This first essay contains mild spoilers for the films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and Eighth Grade.
In the latest Mission Impossible film, Tom Cruise’s super-spy Ethan Hunt is faced with the most catastrophic threat to his existence yet: a sentient AI supercomputer named “The Entity”, which those involved are worried will reshape the balance of power between the world’s superpowers (that’s a lot of supers for a film with no costumes). “The Entity” in Dead Reckoning is positioned as a mainly military threat – here is a computer with access to the intelligence networks of most major world powers that can destabilise them in an instant. But it doesn’t take a lot of reading into it to suppose that Mission Impossible, produced and helmed by one of the last remaining true movie stars, is using The Entity to comment on a threat to the world of filmmaking.
The original Mission Impossible film came out in 1996, to a world where the dominance of the internet was not as assured as it is now, and while the series has passed from director to director, the basic style and plot remains largely the same. Despite the fact that the internet has been on most people’s phones since at least the early 2010s, it’s only now that computers have been regarded as an existential threat to the filmmaking process, with the idea that AI may be poised to replace screenwriters and perhaps even actors.
Hollywood, however, has been avoiding the internet for far too long. The same year as Mission Impossible was released, director Yoshimitsu Morita was already trying to use the web to shake up the romance genre, with his film Haru. Similar in concept to the 1998 film You’ve Got Mail, Haru tells the story of a romance formed on the internet between two strangers who end up having some kind of connection in real life (in Haru the connection is more linked to the internet than in Ephron’s film, but also less crucial to the overall narrative).
The striking thing about Haru, and what makes it worth writing about, is its formal creativity when it comes to making a film where communication over text is the focus of its narrative. Rather than resort to voiceover or expository dialogue about the nature of the lead characters’ online dialogue, Morita instead shows the audience almost every email the two lovers exchange with each other.
Dialogue is not the main form of communication observed by the audience watching Haru; the scenes of the two leads living out their day to day lives away from a computer screen are mostly silent and reflective, with sparse sets and minimal dialogue. Meanwhile, the audience is expected to read through long paragraphs of text, often on nothing more than a plain blue background, in order to discover more about the lead couple’s relationship to each other and see how their love blooms.
This isn’t to say that Haru doesn’t contain moments of the cinematic. Indeed, a moment set on a bullet train seems to pay homage to Kurosawa’s High and Low, and is almost equally thrilling despite the difference in stakes. But ultimately what impresses about Haru is that Morita is committed to making the audience read text, rather than view images – this seems to go against the convention of what cinema is for, but what Morita understands innately is that when making a film about the internet, he must make a formal leap; one that reflects the leap in forms of communication that has occurred over the last 30 years.
Haru is, I think, one of the few films I’ve seen on the topic that really gets this need. Even though I’m not sure making the audience read long text chains is the way to express it, Morita knew he needed to make some kind of change in the language of cinema in order to reflect a change that was being felt with the proliferation of the internet.
Other films produced in Japan at this time were also grappling with this topic – Satoshi Kon, who I’ve written about extensively before, is often lauded for his prescience in regards to online fan cultures with Perfect Blue (1997). But even that film uses actual internet screens minimally and it’s not until Paprika in 2006 when Kon would try in a small way to work the internet into his dream world, ultimately minimizing it into one fragment of the human subconscious that operates on a similar level to cinema.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s creepy J-horror classic Pulse (2001), meanwhile, creates an eerie vision of ghosts trying to enter the world through the computer, including a disturbing website which shows images of dead bodies in dark rooms. But while the visual language here is great, neither Pulse nor Perfect Blue really push the boat out in terms of using computer screens in a unique way. Indeed, Pulse’s internet ghosts are often behave in similar ways to the VHS based horror of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998).
Many great recent films, from Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018) to Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2020) have accurately captured the feelings and thoughts of those using the internet – and something like Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) goes a long way to decoding the human origins of social media. But only a few films like Haru manage to replicate the feeling of using the internet.
Only one other that I’ve seen springs to mind, which is Jane Schoenbrun’s 2021 debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. A kind of horror/coming-of-age film, Schoenbrun tries and mainly succeeds in putting the visual language of the internet into the realm of cinema – think, for example, of the use of the Youtube loading wheel to create and sustain tension before showing the viewer something horrific or shocking.
But before I make it all sound like visual gimmick, the real revelation is how Schoenbrun accurately recreates the sense of distance that comes from using the internet. Although both World’s Fair and Eighth Grade show their lead characters creating vlogs, Eighth Grade uses these moments as a kind of ironic counterpoint to the protagonist’s real life, which we’re shown extensively. Most of that film takes place outside of the internet, despite its looming presence in the protagonist’s life, and the basic plot structure is strikingly similar to many other teen or coming-of-age movies, including ill-advised crushes and a final encounter with the nerdy kid who the protagonist is able to form a genuine connection with.
On the opposite side of this, World’s Fair takes place mainly inside the internet. While we occasionally see snippets of Casey (the protagonist)’s life outside, this takes up far less time than the amount we see of her making vlogs, aware of the camera pointed at her, and acting towards it. The glimpse of her real life makes the gap apparent, but we’re shown so little of it that it becomes impossible to grasp Casey as a person beyond what she tells us of herself. By the film’s denouement, all of that is called into question, and the viewer is made to ask how much we know of Casey.
In Haru, the disconnect between the character’s real lives and their online lives is also a big part of the narrative – these are characters who want to appear as someone else, just as Casey is. The internet give us all an opportunity to built an alternate version of ourselves and to communicate with those whose paths we would otherwise never cross.
It seems stupid to even talk about the impact it has had on our lives, like saying that the printing press was important or that water is wet. So it’s strange that I can only really think of two films that allow themselves to be moulded by the internet, and make an effort to change their form to respond to it. World’s Fair makes leaps forwards from the visual format of Haru, but they still feel like they’re borrowing from similar playbooks.
Not all films need to include it, but filmmakers shouldn’t shy away from tackling it head on. Cruise may be right to be scared of AI, but the internet itself isn’t a threat to Hollywood – indeed, it should really be embraced, rather than shied away from, if filmmakers seek to represent the world in which we now live.
In 2021, I wrote a review of Cyberpunk 2077, in which I mentioned briefly that the review was only relevant to the game in 2021 – it’s the reason I avoided talking about the game’s proliferation of bugs and glitches, because I knew that at some point in the future, a patch would address those issues. Now, not only is the game in a very different state to when I wrote that review, but a new and recently revealed expansion, Phantom Liberty is also set to make extensive changes to the base game, including some which may have addressed issues that I originally had with the game.
Games releasing now are in a constant state of flux, liable to change at a moment’s notice, and being worked on for a long time even after release. It’s not always clear what those changes will be, of course. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have received numerous patches since release, and are set to also get some extensive DLC content, but it now seems unlikely that the game’s poor visual quality and inconsistent performance will ever be fixed by GameFreak or TPC, who are seemingly more invested in the endless content churn.
Even games that were once broken may eventually get fixed in the form of a remake, remaster or definitive edition, however. Even games that are widely regarded as perfect and available on all platforms, such as Resident Evil 4, aren’t immune from being polished up, tweaked and spat out anew for another £60.
What this all means in practice is that being a games critic involves a lot of clarification in ways that other art forms aren’t – books are rarely released with spelling mistakes or plot holes that have to be fixed in reprints, and when films are remade, the resulting product is so different that unless you’re Psycho, you might as well treat, say, the two versions of Ocean’s Eleven as basically completely distinct from one another, their similarities only notable in a scholarly sense.
So it’s difficult to write about art that doesn’t stay still, or doesn’t have a fixed point in time. People have generally dismissed the need to worry too much about mechanical or quality of life changes, but remakes and patches are very rarely only mechanical. The Wind Waker HD may not see anyone complaining about the swift sail or the reworked Triforce Quest, but the game changes its entire lighting system, removing the cel-shading in favour of something far softer and more naturalistic. The change may be to your taste, but there’s no denying that it creates a different effect to playing the game.
Of course, I understand that there is a simple way to write about these things, referring to one as Wind Waker and the other as Wind Waker HD sorts it out if I ever need to make the distinction, and if not then the two are close enough to each other that I can group them in, but it does raise a potential issue of what makes a singular work of art?
Here we’re going to encounter a problem that I imagine must plague the mind of a lot of people who like to think critically about media. Let’s take Resident Evil 4 as an example. There are two versions of this game that basically follow a similar pattern (play as Leon, shoot zombies, rescue the President’s daughter). The level design is roughly the same, with only a few notable exceptions, the dialogue is edited but strives for a similar tone, the gameplay makes a few large revisions but the main way of communicating with the gameworld is still through the barrel of a gun.
Now there exists two distinct versions of the same thing. For some things, it won’t matter. If I like Resident Evil 4 for the level design and pacing, I probably mean I like both versions roughly the same. Give me either Resident Evil 4 and I’ll be happy. But if I like Resident Evil 4 for the way the character controls, suddenly there’s a problem. Do I like the more tanky controls of the original, or the freer movement of the remake?
In a way, this is a pretty simple problem to deal with, because the two versions of the game exists as separate physical problems. Let’s take it one step further, and talk about Blade Runner. This film has a number of different versions, from the original theatrical version to the director’s cut, to the final cut. I may enjoy different versions of these for different reasons, and indeed dislike others for relatively small differences, such as the addition or subtraction of voiceover.
Again, you may say that each of these versions is still readily available, and named distinctly to help critics separate them, with “theatrical”, “Director’s” and “Final” cuts. But what about a film like The Big Lebowski, the recent re-release of which altered the colour grade slightly, but noticeably? There’s no new naming convention for the different grades of Lebowski, you just have to know which DVD, Blu-ray or Digital version might contain which grade.
This may already be slightly concerning, but it gets a lot worse when you consider a film like Dunkirk, which I found myself enjoying when I saw it, on release in an IMAX screen, but which I imagine would be a hugely different experience when watched on a laptop, or an iPhone screen, or the back of someone else’s seat on a plane. Much of the power and impact of that film comes from the seats shaking every time a bullet is fired, and would be lost even on the best home cinemas.
Even tiny changes to a singular artistic work can make a huge difference as to the amount which you enjoyed or the way in which you respond to a work of art. Seeing something in the cinema versus watching on your laptop, or playing different versions of the same game will often result in wildly different interpretations and responses. This makes it incredibly difficult for critics to know how they might respond to any given work of art when seen under a different circumstance.
Art is entirely subjective, one might argue, but the difficult thing to come to terms with is just how subjective a person’s response to art truly is – it’s not just subject to you as a person and the ways in which your background might respond to certain things in art, but also to do with a million different circumstances you might not even be aware of. Which colour grade of a film you’re watching or which version of a game you’re playing could cause wild variations in your thoughts about that film or game. Theatre and music suffer the same inconsistencies, while books may be slightly more likely to avoid it. Exhibited fine art often goes to great lengths to ensure consistency in the way in which its seen, with museums regulating their lighting and positioning, but go and see a Monet painting in one gallery and it might seem one way, but when loaned out to another gallery and juxtaposed with another artist, and it might reveal depths you couldn’t possibly have noticed before.
In a way, this represents a terrifying loss of control for the viewer, particularly those who are fond of art criticism and analysis. After all, I could have loved An Autumn Afternoon if I’d seen it in a cinema, and probably would have a lower estimation of Dunkirk if I’d seen it at home. For the artist, this is an even greater risk, as it’s impossible to control an audience’s reaction to your art once it leaves your hands, no matter how many times Nolan advertises the correct seat in which to watch Oppenheimer. Or, for video game developers, many people’s first and only experience of Cyberpunk 2077 will be when CD Projekt Red’s managers shoved it out unfinished onto storefronts, and not now, when the game is finally polished enough to be in the form that its original creators may have desired.
In the end, all we can do is be aware of this problem and sympathetic to it. Learning from past experience is a start, but there’s no real way to know how to best experience a work of art, especially when it’s constantly changing. We must all just accept that sometimes we’ll miss out on seeing it at its best, and sometimes we’ll be at the right place at the right time to see something in a way that no one else ever will.
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