A guy named Guy (Ryan Reynolds as Ryan Reynolds) is a simple NPC in the multiplayer action game Free City (an obvious reference to GTA V, but for some reason with interfaces from a cheap mobile fake), a bank employee, who is robbed ten times a day by players greedy for profit. He is used to his life: in the morning he orders a standard coffee, talks in standard phrases, and gets hit in the face by a standard sneaker from another user. He does not yet know that his world is fake, and is happy to be in the dark. Until, of course, he meets Molotov Girl, aka Millie (Jody Comer), and something clicks in his artificial mind. The guy strays from the algorithm’s path and starts gaining “levels” just like the real players, only not by robbery and shootings, but by doing good deeds.
Millie, on the other hand, has a different problem: she plays Free City not for the dopamine, but to find remnants of the source code in it. The fact is that the game’s owner, the charismatic scumbag Antwan (Taika Waititi), once bought Millie and her co-writer buddy Case (Joe Keery) out of their indie project, switched Case to work for himself and probably illegally used the guys’ work for his mindless, money-sucking shooter. If the girl can prove that he actually remade their game into Free City, she can sue the corporation and get the copyright back for herself. One problem: In a couple of days, Antwan will shut down Free City for a sequel, and the source code will be gone forever – and with it, the boy who gained his sanity.
In terms of concept, Protagonist is the most curious action film this summer (or maybe the year in general): a blockbuster with a meta- prefix, incorporating the ideas of other stories about fake worlds and real feelings. From “The Truman Show” – the existential drama of a man who has realized the artificiality of his own life; from “Character” – the sharp conflict between the Hero and the Author; from “Lego. The Movie,” and finally, all sorts of hokum and postmodern flirtations with pop culture. The relatively new thing here is mostly a great emphasis on real-life context, the same subplot with indie developers forced to fight an ogre corporation for the right to create freely. There was something of that in “Truman” and even in “Lego.Movie”, but “Protagonist” is distinguished by a kind of desperate non-metaphorical statement: a situation where the success of a small team is criminally exploited by a soulless big studio is too easy to imagine in life. It’s a blockbuster that mocks blockbuster culture itself, an uncomplicated but painfully relevant film about how the industry’s eternal pursuit of money robs art of all that is creative and new. Sounds great, no question about it. But not when a movie with that rhetoric is released by Disney, the very epitome of all the evil that the characters in “Protagonist” are fighting against.
That is, the literally multibillion-dollar studio, which in recent years has made almost no big movies outside of well-known franchises or remakes of animated classics, is teaching us that free creativity, it turns out, must be safeguarded. And creating safe sequels to once-shot projects for profit and taking over small creative teams is very, very bad. The latter is especially ironic, considering that “Protagonist” was actually originally a 20th Century Fox movie, which ended up at Disney after they bought the competitor outright (Fox, of course, was no small team, but the parallel is not lost on them).
You could even see a peculiar form of self-irony here, if “Protagonist” hadn’t been so inexpressive. Don’t get me wrong, this is a perfectly competent summer blockbuster – funny in places, entertaining in places, it’s sure to find its audience and is unlikely to piss anyone off much. But for a film that votes with both hands for creative freedom and a departure from industry conventions, it is too conventional.
In other words, the exact opposite of “The Author”, a perfect studio scriptwriter who apparently knows nothing about video games except the faces of famous streamers like Ninja and Fortnite dancing (and he was at one point set to shoot “Ancharted”, so that was a miss). That’s why “Protagonist” doesn’t work too interestingly with its setting, trying to move quickly from the private (that is, irony over gaming conventions) to truisms about love, friendship and self-actualization.