I love it when a movie makes me want to read a book. I’m a big book person.

As a disclaimer, I haven’t read the book but if the source material gave me this movie I think I’d enjoy it. I like the vision of the future world. Where things aren’t that different but we keep building up. It’s not the gloomiest future world, just grimy enough to explain why everyone would need an escape.

What I don’t get is the combination of real and digital world. Like the treadmill. If it’s entirely digital what is the point of doing things in the real world to interact? And where is that line drawn? Or is it less that some real world stuff is needed for the digital world and more that the real world engagement actually increases the digital world efficiency? Or was it just because it looked cool?

The romance was cute and not really anywhere as creepy as it could have been. And it didn’t overshadow the rest of the plot. The best thing about a computer generated female is that she can be pretty and strong without sacrificing. The worst thing about a computer generated female is that we knew from moment one that her hard personality and her too cool vibe and her not wanting to show her real face because of trauma that she was there to be the romantic opposite of the vanilla male. Good thing vanilla male helped her work on a team and save the world and discover self-love and yeah.

Come watch vanilla male and much more interesting woman plus a hodgepodge of minority supporting characters save the world by being good at video games. Now, that male sound amazingly negative as a take but really, it’s a nice story that made me feel like maybe the future isn’t bleak and maybe technology and video games can bring us closer together and free us from society’s worst prescriptions for who we are supposed to be.

Interesting stuff, that is probably better addressed in the book. Ima go find that now and read it I think.

Verdict: 4/5, a good time as long as you don’t expect it to break any tropes (but maybe it started the tropes and I’m being unfair)