At the bar, Main Character is again swamped by fans, because the plan to go in disguise only lasted during the explanation of the plan.
I-roc the mercenary hired by Kia (presumably because he is also named after a car) is told by someone in the bar that Main Character is there, then kicks some women out of a private booth. I-roc gets a call from Kia, which he immediately dismisses. I am not sure what the purpose of the call was, other than to show him dismissing it, but I'm not sure what the point of any portion of this movie is.
I guess I-roc can hear what Main Character and Love Interest are saying.
Love Interest explains that the programming for dance club was started shortly after Creator's date with Karen. Reading back over my notes, that's the woman in the Obituary for the woman in the picture with 006, and they said she was someone's wife. I guess those 2 mysteries are solved (and caused by distraction from) keeping notes.
Love Interest makes a comment that virtual dates never work, and also that Creator never got a second date with Karen.
They seem to have solved the clue that creator is the Creator, the club is the creation he hates, and the leap not taken is jumping into the anti-gravity tube/dancefloor down the middle of the bar. Although, as Main Character points out, it's statistically impossible for someone not to have accidentally solved that riddle (also true of the first riddle, but why not) because it's always full of people. Love Interest guesses that having one of the keys makes it work different.
In the first good usage of "this is VR, so we can do things you can't normally do", they dance while floating, with Love Interest's dress changing length and form. Then Main Character creates 2 disco dance floors and Love Interest's dress changes between a dress and bellbottoms with her movements, which is cool.
Then Love Interest asks if he's got just a visor and gloves, or a full-body feedback suit (he had just purchased a full-body haptic suit), and starts feeling him up.
Main Character asks to meet up in the real world because he's halfway through the first date and there's no blood in his brain. Love Interest tells him he'd just be disappointed, points out he doesn't really know her, and that she doesn't look like her avatar. He says he doesn't care, and gives his real name, which freaks her out. She reiterates that he doesn't know the real her, and he's not picking up what she's laying down.
They're really trying to put the vibe out there that she's sharing information with I-roc (he can hear what she says/hears), and might be using him to solve the riddles for badguy corp. They're laying it on so thick that it either has to be a misdirect, or the writers are completely artless.
Main Character says he's in love with Love Interest, and there's an explosion as badguy corp smashes 2 dropships full of soldiers through the walls of the bar, and shooting starts. I-roc doesn't like that they're going loud so early, because it's not currently time for his character to be the idiot for comedic purposes, it's time for him to be a brilliant tactician for expository purposes.
Main Character and Love Interest have plenty of time to have a conversation during a firefight, because they're hiding behind a glass table that's floating around because. He restates his love, she doubles down on the "nope, I'm just here to get information from you" vibe. Then the table breaks because it's no longer necessary for the scene, and the firefight really begins.
Every time one of the soldiers is shot, they turn orange then explode into coins. Every time Main Character is shot, he just turns orange. He apparently has armor, which the company who creates the (digital) armor can't afford to provide to their soldiers, or didn't expect them to get into a firefight when they were sent to start shooting.
Main character uses the Zemekis cube to send everything back in time 60 seconds, and Love Interest is angry that he waited so long to use it. She explains she is trying to stop badguy corp, and there are real consequences if they die, and he has to quit treating the game world like a game.
Apparently Love Interest's father borrowed equipment from badguy corp, so they put him in a "loyalty center" to work off his debt, and he died in that camp.
I-roc calls Kia to tell him that the attack was stupid, because people respawn after the die in the game, which seems like a thing you might realize if you ran badguy corp, and means their soldiers are pointless. Strangely, nobody had realized that phenomenon previously. I-roc also is mostly back to being an idiot, but also managed to cross-reference Main Character's name with a list of everyone who had recently purchased a VR suit from badguy corp (because that's public information, and makes much more sense than badguy corp having a list of their own sales), and found out his home address. Thank you, this scene. I was getting close to thinking this movie was approaching competence. Probably one of the writers was coming down, and someone fixed that.
Next scene, Kia starts asking an underling about her loyalty, and says her division will cease to exist if the wrong person wins the contest. She agrees to do what is necessary.
Kia also sent Main Character a message straight to his VR helmet, asking to meet him to make an offer. The message also says Main Character will get the egg and everything else he wants. This message obvious freaks Main Character out, because the technology to direct message someone online shouldn't exist.
Kia brings Main Character into his office as a hologram (where we learn the password on a post-it isn't a joke, it's another half-assed foreshadow, because anything even moderately good in this movie is an accident they would have avoided if they saw it coming), and offers him a job with a penthouse apartment and unlimited in-game items (which, as discussed, are for some reason not given to in-game soldiers expecting combat), and a new high-end gaming rig. Plus $4 million/year salary, and a $25 million bonus for finding the egg. This is a really good deal when the egg also gets you control of the company worth over $500 million. He'd be dumb not to trade 500 for 25. Main Character has mentioned a few times already that he doesn't "clan up", because sometimes the writers remember this is an MMO and try to use terms from games.
Main Character can't do math, so the only thing he needs convincing on is that badguy corp is going to use control of the game for everyone's benefit, not theirs. Kia tells him he's going to "convert all the schools on Ludus into replicas from Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller."
The research team helps Kia realize Main Character's response of "which school" contains schools from other movies that nobody cares about anymore in 2020, let alone whatever year it is in the movie currently. Having proven that they are on the side of good (pop culture), they can't be evil (corporate greed). The research team is all staring intently at the man urgently Cyrano de Bergerac-ing Kia all of this pop culture. Main Character grows a brain, and realizes he's being duped, and refuses.
Kia switches from reasonable to evil (and it's commented on by Main Character), and starts listing off everything about Main Character in real life, and mentions that nobody will mind an explosion in a rat's nest trailer park. It's weird that he would mention a rat's nest instead of the one they've shown in the movie, but whatever.
Action scene of Main Character leaving VR and running towards the trailer from his secret lair that they don't realize he's not in even though they say they're watching him, as 3 drones chase him, then go attach the world's smallest bombs to the top of the Aunt's trailer (where they will do the most damage, considering it's at the top of a tower of trailers, and there's no way physics would allow you to knock down tall objects) and one on the bottom.
Instead of what I just described seeing, all 5 of the 3 bombs go off on different floors from inside other trailers, including 2 near the bottom where they make sense. You can hear the frame of the tower twist and bend as it falls over without twisting or bending in a CGI scene that might be beyond my abilities. Cinematography.
Main Character returns to his secret hidey hole, and is kidnapped by some big guy hiding behind his chair, because duct-taped office chairs in the center of a room can easily hide a full-grown person.
It turns out Love Interest is the one who kidnapped him, and brought him to her refugee camp, where we notice he stopped wearing his full-body VR suit. I assume it evaporated because him buying it is no longer leading to a future plot point. At no point does anyone question why she has goons, why they know where he hangs out, or why she kidnapped him.
Love Interest is over-concerned about the birthmark on her face, which is a way people act over minor shit. Meanwhile the spazzy and shlubby internet nerd is completely confident is his non-existent good looks, which is probably also accurate. I can't even tell anymore if the writers accidentally fell into a scene with meaning because they're too hacky to realize it was good, or if someone on the team actually has some talent. It's pretty obviously the former, but they leave doubt that it could be the latter. Also, Kagus undersold how dumb this scene is.
We're then treated to a touching scene where they connect over both having names.
Love Interest figures out the second riddle requires them to go to where the second date was: inside the movie the Shining (Stephen King didn't like the movie). I'll be disappointed
if when they don't reference the
moon landing being faked because Room 237 means the moon to profoundly insane people, in a movie about references. Also, one of the characters is apparently blind, but capable of using VR. Atari tried a direct brain interface in the 70's, so it's not unreasonable that someone has succeeded by 204X.
H is dragged across the building by the blood-from-the-elevator hallucination, because that's how hallucinations work, and ends up in room 237 (which they don't mention related to the moon landing). For some reason the rotting version of the naked lady has a knife, and also Jack's axe comes through the wall. H falls into the bathtub, which is a portal to the end of the Shining out in the maze with snow and ice. Also, now the rotting lady is a giant and has an axe. I guess they're trying to add action scenes to keep people entertained, and because the plot isn't the main draw to this movie.
Now they're in the zombie game Creator made, and when Love Interest jumps onto one, the rest of the crew is tossed outside. Right after a scene where it was important H followed them into the game. I don't even know.
Love Interest gets to play a platformer where the platforms are all floating zombies, where she's trying to save the woman Creator loved, and wins the key.
Next, we see Kia being told the researchers have cracked the second riddle (without having gotten the clue from the race, as far as the movie has told us), and their army is trying to beat the Shining competition
while the scoreboard is updating to show Love Interest's score go up on the scoreboard. While that's going on, Main Character also gets the key, which lets them know he is not dead, and also can solve the puzzle in seconds.
Now every drone in the city is looking for the guy who kidnapped Main Character. Not because they saw the kidnapping, but because the kidnapper had been standing around in the trailer park and was seen by a camera, which probably only describes hundreds of people. Standing around in an area full of people = the one person who knows what happened. I think NCIS has a better grasp on both tracking a person down and computers than this movie, which is saying something.
The refugee camp is raided, and Love Interest helps Main Character escape to the outside, which is definitely not going to be full of badguy corp soldiers, and doesn't follow because reasons.
Love Interest gets arrested for her debts (which badguy corp bought out), and sent to a loyalty center to pay off her debts like her dad.
We also meet H in real life, and surprisingly she is a woman (looking up the actress online, I learned it's spelled Aech, so you don't know it's an initial. However, spelling isn't useful in spoken language, so that obfuscation is only useful if you're looking up the lady who played the character, and also don't know she's not a man, or you've read the bad book the bad movie is based on and watched the movie anyway because you don't learn from your mistakes). A drone IDs her van, and is focusing its camera on H and Main Character, when it get beat by a guy with a baseball bat who came from inside the van. Luckily, wireless internet isn't a thing that exists, so I'm sure no information got out. Thus, we get to meet the 2 characters who sometimes show up to remind us H and Main Character have some friends.
We are also told badguy corp found the third challenge, because they're going to shoehorn in a race over an hour into the movie, even if the plot has been about badguy corp being useless at solving the clues up to this point. Maybe they would have solved it all in less than 5 years if they could have figured out the nigh-impossible "drive backwards on a racecourse in a video game" puzzle. I just can't say enough about how great this writing is. Because there are zero examples to give.
So they need to save Love Interest. It's too difficult to break into the loyalty center, so they go for the much more reasonable plan of breaking into badguy corp HQ to find Kia and convince him the right thing to do is to stop being the bad guy. They can accomplish all of this, because Main Character saw Kia's chair (and Kia's password, which also doesn't help them get into the building
or find out where in the building to go). Fuck all of this internet security. I didn't know people could hack you if they've seen what your chair looks like.
Because scene transitions are too difficult for the writers, you see the van drive through a gate, then see the inside of the loyalty center they aren't going to. Love Interest panics, because she has a VR helmet on that she can't remove. They are being used as physical labor in a game because seriously fuck everyone involved with this.
We also get 2 VR scenes here that show the writers understand how virtual reality works equally as well as they understand how actual reality works. In the first, Love Interest looks towards a person in VR and at the same time turns to face them in reality. Then the scene is mirrored when badguy corp soldiers are lined up to play on an Atari 2600 in the game, and also need to line up in reality. Despite having shown them all strapped into harnesses or sitting in chairs throughout the rest of the movie that started with Main Character describing his otherwise-unseen omnidirectional treadmill. I assume they're letting you know that they're changing how the world works halfway through this shitty movie, because they don't have enough drugs to go back and re-write earlier parts of the movie to fit the new plot. I can understand, as I can't be bothered to go back and check anything related to the movie.
I-roc (I still love that the name is half of a pun, where you notice it could be one of two things, but you can't figure out how to make one of them make sense in any way) gives Kia the magic orb from before, and casts a spell to create a shield around the whatever it is that the laborers are building. Kia leaves through a portal, but we don't find out where he's going because the stupid chair plan worked (off-screen, where the entirety of this movie belongs) and Main Character and one of the tertiary friends remove his VR visor and point guns at him. You can tell they're toys because of the weight, but you can't tell if that's in-world or not.
"You killed my mom's sister. I guess there's a word for that maybe, but I can't remember what it's called right now."
Kia explains that the whole blowing up his home to try to kill him thing was a corporate decision, and wasn't personal. We also learn the building the Loyalty Center that Love Interest is in (which H explained is impossible for them to get into, so they'll break into Kia's office instead) is the same building as the office they'll break into instead. We can't get into the building so we'll get into the building instead.
While they're interrogating Kia, Main Character just walks off and ends up in VR. At this point, it's obvious that the writers are just fucking with us, because nobody could be this bad at scene transitions, writing in general, logic, movies, or not dying from a cocaine overdose.
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Topic: The Movie Discussion Thread! (Read 170046 times)