I finally got the opportunity to watch Free Guy recently. Before I go any further, there are probably going to be spoilers here. The further we get from the original release date, the less that will matter. However, there may be some people who still haven't seen this movie and don't want it spoiled. I will say it was a good movie that could have been better. I enjoy movies in this genre.

Oscar Isaac gets quite naked, and then he gets quite dead. Timothée Chalamet, as Paul Atreides, falls in love with a girl, played by Zendaya, who's on screen for all of seven minutes. They barely speak; most of their courtship proceeds in visions and hazy dreams--the safest of social distances. Not that most real-world teens would even play Seven Minutes in Heaven these days. If they didn't already prefer to achieve sexual awakening as Paul does--remotely--then the past two years of Covid-19 protocols will have inculcated in their psyches the belief that a policy of No Touching is not only law-abiding but, for a lot of them, ideal.

Free Guy bills itself as a comedy, but it exists in a world in which Ryan Reynolds doesn't exist. Which, of course, makes it a tragedy. The movie solves this problem by building its own Ryan Reynolds out of code, inside a video game. But, Guy (Reynolds) is more than just a simple NPC. In truth, the emergence of Guy as a fully-fledged awareness inside the game wasn't wholly directed.

Free Guy is pop culture in a blender. Largely set in a video game that feels like a cross between Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto, the movie feels both incredibly familiar and brand new. According to Ryan Reynolds, who stars as a non-playable character named Guy, that's by design. "A wholesale, original non-IP, non-comic-book, non-sequel movie is an increasingly rare unicorn these days," Reynolds tells WIRED. "I remember as a kid getting to see Back to the Future for the first time, and I'm not comparing our movie to Back to the Future, but I kind of wanted it to have a bit of that magic. I love being immersed in a world I'm unfamiliar with, and experiencing real wish-fulfillment is something that harkens back to, like, the Amblin days."

In Free Guy, the new film from director Shawn Levy and screenwriters Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn, Ryan Reynolds plays an NPC--a non-playable character--from a video game. Over the course of the movie, Reynolds' character becomes conscious, falls in love, and eventually learns how to use lightsabers, Captain America's shield, and a grab-bag of intellectual property controlled or licensed for the movie by the Walt Disney Company. It's not the first time NPCs have been featured on-screen, but no other film has spent as much time exploring their inner lives. To find out how NPCs felt about their moment in the spotlight, I travelled to several video game universes and asked any NPC I could find what they thought about Free Guy. Here's what they told me.

But the first and most prevalent gimmick is the sunglasses. In Free City, the fictitious shooter game at the center of the story, sunglasses are what signify a player: someone who can shoot up a bank, steal a car, face-punch a stranger. They are, Guy (Reynolds) says, the "heroes." Similar to the shades in the movie They Live, the players' eyewear works like in-game augmented reality specs, showing scores, power-ups, loot, etc. Sunglasses are the lens through which players are meant to experience Free City's metaverse and decode its mysteries. Guy, the audience eventually learns, is more than just an NPC in Free City--he's actually an artificially intelligent bit of code left there by the game's original developers, and he is just starting to gain sentience.

The hero of "Free Guy" is a guy named Guy (Ryan Reynolds). He has a best buddy named Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), and they live in a city named Free City. What, however, is the nature of their liberty? Guy wakes up every morning, dons an identical blue shirt, buys a cup of coffee, and goes to a bank, where he works as a teller. His customary greeting is "Don't have a good day.

This post contains spoilers for Free Guy. Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds' new, hammy vehicle in which he plays a self-aware video game character, didn't start its life as a Disney movie. The movie was already in production when the House of Mouse bought Fox, at which point the comedy became yet another member of the Disney family. Despite being a bland Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto Online rip-off, Free City is apparently massively popular around the world: Real-life streamers Ninja and Jacksepticeye make cameos as Free City players, we're told the game has won tons of awards from IGN, and even Good Morning America is covering the its viral moments. As an NPC, Guy is only supposed to be set dressing for the real users. But because of a contrived, nonsensical plot device, he gains access to some hidden code within the game that grants him artificial intelligence.

Thanks to some extremely advanced artificial intelligence code we won't attempt to explain here, Guy is the only NPC (non-playable character) in Free City who is able to think and feel things for himself. As a result, he starts to become bored with his everyday life.

Things are moving forward for video game focused action-comedy Free Guy. The movie, which stars Deadpool favorite Ryan Reynolds, has just signed Killing Eve's Jodie Comer, Get Out's Lil Rel and Stranger Things' Joe Keery in supporting roles. Free Guy -- set to begin shooting in April -- tells the story of a background character (Reynolds) who realizes he's living in a video game, and with the help of an avatar (Comer), must stop the game's developers from shutting down his world. Shawn Levy is attached to direct, which means he'll be stepping away from Uncharted, the long-awaited live action adaptation of the game. The movie, which is loosely based on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, has been in the works for some time, with a multiple writers and directors coming and going.