a Great idea, brilliantly executed. Hilarious, surreal, and, yes, really exciting in a weird way. This could be the Marat/Sade of the 21st century. During lockdown, two out-of-work actors, Sam Crane and Marc Oosterveen, played Grand Theft Auto (GTA) online (remotely to each other), and the entire movie It is shown as an in-game action feature in GTA. Their avatars navigate the vast, intricately detailed cityscape of Los Santos, similar to Los Angeles, where the action takes place, while avoiding being shot, mutilated, and mauled in the usual GTA fashion. While running through the area, they happened to come across a deserted group of people. Vinewood Bowl Amphitheater. So they staged an in-game production of Hamlet there, recruiting other gamers to play the roles, donning various bizarre costumes, handles, and personas, and using virtual reality in a zero-gravity, near-realistic way. I thought it might be possible to move around the space., the avatar’s lips move almost in sync as they speak their lines into a microphone.
They audition for all comers. In this noisy business, strange people appear who tend to use flamethrowers and rocket launchers to destroy others for no reason during the explanation of their works. But they also meet people who have fascinating or inspiring stories to tell. Finally, the finished performance is shown, with an atmospheric musical soundtrack that was probably added later for the film.
Coincidentally, they don’t stick to the Vinewood Bowl stage, instead boldly expanding their reach throughout the city. As one of the leads says, this is Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget, or the Shakespeare Elon Musk can afford to make. Crane and Oosterveen, along with Pinny Grylls (who co-directed with Crane), explore the game’s never-ending, dark violence, how close it is to the violence of Shakespeare’s world, and how depressed they are by the stagnation of lockdown. I look back in fascination. It provides a new dreamlike insight into Hamlet’s melancholy.
The result is something like Baz Luhrmann’s gangbanger Romeo + Juliet or Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which actors roam the land performing a show. It’s so wild that you wonder if anyone is watching it. It’s really funny and sweet when Crane, Oosterveen, and Grylls start arguing among themselves in the quirky GTA setting. (Maybe they were just making a little fuss about these “real” crises, but that doesn’t matter.)
To me, Oosterveen’s bemused voice sounds a lot like Simon Jones as Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it’s no surprise that Douglas Adams would have loved this movie. I say this as a compliment. It certainly was.
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Source: www.theguardian.com
