A charming tribute to the early era of video gaming
During cicada season in 1980s Baltimore, computing enthusiast and ASCII artist Conor, a loner who avoids leaving his house and whose only friend is his rescue dog, buys a new video game that promises an advanced immersive experience. After what seems at first to be a disappointing test run, it gradually becomes clear that the type of immersion he’s getting is of a rather extreme kind: the game’s villain starts invading his TV screens, his printer, his backyard and his dreams. The plot of the game blends into his life, capturing his neighbor, his dog, his childhood memories and his secret fears. Maybe it no longer matters whether he can make it back to reality, as long as he gets a happy ending?
Albert Birney’s independent film OBEX is full of what video game reviewer Aidan Moher affectionately likes to call “hot CRT action.” Conor’s life is experienced through screens, from the morning variety/news show that presides over his breakfasts to his home office computer to the karaoke list he uses to sing himself to sleep. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, we’re shown what he does for a living: he turns people’s family photos into ASCII art that he painstakingly types by hand with fearsomely timed precision. He digitizes dozens of people every day, not unlike what the video game will do to him.
In fact, there’s an even cleverer form of foreshadowing in the first act. The events in the movie coincide with the periodic emergence of adult cicadas from their years-long undergroun hibernation, and Conor watches on the TV a chef who suggests ways to cook cicadas. Conor notes the cosmic joke that it must be to spend that many years in quiet solitude and end up eaten on screen. That description, it turns out, also applies to Conor, who has set for himself a simple and steady routine of working at home until he gets trapped by a video game.
I was too young to know what it was like to live through the first years of the home computer, but OBEX succeeds at giving me the feeling that it captures that era faithfully and lovingly. The retro computer graphics are made with admirable attention to detail. Also, it’s a genius choice of sound design that the mating call of cicadas is echoed by the noise of TV static and the screech of a dot matrix printer. Writer/director Birney gives an endearing performance as Conor, establishing the character’s effortless likeability as a harmless weirdo. The choice to film in black and white brings to mind elements of Pi, another story of obsessive computing, as well as Pleasantville, another inexplicable journey into audiovisual media.
Inside the game, the quest is straightforward: there’s a demon lord terrorizing the kingdom, and the player is the chosen hero who shall slay him. To make matters more personal, the demon kidnaps Conor’s dog (or so it would seem; the ending retroactively blurs the line between the real world and the game world). What began as a paranoid psychological thriller becomes a horror chase, with human-sized cicadas, murderous skeletons and lots of squirting blood. The final battle between Conor and the demon is exactly as adorably cheesy as one might expect.
Alas, I preferred the first half of the movie, when the scenes are restricted to Conor’s house, to the second half, when he’s thrown into the world of the game and has to walk through a forest to find the villain’s lair. Birney displays far more expertise in camera placement and shot composition when he has to film in a set than in exterior shots. The causal sequence of events is also more solid during the first half as opposed to the almost freeform plotting of the fantasy quest. After Conor enters the game, he gains a sidekick who has a TV screen instead of a head, which means we never see the actor’s expressions. This forces Birney to carry the emotional weight of those scenes all on his own, which strains the enjoyability of the second half of the story.
OBEX manages to both push the right nostalgic buttons and have something to say about present-day computing. We think nothing of watching screens, but recently it’s the screens that are watching us. Are you on camera right now? Don’t take any risks. Smile.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
