Game is not over

“9” and “Gamer”: it seems that a new film genre is emerging - an imitation of a computer game

Some young gamer recently wrote on his blog: “If only they made a movie based on Stalker, that would be a movie!” “Stalker” for him is not a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on the story by the Strugatsky brothers, but a computer game in which gloomy men go to the Zone, and sometimes sit by the fire and play guitars. What a movie that would be!

Once upon a time, on the contrary, computer games were made based on films. For example, there was such a game - “Die Hard 2”. There, a brutal gray hero moved unconvincingly through a grayish airport, periodically shooting at bad people. Also, it seems, gray. Both heroes and villains then looked like a “pixel-pixel-cucumber made of two pixels,” but that didn’t matter - the drive redeemed everything. Many people learned about the existence of Monty Python from the hilariously funny toy “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” where you had to cut off all parts of the Black Knight’s body, but he continued to jump menacingly without arms and legs.

Then the pixels matured, the computer mind learned to philosophize, and directors began making films based on computer games - from Poul Anderson’s legendary “Mortal Kombat” to Hironobu Sakaguchi’s “Final Fantasy.” The Japanese film pretended to be a live-action film, but in fact it was completely digital. After its release, many predicted the imminent end of cinema, the abolition of actors and the complete triumph of computer graphics. The film failed at the American box office, but nevertheless became a new stage in the computerization of cinema. Today they no longer make films based on games or games based on films, but simply make a film as a computer game.

The cartoon “9,” which will be released on September 9, 2009, originated from the short film of the same name by the young director Shane Ecker, nominated for an Oscar three years ago. The short film in the style of stitchpunk (a post-apocalypse sewn on a living thread) was both hopeless and tender, in which a rag doll with eyes like camera shutters fought in ruins with a mechanical monster - a soul eater. Tim Burton liked the cartoon, and Shane Ecker began working on a feature-length version. In it, the main character, Nine, and all the other dolls received a backstory. Humanity, as it turned out, died because it trusted the machines too much, and they rebelled and killed all living things. There are only dolls left that do what the creator intended in them: someone rules, someone reads books, someone patches up the rest of the dolls, and someone saves the world. Having woken up in God knows where, the Ninth must, if possible, find the other eight and understand what is required of him and who created him. This is a normal post-apocalyptic quest with fights and simple tasks, except that the heroes themselves, sewn from sackcloth, look unbearably touching.

Last year’s cute children’s fairy tale “The City of Amber” by Gil Keenan was also a quest, in which the teenage heroes had to find the right doors and be able to open them. Many of today's films are built on the principle of all sorts of action-shooter games. And the recent “Death Race” by Poul Anderson with Jason Statham was a typical simulator crossed with a shooter: the hero had to drive fast and shoot, nothing else was required of him.

It seems that a new film genre is gradually emerging - an imitation of a computer game. The line between film and gaming is already blurred. By and large, any movie is structured like a quest, shooter or role-playing game. And life works exactly the same way. The difference is that the world of a movie game is completely explicable, and if something in it cannot be explained, then it is not important for the development of the plot.

If living people get inside a mechanical, stupid world controlled by four keys (right-left-pray-eat), then a brilliant movie can turn out. For example, the classic metaphor of existential horror “Cube” by Vincenzo Natali or “Avalon” by Mamoru Oshii, where a computer toy turns inside out. Or “Run Lola Run” by Tom Tykwer, in which the heroine can run through the same part of her life over and over again, not paying attention to failures, until she succeeds the way she would like. Tykver, as in a role-playing game, added experience and endurance to his character, while not forgetting for a second that Lola is a living person.

Today's games have more philosophy and deep characters than any Fast and Furious movie could handle. But all the same, the movie game can be immediately recognized: firstly, there is not enough keyboard at hand while watching, and secondly, what we are shown is more often described by the word “project” rather than “cinema”. “9” is just that case.

Burton's influence is obvious here - the phantasmagoric clanking monsters came, if not from his "Nightmare on Christmas Eve", then from some similar terrible dreams. The film's second producer, Timur Bekmambetov, quickly invited fashion writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, author of the underground post-apocalypse Metro 2033, to translate the film into Russian. Bekmambetov also came up with the idea of ​​holding an all-Russian day of giving up mobile phones in connection with the premiere - so that the machines do not completely subjugate us. The project turned out well, but the movie wasn’t very good.

Bekmambetov is a master of imitating worlds. True, in his best projects these worlds are filled with life, or at least something like it. There is life in “9” thanks to Shane Ecker’s imagination, but it is very uncertain. It's more like a set of amazing, magical backgrounds for a computer game, and to go with them is a bunch of the cutest characters. Nothing was explained in the short source film; all that was important was the hero’s battle with the Soul Catcher. In the current “Nine” everything is explained, and with social overtones, and even two or three times. Because a project can only be made from something simple and understandable.

But there is also a fantastic episode in “9”, in which the film for a moment ceases to be a quest and becomes a real movie: the rag men start the gramophone and listen to the old song from “The Wizard of Oz” - Over the Rainbow. And Judy Garland's voice fills the entire lost world, and we are no longer in Kansas. And then the heroes again run right, left, jump and fall.

Another recent film, "Gamer" by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, describes a wildly popular reality TV show in the near future. This is a game in which, instead of computer characters, real people fight - prisoners of the death chamber. And they are controlled by players, gamers, using the latest nanotechnology. If your character dies, game over turns into real death for the prisoner you played as. And only the character who can persuade his gamer to give him more freedom can win.

Ruthless action with philosophical overtones. Every person feels that someone is controlling them, whatever you call this force - fate, boss at work, government, wife, director of your film. By exposing and bringing to a logical dead end the very principle of a role-playing game, “Gamer” is valuable precisely because it deliberately looks like a movie game.

Perhaps we are witnessing the approval of a new film genre. Right-left-pray-eat. A set of secret keys enables god mode. Game is still not over.