The Sandbox: Virtual Hypocrisy

"Gamer," "Surrogates" and "Avatar" extend Hollywood's jaundiced eye towards virtual reality.

Jonathan Mostow’s upcoming “Surrogates” is unlikely to deviate from this party line, since it’s set in a future in which humans no longer interact with the world. Instead, they live their lives through cyborgs, a paradigm that allows for greater personal freedom and wish-fulfillment while also eliminated crime — at least until someone starts murdering people through their surrogates, and Bruce Willis’ cop is forced to deal with things sans virtual reality.

I’ve haven’t seen the film, yet from its premise alone, “Surrogates” appears pretty clearly to be a continuation of Hollywood’s penchant for borrowing what it likes from gaming and then decrying the form as unnatural and dangerous. It’s a simplistic attitude that, in its censure, flirts a little too closely with the denunciations of renowned (and now-disgraced) anti-gaming activist Jack Thompson, who’s vilified gaming as a gateway to crime and corruption.

Worse still, this message indicates a sort of backward-looking, curiously Neo-Luddite vision for cinema, one in which all other artificial entertainments must be rebuffed lest they irreparably damage our souls and civilization. Which is precisely why James Cameron’s long-in-the-making sci-fi odyssey “Avatar” — about a paraplegic marine who takes part in a war on a foreign planet via a human-alien hybrid avatar — seems so promising. If the trailer is to be believed, the combat-heavy film will portray virtual reality not as something destructive but, rather, as a vehicle for tolerance, compassion and love. Far more than its much-ballyhooed advanced 3-D special effects, it’s that progressive perspective that, ultimately, might just wind up making “Avatar” the revolutionary film Cameron so loudly proclaims it to be.

The Sandbox, a column about the intersection of film and gaming, runs biweekly.

[Additional photo: Ralph Fiennes in "Strange Days," 20th Century Fox, 1995]

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