Have you ever wondered, what it is like to talk to human like AI's and even fall in love with them?
Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer and Taika Waititi are going to bring you deep into the world of artificial intelligence.
The Plot
In short: Reynolds plays a NPC (non playable character), called Guy, in the video game "Freetown 1", but doesn't know, that he is only a ingame character. Comer is one of the developers of the underlying artificial intelligence, named Millie, that brought Guy to "life". Guy doesn't like his boring everyday life, that is a perfect loop and one day breaks free, after falling in love with Millie, by taking away the sunglasses. Those are the way the player characters see the missions and everything else in this game.
Millie and her former companion Keys did create a code for an online experience in which players would not kill, but watch and friendly interact with, NPC characters, that would develop as the game progress. Waititi, playing the evil game company owner, Antwan, didn't license their code, but wanted all the profits for himself.
Millie finds out, that Antwan used their code without telling them and wants to win in a law suit against him, but so far couldn't proof that he was using their code. She encounters Guy in the game and recognizes, that he is special.
Guy, in order to impress Millie, is participating in the game and leveling up by being the good guy and helping the NPCs instead of killing or hurting them. It takes a long time, until Millie - and later others - realize, that he isn't a player, but an artificial intelligence.
Millie asks him to work together with her, to recover the code and rescue his world - since Antwan wants to do a make over of the game completely getting rid of the original code from Millie and Keys. But this would destroy the NPCs and all the artifical intelligence that goes with it.
My Opinion
I really enjoyed the movie. It is fun to follow Guy's character arc. The movie is quite funny - especially if you like Reynolds' humor in general. I really enjoyed his performance on the movie.
Waititi has a lot of fun playing the evil guy - which reminds me a lot of Jojo Rabbit. His performance is so over the top, that it is really hilarious.
The very intriguing part is the love story between Millie and Guy. Falling in love with an artificial intelligence sounds really something that couldn't have been imagined a few decades ago - well, AI itself was only sci-fi.
Also the topic of being friendly to NPCs and too violent games is touched. As well as social media culture around games - and streamers. I really found many aspects that are very similar to my Hive experience - and what I did experience in #Splinterlands. Well, I am not really sympathizing with the cards, but many aspects of the movie are also happening in my daily life. Streamers talking about the game. Bots are kind of an AI.
I was wondering if it is going to happen, especially in the Meta-Verse, that people are really falling in love with AI. This wouldn't really surprise me. Guy was a clone of Keys and expressing his love to Millie. But it isn't out of my imagination, that real life AI could be attractive to people. And also attracted to people. It is kind of scary to think about it, but I don't think it is too far away.
In total, this is a movie I really enjoyed watching. It is funny, but not too shallow. The politics involved are more subtile. It isn't a life changing experience to watch this movie, but it is a fun movie for a movie night or an evening after work.
Even though violence is involved, I think that it is also possible to watch it with older kids.
Did you watch Free Guy ? If so, did you like it?
All images are from Disney+