Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie

(Hi there! This isn't really a Nintendo game post, but I was inspired. After years of filming and production and stuff, the Angry Video Game Nerd movie finally came out! I watched it last night and I had words to write about it... sort of. There will be spoilers in these words, so do beware. If you'd like to see the film, here is a legal avenue for you to do so. Regardless, here we go.

PS: If you got here from Cinemassacre, hi! I hope you like my silly Nintendo game blog!)

Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie (henceforth referred to as the AVGN movie) is many things. "Terrible", surprisingly enough, is not one of them. Believe me, I'm the first to call out an AVGN-related product when it falters. I've done it before. Still, this is not a review of the AVGN movie. Not quite, but let's get housekeeping out of the way and give quick thoughts anyway. It's okay. It's not a classic or a masterpiece, but it's a movie I'd watch again. My favorite part, aside from all of the esoteric bullshit I'm going to write about it in a second, is how it handles cameos. This is an Internet Celebrity Movie, and in my mind I immediately compare it to Doug Walker's Internet Celebrity Movies for his website, That Guy With The Glasses. They are not very good in my eyes, and one of the reasons I dislike them? Their reliance on cameos and reference. They exist to light up the audience's memory neurons regarding Internet Celebrity Inside Jokes And Appearances. By contrast, the AVGN movie is also brimming with cameos from other Internet Celebrities (even Doug Walker himself shows up!)... but at almost no point is it ever directly stated that the person appearing on screen is Someone From The Internet. Doug Walker gets his cameo, but it's a scream of horror at something. He does not identify himself as Doug Walker. He is a cutaway reaction, a piece of a larger montage that actually is relevant to the plot of the film. There are other things I liked, but let's not go into those now. Let's talk about alchemy again.

Oh, is the AVGN movie dripping with alchemy and the totemic power of the Nintendo pantheon... even if it doesn't really involve Nintendo. For starters, let's look at the Nerd himself. If the Nintendo Project is the TARDIS Eruditorum of the NES (which, really, Phil deserves all credit for)... then the AVGN web series is the About Time. Or the Jeremy Bentham or whatever. Thanks to him, creations of the Nightmare are spotlighted and targeted by the masses. We know to treat Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde as a dread beast. Top Gun and its plane landing are nonsense. The Power Glove really is that bad. (We'll get there, in a roundabout way, soon.) He jumps all over time with these games, as we do, and doesn't even limit himself to the grey box. Atari is fair game as well. The 2600, the once-king of the wastelands of woodgrain. What happened next is recorded history, of course. The impossible king rose to great heights, in conjunction with the dread beast GREED at the near-peak of its capitalist power. They were invincible, and they recruited an alchemist to make something to give them more money. A video game based on that one Spielberg movie. Yes. Eee Tee. They gave their microchip alchemist no time at all to turn lead into gold, and the half-baked creation was sour and malformed. The capitalists, in their hubris, made far too many. Their assumption was that Darth License's brand would fly off the shelves. How wrong they were. Video games suffered a mortal blow, and the lead blood splattered everywhere, poisoning the well. They died in 1983, but the trickling blood splashed into a void, reaching a land that did not exist. It touched a white and red box, and the Famicom was born. As for the E.T. carts? Buried with countless other unsold Atari stock, in a landfill in the wastelands.

All of this is true. Even the landfill part.  The movie, of course, embellishes things slightly. And by "slightly" I mean that every Eee Tee cartridge ever made actually contains a piece of alien super-metal harvested from the Roswell UFO, as well as the floor plans to Area 51. Things go farther than that. There's an alien who tells us that our reality is its own ridiculous video game. Entire planets and nebulas created with alchemy far surpassing our own... and the entropy that can stop it? A Lovecraftian death god lurking under Mount Fuji. Who awakens during the third act of the film and lays waste to the world like a kaiju monster. The Nightmare, Peko The Destructor, the dread beast GREED... all just concepts without form. Here, then, lies the true horror. Video games exist to further capitalism and line the pockets of their creators. The side effect of that? Sometimes they're fun. Sometimes the microchip alchemy creates something beautiful. Sometimes, the grace of good fortune awaits. There is good in this universe, and there are good games.

The Nerd himself, whether he knows it or not, is a force of good. He may swear and fight and drink and vomit, but above all else his greatest fear is the suffering of those who have grown to laugh at his work. The idea that people would actually play E.T., let alone go out to the harsh desert to dig the damn things up? It horrifies him. He spends the film trying to deny the entire thing, even as the conspiracies and revelations about the inner workings of the universe rack up. He doesn't want us to become the mindless zombies of capitalism; indeed, a nightmare sequence early on features just that. A carnival of capitalism with Eee Tee and the Nerd's face plastered everywhere, the undead buying and winning and buying... then playing their product. Furthering the brand. Consuming not just what the fools at Cockburn put out, but human flesh. How horrifying.

In the end, it is too much. In order to save the day, mankind needs to rid itself of this burden. Every cartridge of Eee Tee on the planet comes together, the ultimate alchemy. It forms a spaceship, and this is what sends the death god back to its realm. We are deprived of our so-called "worst game ever", but as the credits roll, we get what we have wanted. We get our AVGN E.T. review... and you know what? It's not the worst game of all time. In the end, E.T. isn't really some earth-shattering calamity that can be used to make it so nothing ever existed. It's a flawed game that some greedy old people rushed out the door for Christmas 1982. It's a game that one man worked on to the best of his effort, creating some weird thing about telephone pieces and falling into holes. It has its cryptic moments, but it was intended to come with instructions. You read them, and understand, because the game has no room to tell you what to do. Its alchemist has no time to explain to you what to do. Sure, it may have brought Atari to its knees and almost killed video games, but that set the scene for the NES, and the 30 years of video gaming that followed. A new empire, forged on the ashes of the old.

In that regard, E.T. might be the most important game of all time.