Hacker Cinema
The Game
1997 · Film · 129 min
Directed by David Fincher
In honor of his birthday, San Francisco banker Nicholas Van Orton, a financial genius and a cold-hearted loner, receives an unusual present from his younger brother, Conrad: a gift certificate to play a unique kind of game. In nary a nanosecond, Nicholas finds himself consumed by a dangerous set of ever-changing rules, unable to distinguish where the charade ends and reality begins.
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36 comments on Hacker News
In the middle of season 2 now, I love it. Thanks again. :)
There were a few similar movies, most of which take place in 1 location.
Exam (2009)
The Belko Experiment (2016)
I forget some now.
Similar, kinda, is The Game (1997).
If the king was being extorted by his thought control, it was a ruse. Kind of like The Game. You’ve seen that movie haven’t you? The Game?
The same thing happened to the pentagon in 2018, that “Hawaii missile tweet”. Of course everyone normal gets a story, some guy was fooling around and their submit button slipped. While in actuality, those voices in our heads were extorting America with their own nuclear weapons. “let one off the chain” I think is what was said among those in the know. I wonder what the king was being spooked over.
Remember Trump had top secret files pertaining to nuclear weapons at Mar A-lago? Apparently the Pentagon misplaced entire launch facilities.
1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.
There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.
Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.
>> life-altering experience ... doesn't seem to make them a worse, better, or even different person
The best insight you will get, without taking the trip yourself is going to come from reading Huxley's "Doors of Perception". A large enough dose will give you all sorts of interesting insights into your own thinking.
The closest your going to come to this, is the first time you watch the film "The Game", assuming you pay close enough attention and are tuned into it as a film and the characters in it. However it pales in comparison to the real thing.
5: "Keyser Söze", logo is from Usual Suspects 6: "descartes", Ceaser cyper 7: "lucifer", lyrics from Symphony of the Devil 8: "bletchley park", images translate to w3w location 9: "conrad", reference to the movie "The Game" 10: "pineappowl", send "Hi" email to 3.243F6A8885DD3B903D0F@gmail.com 11: "ambidextrous", the image file name contains planets "susaturnortmarsxedvenusibma" planets removed and reversed 12: "playback", novel by chandler
Does anyone remember that movie "the game" with Douglass and Penn? (It wasnt that good). It's getting closer every day.
This is self destructive, as it makes their content look paltry when you view it through a VPN. I just unsubscribed from Netflix yesterday because I was like "none of the movies on my watchlist are on Netflix". Now I wonder if that was actually because I was looking through a VPN.
The most insidious part is that they don't tell you that you have reduced content, they just silently remove content if you use a VPN.
As an example: I can watch "The Game" (1997) from California, USA if I don't use a VPN. If I connect with Express VPN (through San Francisco) the title is not available. That is dumb.
Apropos Alternative Reality Games, there's a film called The Game which stars Michael Douglas that's worth a watch. It's maybe a wee bit dated, but certainly enjoyable.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/
This is where semantic data would be really handy (admittedly, it's not a great example because the two movies are not linked at the moment):
- https://dbpedia.org/page/The_Game_(1997_film)
- https://dbpedia.org/page/Rebirth_(2016_film)
I gave it more thought in passing and am a bit curious what real, heavy ML might look like. And if there's value in such things.
Example: I often find myself remembering bits of things, and querying Google, and the results are way off or completely irrelevent. Things a human would know in a matter of seconds, generally.
I was for example trying to remember that newish Netflix movie that is very similar to the Michael Douglas movie "The Game." It feels like such a question should be easy for a sufficiently smart system. Something like Watson, I guess?, at the search engine level would be immensely mindblowing to me.
The answer btw for anyone curious was "Rebirth." Nearly every review of said movie makes the comparison.
If you watch the movie "The Game"... and stick with it until the end.... this is similar.... wtf?
Is this a spoof, or what?
>Fincher himself, he spoke about it, I think on The Game, commentary track.
Thanks, that's super interesting.
On the bonus material for the Alien box set, which Fincher didn't participate in, a number of people who commented (studio people, producers on set, etc., IIRC) said they felt they were marginalized during the filming and that their advice was not heeded. All things considered, the documentary was very supportive of Fincher's point of view, that he was a victim of an overly controlling studio that didn't give him the funding he needed. So I guess there's a difference in point of view there regarding precisely when he stopped heeding others' advice. :)
Just watched The Game last night. Very silly and contrived, but for my son... who’d not seen it before, it was riveting before the ending. He tried to make sense of it, and I assured him, aside from Easter eggs, trying to make the movie make sense would be folly. As an example of a film maker in command though, it’s a good example of the director playing the audience like a fiddle.
I’m reminded of the film The Game (1997), but I won’t say more as to not spoil anything for anyone.
Yeah but there is a good way to pull it off, and there is a bad way to do it. E.g. the Room also has the premise that it is SO much more about than what is on the surface, but we all know that's a delusion and that the Room is a shallow piece of movie. M. Drive doesn't give that impression, we're left with "wait... what was this about?" feeling which, to me, means it's a great movie. If I left the movie with "this doesn't make any sense, someone must have had a stroke editing this movie" then it would be bad. I think Predestination is an example of movie that is done in a similar vein but is significantly worse (than M. Drive) as in if you hold it to some scrutiny it's clear there is no deeper meaning and it's just intended to be "mind-blowing" or whatever it means.
Another example is David Fincher's 1997 movie The Game.
Many directors tried this, yet none pulled it off like David Lynch. IMHO.
Just my 2 cents. I'm a movie layman.
Check out the movies - The Manchurian Candidate and The Game.
Reminds me the movie The Game with Michael Douglas.
Interesting premise. Could even be the plot of a present day sci-fi novel (an executive goes about their day of seemingly random inconveniences amidst a high-stakes battle between advertising firms directing the exec towards their clients). Almost reminds me of The Game, which was the greatest film ever made and I will hear NO argument.
That being said, most of the wealthy people I know personally tend not to use computers when they can call up concierge services to handle complex tasks for them. That most wealthy people I know happen to be older and not as used to using computers for every problem may just be more of an age rather than economic dissonance.
The Game was great, though. My favorite movie by far.
You also basically described the movie The Game (with Michael Douglas). If you haven't seen it I suggest you check it out.
I always thought this was a cool idea. I'd imagine this couldn't effectively be done for less than a couple hundred thousand considering the number of people who would have to be working on this full time.
Reminds me of The Game movie [1]. Try not to read any spoilers if you haven't seen it yet.
[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/
Opinions on some of the movies from the list I've seen:
Idiocracy – Basically an ordinary comedy, with an above average plot, but overall nothing that special or interesting. Overrated.
Fight Club – One of my favourite movies, perhaps in my top 10. Really loved it.
The Game – Another great movie from David Fincher, I love the mysterious atmosphere of his movies.
The Man From Earth. – Huge disappointment, I never understood why people like this movie. It's basically one guy telling a predictable and boring story. One of the most overrated movies ever. (I mean overrated in subjective sense obviously.)
Traffic – One of the best movies about drugs and organized crime.
Inception – Above average but overrated, logically inconsistent, nothing really special about this movie. The Cell is another movie where people enter someone else's dreams and even though it has only 6.2 on IMDB, I think I enjoyed it more. The depictions of the dreams were definitely more creative and looked more dreamy.
Of the top of my head I would recommend these:
* Something from David Lynch – Lost Highway, Blue Velvet or Mullholland Drive.
* Requiem for Dream
* Evil (2003)
* Sin City
* Crank – not very known, but wow, this is the best action movie ever.
* Elite squad – another great action movie, very realistic, borderline documentary.
This is one of my favorite kinds of movie. I've never heard a good name for the genre. Psychological thriller? Too broad.
You should add The Thirteenth Floor. A good movie, better than its low budget, that fits squarely in the category.
Glad to see someone suggested The Game. I loved that one. It's a long way down from The Game and Seven to Benjamin Button and The Social Network.
* Primer (fantastic puzzle movie, filmed on a $7,000 budget)
* Abre Los Ojos (Vanilla Sky is the shitty American remake of this film)
* Revolution #9 (best fictional depiction of schizophrenia I've ever seen)
* Memento (filmed backwards, about a man with a 5 minute memory)
* Fight Club
* The Game
* Naked Lunch (the last good Cronenberg movie)
* Videodrome
* Dead Ringers
* Zoo: A Zed and Two Noughts
* Last Year at Marienbad
* Requiem for a Dream
This is very reminiscent of EA's Majestic game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game)
It was like X-Files conspiracy theories meets The Game (the Michael Douglas movie). Sadly, it didn't last very long. I'm hoping this will do better.
When I read that, I thought it was a reference to the movie The Game: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/
You think that you are being so extreme that it is ridiculous.
Well, lawyers already went there: http://www.plotpatents.com/
"A Plot or Storyline Patent application seeks to patent the underlying novel and nonobvious storyline of a fictional story. Such protection is to be contrasted from the copyright protection of one of millions of possible expressions of an underlying storyline. The field of possible applications is broad, and may tentatively be split into an entertainment-advertisement dichotomy. The epitome of an entertainment application is an original, thought-provoking, often shockingly unique movie plot. Several potentially patentable features may have been found in the plots of, Memento, The Thirteenth Floor, Being John Malkovich, Butterfly Effect, The Game, Fight Club, The Matrix, Total Recall, The Truman Show, Minority Report, The Village, Groundhog Day, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to name a few. The epitome of an advertisement application is one of the many thoughtfully hilarious Super Bowl commercials."
I didn't like the book, didn't like the movie, but the game.. I like it. Died against the first boss.
Sounds like "The Game" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/ from 1997. Quite a good film, hopefully this game is not that sinister. :)
It is a fantastic book! And the setting of the film is different, but the story is surely the same: an emotionally immature protagonist gets swept up in an ever-expanding and quasi-supernatural game. The emotional crimes he plays out on others are played back on himself through this game, causing him to eventually achieve self-realization through a sort of emotional catharsis and resurrection (metaphorically in the book, quite visually in the film with the white suit and the graveyard and all).
Replace Greece with San Francisco and the sexual crimes in the novel with the film's emphasis on corporate greed. Still not convinced? The icing on the cake for me is the fact that both film and book end identically, hanging on a moment of choice in a situation which leaves it ambiguous if "the Game" is still ongoing.
I don't think Fincher really nailed the movie the way he did with Seven and Fight Club, but the connection to the Magus seems obvious for another reason as well: the weak points of the film start making sense if you think about it as an adaptation. The major point of the Fowles novel is in its Eliot quote that, "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time." I don't think the film is as convincing as the book in part because the romantic relationship it uses to do this is incidental to its preoccupation with corporate greed and is not very believable. But the intended structure helps explain some of its weaker dramatic moments, the biggest of which for me was seeing Michael Douglas running around a corporate cafeteria with a gun shouting about the need to protect his employees and their pensions.
What amazes me about the coverage of this film is that David Fincher is getting totally overshadowed by his subject. Case in point, Techcrunch doesn't even mention that Fincher is the director, even crediting the film to Aaron Sorkin who just worked on the script.
Why is this an oversight? Fincher is one of the smartest directors in contemporary American film. Seven was a brilliant critique of how visual media feeds social violence. Fight Club turned a stylish but shallow nihilist novella into a meta-recursive critique of nihilism itself. Zodiac was a narrative masterpiece created out of nothing. The Game was an ambitious attempt to turn The Magus into a film that succeeded so well no-one seemed to notice. And even his lesser works, Panic Room and Benjamin Button, were still films that tried for something and are worth watching.
Yet not a single mention. Amazing.
I discovered this through a fantastic list of 'mindfuck movies':
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/mindfuck_movies.php
It's definitely the most complex of the bunch, but most of them were great finds. Cube was another low-budget gem, and on the other end of the spectrum there's The Game with Michael Douglas.
You might like "The Game" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/
The Game didn't really start the genre. Microsoft was doing ARGs internally before 1997, and possibly provided some of the inspiration for the film. There was also Dreadnot which predates the film as well.
ive seen the game before, but rewatched last night. awesome movie. yeah, majestic was just right after the beast. those two are the fathers of the genre. EA discontinuted majestic though.
I think technology is making the line blurred between two realities.
Well, you didn't mention The Game (movie, 1997). It actually started the genre, and inspired a real-life game called Majestic which technically predates The Beast. It's very much worth watching for inspiration.
Majestic was lackluster but ambitious: it wanted to be a realization of The Game but lacked the necessary good writing and good acting to pull it off.
I've often wondered at what point technology and its side-effects will allow people who are dissatisifed to create or join alternate realities and literally tune in, turn on, and drop out. At what point can you say that you have effectively stopped living in 'reality'?