Gamer

I just posted the review for Law Abiding Citizen http://mrfilmreviewer.blogspot.com/2012/07/law-abiding-citizen.html and I decided to go on and write about Gamer cause I saw the two movies at the same time some time ago.

Gamer was a 2009 sci-fi action movie starring Gerard Butler. It was directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. The screenplay was written by both Neveldine and Taylor as well. I assume they really worked on the project together from the start. Also part of the cast were Michael C. Hall, Amber Valleta, Logan Lerman, Terry Crews, Chris Bridges, John Leguizamo and Kyra Sedgwick. Not the most popular cast but a pretty good one, I thought. Unfortunately they failed to impress the critics, and also wasn't able to earn back their budget. It only earned a little over 40 million against a budget of 50 million.

It's about a man, Kable, a prisoner in the death row, who participates in an online game as a character being controlled by another person, a 17 year old named Simon. The idea was to use real people to be the characters in the game "Slayers". This was done by genetically altering the motor abilities of the prisoners and programming it to a point that they lost control over their own bodies. The main concept of the game is to win until you reach a certain number wherein the prisoner would be set free. Kable was one win away but that one win would drive the story forward to a much bigger battle.

To put it in a more popular context, it was like The Hunger Games except this one's more focused on the game. Also, in this one, someone controls the players. However, everything else seemed identical. Both movies featured involuntary participation in a game of death (and no, Katniss shouting "I volunteer as tribute" would not count as voluntary under the circumstances she was in). It featured people who had to kill in order to achieve freedom, while people in a remote location control their fates by being in control of the game.

If you watched it in a movie house, you probably thought you should have just waited the DVD and rented it instead of shelling out a few bucks to pay for the ticket. In other words, some of you might have regretted going to the cinema for this movie. If you, waited for the DVD and paid a much less amount to see the same movie, you probably found the movie decent, and quite enjoyable. These are just two assumptions based on the reaction of the people. Actually, a lot of people didn't enjoy this movie, and critics gave it negative feedback.

As for me, a person who waited for the DVD, I found it quite enjoyable. I liked the idea behind it. I thought the concept alone was already a good starting point. However, the development of that idea faltered a little bit. The movie had a lot of rough edges and I thought the editing team of the movie could have done a much better job at polishing it. But at the sae time, I was pleased by it mostly because of the action part, and well the conceptualization. I think Neveldine and Taylor had an amazing idea, but somewhere it didn't quite make it. Having said that, I still enjoyed the movie. It still had that intensity the movie required, and still delivered an action-packed sci-fi flick.

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