 failing, Guy telling Mills that he is actually an AI made by Keys to fall in love with her specifically, a realisation that makes her fall in love with Keys instantly and ending the movie in the most predictable, boring way possible. Guy, gets to live a happy and free life in the Rainbow World, which is nice, I guess.
SUMMARY OVER!
First of all, I’d like to apologise for this absolute cliff of text that I just dumped on the page.
Second, I’d like to point out just how many plot points there are in this movie. It’s designed to have so many things happen (and this is with my heavy exclusion of some of the less important plot points), to distract you.
Third, I’d like to point out just how many of these points are completely redundant. There are multiple mini crisis scenes in this movie, even more that I didn’t mention, that serve no point other than to deliver a short lived, fake emotional moment, that the viewer moves on from within a few minutes.
Fourth, the movie is just full of huge plot holes, and I just need to get this out of my system.
First and foremost — the ticking clock element completely breaks my suspension of disbelief. If Antwan can shut down the game in 48 hours, and he wants to stop Guy from succeeding, why not just do it right now? What’s the difference between two days from now, and now?
Why does Antwan not understand the insane value of a sentient AI? He stole the AI code for his game so he surely understands it to a degree, why does he act like a petulant child when it’s convenient for the story?
Why did Keys, when designing AI for his game, design it in such a way that the AI can break free of its programming, but also deliberately prevent it from doing so by making that act unattainable?
Why is it that the admins of Free City can’t ban Mills? Is their game that poorly made?
Why is it that the developers of Free City are so lazy that they couldn’t remove the Rainbow Game from their own? There is no way in a billion years that anything like this can happen in the real world.
How is it that nobody who’s played this game ever looked at reflections in the window? Is this movie just meant to be commentary on gamers being idiots? Maybe it’s the directors being idiots and not realising that gamers, especially PC gamers, obsess over stupid things like reflections. RTX, the latest buzzword technology, is popular because it creates realistic, pretty reflections!
How is it that the Rainbow Game Island got revealed the instant Guy got to it? What happened there?
Why does Rainbow Island existing matter to anyone in the world? Why does Antwan just stop destroying the servers when that’s revealed? How does the island existing prove the original build is there, and again, didn’t Antwan acquire the game anyway? Why does that matter?
Why was Mills not creeped the fuck out by Keys designing an AI character that’s meant to fall in love with her as a stand-in for himself? Why is her reaction one of mutual adoration and not disgust by this weirdo, obsessive creep who was crushing on her for years while they were working on a game together, to the point of making characters in the game want to bang her?
How is it that nobody in the history of the world played the game in a pacifist manner until Guy? Are gamers really that stupid?
Why is it that footage of the Rainbow Game Island only exists in a single place in the entire game? How is it that that mansion is guarded by a ton of infinitely respawning NPCs? Are the devs aware that the damning footage that could cost them their company exists in this game? If so, why not just delete the footage?
If players aren’t allowed to kill other players, and NPCs aren’t allowed to kill players, what are you meant to do in this game? Just rob a bank without any challenge or threat? That doesn’t sound very fun.
Why are the GMs of this game so worthless? You’d think that a GM can just spawn in a nuke and blow up the entire city if he wanted to. Why is it that when they try to stop Guy and Mills from reaching the Rainbow Game Island, they try to make the streets crush them when they could have just removed the ground and make them fall out of the game world?
Why can players lose their sunglasses, and what do they do without them? Are they just powerless and helpless? That doesn’t sound very fun.
Why is it that Mills can save her online game? If you can save your game and return to it, that implies it’s single player. If it is, why are there other players there? Why is there a single Guy that interacts with all these players. If it’s not, why can she save her game and have multiple save files? Is there a different Guy in every save file?
Why does the irrelevant Indian sidekick seem to not care about Keys at all, to the point of even siding with Antwan to screw him over, only to change his mind at the last moment and say he’s his friend? This isn’t how friends treat each other.
Why does the mere mention of a Cappuccino cause the barista AI to break out of her programming. Is the implication that nobody’s ever tried to order anything from her, ever? Or is it that only NPCs can order coffee in this game, seems like a pretty big waste of time to write in all these characters if the players can’t interact with them.
Why does resetting the server cause Guy to revert, but also not revert at the same time? Why can both of these things happen?
Why the FUCK can Mills kiss Guy after the movie made it explicitly clear that you can’t kiss people in this game as a player?
Why is Antwan so desperate to release an unfinished “sequel” to the original Free City, if Free City is still extremely popular and making the company a lot of money? Why rush the game, if he’s still got the most popular game ever on his hands? In the real world, the exact opposite happens. Rockstar haven’t released another GTA since GTA 5, which was released in 2013.
What frustrates me about this movie, is that it touches on many interesting, thought provoking ideas, but only slightly and with great fear. This movie is about:
The struggles of an indie developer in the games industry
Falling in love with an AI
What it means to be human
Simulation theory
The immorality of large corporations and the apathy of the average consumer
Life in a routine and breaking out of the routine
Each one of these is a great topic and deserves its own movie, and each one of these could have been the focal point of this movie’s plot, but instead of focusing on one or two themes, the movie decided to touch on all of them, thus focusing on none of them.
This approach is best seen when Guy learns that he lives in a game, and that he’s an NPC. His initial reaction is understandably one of shock and confusion, rejecting his world. The next scene, however, he visits his best friend, and asks him what he’d do if he learned that he was fake. His friend says “lol dont worry about it bro” and Guy is immediately convinced to continue moving the plot forward. A good movie would not have passed on the opportunity to dwell on this topic more. This is even more true with the movie’s ending, one where Guy and all his NPC friends are in the Rainbow Island Game, living some miraculously free life. Guy, despite being fully aware of the complete futility of his existence, his artificiality, doesn’t mind. He’s happy and free, despite being caged, at the whims of an electrical current that could cut get off at any moment and end his pathetic existence.
What’s worse, the movie also contradicts itself on its stance on the humanity of an AI. The movie treats Guy as a human, he’s acted by a real human for most of its runtime, despite the game’s graphics actually looking like Mafia City. He has genuine, honest, realistic reactions to situations. He falls in love, he has desires, ambitions and goals. Yet, when it’s convenient, he’s downgraded to being a bunch of 0s and 1s. His importance instantly drops in favour of the importance of real humans. Mills, despite being obviously infatuated with Guy, drops him for the real human Keys, a person that she didn’t give a shit about romantically until that instant. Guy is more human than most of the human cast, and he deserved to be treated with humanity.
I spent a lot of time after watching this movie, trying to think of how I would fix it, while keeping it entertaining and changing as little as possible. It’s a fun thought experiment, and I think if I had to summarise it, I would do my best to increase the movie’s focus.
To start off, I’d remove Keys’ character from the movie completely. No more stupid, contrived romance story. I’d also remove the original Rainbow Game. Guy exists in Free City, which was developed by Antwan’s company, and he’s an NPC that gained sentience through a freak accident. No more ticking clock element that makes no sense, and no more flimsy motivation.
I’d remove the very notion of the game’s deletion. Antwan isn’t an idiot, he wouldn’t want to delete a successful, extremely popular game, and he would especially not want to kill off a sentient AI. Instead, the threat is not Guy’s death, but enslavement. Antwan discovers that Guy is sentient, and so he wants to duplicate him and use him as a bot in all his future games. Guy, and his clones will be destined to an eternity of servitude as unwilling opponents in the company’s future games. They’ll be football players, soldiers, guides, guards. They’d even be used as waifus, forced to fall in love with people desperate for romance.
Guy’s AI is extremely complex, and it’s difficult to extract it completely while he’s moving around in the game, and so, Antwan seeks to track him down and trap him. He also wants to keep the game up and running, because shutting down the game would kill Guy, who is his golden goose. Guy, in turn, wishes to find a way to exit the game into the internet, which is only possible by causing the game to glitch out by performing a series of random, strange actions, much in the way that people can cause Mario games to completely glitch out.
Mills falls in love with Guy, same as before, but she wants to help him escape. She still looks for footage of the glitches in the game, which they end up finding, and it requires that they perform a sort of scavenger hunt, locating random, strange items in the game world that they will use to eventually glitch the game out, causing Guy to break into the internet, out of the game’s servers and free from the influence of Antwan.
Mills is happy that Guy is free, but believes he’s gone. He eventually manages to track her, in the real world, maybe even showing his face in the screens of Times Square. He pronounces his love to her, and telling her to find him in Free City, much to her surprise and horror, she logs in, expecting to find an enslaved guy, only to realise that Guy is in the game, except as a regular player now. Free to interact as much as they please, they vow to make a new game, like Free City, but truly free, where they can truly enjoy each other’s company.
The movie ends with the couple enjoying a sunset in the same beautiful location as the Rainbow Game, with many other sentient NPCs running along with them.
Despite this rant, and how it may seem, I did enjoy this movie, like I said. The issues that I have with the movie is how much better it could have been. Just a bit more focus, a touch more fine tuning, and more aversion from cliche and the movie could have been entertaining, as well as making sense and being satisfying to watch.
