The movie Gamer was released in theaters during the month of september in 2009. It stars Gerard Butler as Kable the main protagonist of the movie and Michael C. Hall as Ken Castle, the main antagonist. Kable is a death row inmate that is pitted against other death row inmates in a team death-match/gladiator style game called Slayer. The game Slayer is created by Ken Castle and allows for rich people to take over one of the minds of a death row inmate. This is done by Nanex technology placed into a inmates brain so that the inmate can be played by someone else. Kable is trying to win his freedom by winning 30 games with the kid that his controlling him. About halfway through Kable’s 28th game, his human controller is hacked, which allows Kable to escape and have the Hackers disable the Nanites. He then goes to kill Castle for making the Nanexs. Unbeknownst to Kable is that Castle has created an airborne Nanites that will infect everyone so Castle can control the whole world.
As a movie that is trying to stimulate what a video game is like, it does a pretty good job with the concepts. One of the main concepts that the movie tries to show is the delay time between the player pressing a button and the response of the video game character to the button that was pressed. This is a very true concept in video games; gamers themselves will buy anything and do anything that will cut down on the delay between the controls and the games response. The technology that is shown for the human controllers of the inmates is that of a huge VR like console. The console is shaped in a spherical design were the computer screens are dropped down all around the player. The player stands in the center and has a replica of a gun to be placed in their hands. This gun is used to stimulate the gun in the inmates hand. For the inmate to move, the human controller must move on the small conveyor belt like platform that is the base for the gaming console.
The Nanexs that are put into the inmates head that allow a person to take over the inmate is a fictional idea. However, the nanexs are based on the idea of Nanorobotics,which are robots that are smaller than 10 micrometers. the Nanorobotics are being tested for use in medicine and being able to detect certain toxic chemicals. So the Nanex technology that is used in Gamer, is not that unrealistic. Scientist would just need to figure out how to allow the nanorobotics be integrated with the human brain and still be able to send a signal that people could use to control a person.
The way that the movie shows the difference between Kable having control of his body and when Kable is being controlled is by switching the view point to the person controlling Kable. When Kable is being controlled, the audience is shown Kable point of view over a computer screen in front of Kable’s controller. When Kable is in control of himself, it is a third person view of what is happening around Kable. The targeted audience of Gamer is adults who play violent video games like Call of Duty and people who liked action packed movies. The movie hoped to get a lot of money from the people that are hardcore gamers and would see Gamer as a live action Call of Duty movie. However, this does not happen, the movie was a complete flop at the theaters. It did not even make a profit because the movies budget was 50 million and it made 42 million. The movie did not make people want to go and see it because they saw it as a movie that is strongly supporting violent video games and human on human violent.