Grand Theft Hamlet
During the COVID lockdown in the United Kingdom, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were bored and out of work, so they logged into the game for some mindless distraction. They came across a beautifully rendered theatre in the world of the game, and started jokingly reciting Shakespeare on the stage until some random person came along and killed them for no reason. From there, they started to wonder if they could get through an entire production of Hamlet within the game, and the documentary "Grand Theft Hamlet" was born.
It's a marvelously entertaining premise that ends up being an quasi-profound human experiment and an unexpectedly touching display of human connection. The entire movie takes place within the animated world of the game, and Sam and his co-director Pinny Grylls frame the action like you would for a real-world documentary (leading to a lot of unintentional comedy; for instance, dramatic close-ups are undercut by the fact that the character's mouths just move in random motions). Sam and Mark's avatars start approaching random players in the game and asking them if they want to take part in the play, leading to a glorious stretch of auditions where other online players either get excited by the idea or just start murdering each other (or sometimes both). A few people deliver quite soul-stirring Shakespearean monologues, accompanied by impressive manipulation of their avatar's movements to go along with the words being said. Some players share incredibly heartfelt bits of vulnerability, saying that they had always wanted to try out for plays but could never bring themselves to do it in real life, or that they didn't think they were attractive enough to be an actor.
Of course, for every bit of humanity and encouragement Sam and Mark get from other interested people, they are even more often hosed down by the harsh realities of online gamer behavior. A helicopter suddenly enters the scene and fires missiles at them. A man in a strange alien costume interrupts them with sexy dancing. They are cursed at and belittled in multiple languages from players around the world. The attempt to do high art in a place like this is just a goldmine for comedy, and if anything, the movie doesn't spend enough time giving us those moments.
The movie also suffers from some pretty dated and uninteresting COVID content. By this point, we are all more than aware of the difficulties faced during lockdowns, and the filmmakers spend too much time trying to wax poetically about it. To make matters worse, they add in a few pretty clearly fabricated conversations and arguments about their moods or lack of actual real-world connection, which lose any impact they might have had due to their artifice. It's like the filmmakers didn't trust that the in-game material was interesting enough on its own and decided to try and add some kind of sub-narrative about the COVID-related misery and loneliness of their own lives, which was ultimately not a great decision.
Because the real meat here is the player interactions within a completely volatile system juxtaposed with the attempt to perform classical theater. By the time we get to the actual performance, I was dying to know what would happen and was pretty disappointed that we didn't just get the uncut footage of the entire thing. Instead, we only get little snippets of the most unplanned events, which felt like kind of a letdown. It started to make me wonder if they even did the full performance at all, or just enough little sections to put into this movie. That may not really be the point of all of this, but it's just another bit of artificiality that seemed unnecessary.
In the end, it's a fascinating idea that resulted in not only several laugh-out-loud moments, but some real tear-jerking ones as well. I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to some other similar "performances" within the world of the game, as there is clearly something to be mined here (other than just blowing things up). You never know where you'll find a community of your kinds of people; you just might have to dodge the virtual gunfire in order to do so.
