| Game Therapy | |
| Director: | Ryan Travis |
| Editing: | Tommaso Gallone |
| Distributor: | Key Films |
| Runtime: | 97 minutes |
| Budget: | $1,341,185 |
| Gross: | $1,341,185[1] |
Game Therapy is a 2015 Italian-American science-fiction film directed by Ryan Travis. The film features various Italian YouTubers, including Favij.
The film was released in theaters in Italy on 22 October 2015.
Holden Latter, the biggest video game creator, is interviewed. The man claims he wants a virtual world in which impossibility becomes possible, a world where a player can find anything he searches for.
Francesco, an 18-year-old hacker, has a complicated life: he is tormented at school by a bully called Gianfilippo, Francesco's mother, who kicked out of the house the father, he already started a relation with a younger woman, and he is forced to be followed by psychologists.
Giovanni is a friend gamer of Francesco who spends his days playing on his computer and PlayStation. His brother, Federico, oriental meditation teacher, tries to help him with his addiction.
One day Francesco finds an easter egg in a program created by Holden and hacking him, he finds coordinates that took him under the subway where he finds one of the biggest creations on Earth: a device that, via a brain connection, can send a person's consciousness inside a videogame. The game is described by comparing it to Saturn: there are various concentric levels (like the so-said planet's rings) and you can move from one level to another via a shuttle elevator. Every level depicts various games such as Assassin's Creed, Just Dance and Grand Theft Auto V. Everything is controlled by Francesco where he can make appear anything he wants in virtual reality.
The next day Francesco starts the "Game Therapy" with Giovanni who is brain loaded into Assassin's Creed while Francesco follows him step by step connected to a computer outside the virtual world. Giovanni learns how to control his own avatar who can push himself through the limits of human race. To train Giovanni, Francesco sends him in Call of Duty where he gets injured. If a player gets injured his consciousness suffers harm while in case of death it is impossible to reconnect him in the videogame but he can only return to real life. After he gets out from the device, Francesco and Giovanni start making appointments for their Game Therapy.
In the following days Giovanni falls in love with Danika where he starts a relationship. The Game Therapy continues and inside Just Dance Giovanni gets humiliated because he can't dance. Then in GTA V Giovanni saves a little girl during a shooting between traffickers while the game mission didn't ask for it. But in Uncharted Giovanni and Francesco discover that inside the game there's an unknown entity: a Spectrum, a sort of virus and not origin from the game. The Spectrum tries to kill Giovanni trying to put him in a cube-prison: if it happens like this Giovanni would be disconnected from his body ending in a coma. Luckily, Francesco makes him escape with the "Evacuazione di Emergenza" (Emergency Evacuation) button. Francesco reveals to Giovanni his true intentions: he wants to find the Multiverse's key, an universe where everything is possible and the world gets commanded by the player, so that they can enter and leave real life that he believes filled of dissatisfactions. Trying again to get the key Giovanni gets almost killed and Francesco is forced to disconnect him.
Meanwhile, Giovanni's life continues to get worse because he is forced to choose between Danika and the Game Therapy and he can't do the right thing. Francesco is able to create a multiplayer mode to recover the key. Francesco and Giovanni arrive to Battlefield, where they face the Spectrum, discovering that it isn't about Holden Latter, the creator of the Multiverse who wanted to find the key to control it, but something disconnected him inside virtual reality. In fact he programmed the coordinates in the Easter Egg so that someone can find his device to connect himself to the Multiverse and find the key for him. After a violent combat they get transported into the Master Console, an interstellar space where all the game codes and data are generated. Holden pierces Giovanni and fights against Francesco, but luckily Giovanni frees himself and launches a device that sucks Holden's source code trapping him; before disappearing, he launches a dagger to Giovanni that killing him he gets sent again in the real world. Francesco, remained inside, to prevent that the game ends in the hands of Holden's glitch, but also to make her mother pay, in which he believes her guilty of destroying the family they were, decides to open with the key the Master Console becoming Master Gamer. Francesco can now control everything in the videogame, but at a high price: he will no longer return in the real world, and if he gets disconnected he will die becoming a code. The suicide natura of Francesco's action saves the Multiverse that turns off and goes haywire. In the real world, Giovanni manages to pass school tests, to recconect his brother's relationships and get back with Danika.
The film was shot in 2015 between Italy, Morocco and Los Angeles.
The first teaser trailer was released on 3 July 2015.[2] The official trailer came out on 28 August 2015.[3]
The film premiered on 21 October 2015 at the Rome Film Festival. At the premiere many Italian YouTubers participated. The film was then released on 22 October 2015 and distributed by Key Films.
The film earned €740 thousand, placing fifth.[4]
The film has received negative options from Italian critic.[5] Gabriele Niola of MyMovies wrote: "A formidable idea and potentially exciting becomes a retroguardist film and with a plot full of holes".[6]
Giorgio Viario of Best Movie wrote that:
The film has an explicit educational intent, but in reality the center of interest is linguistic: in the sense that Favij and Clapis speak a language that is never heard in cinema and on TV; they build a bridge with the Internet and above all with the world of gamers, more generally with the generation of children aged 12 to 16. Unfortunately the film rarely allows this space, and in fact makes the most banal mistake: that of closing them inside a message and a narrative box, both rigid and lopsided.[7]Antonio Cuomo of Movieplayer wrote:
However, we don't want to be snobbish and mistreat Game Therapy on principle, because we are gamers too and we would have liked the idea behind the film to be better developed, doing justice to the world it accompanies. But if it is presented to us as a film, if it arrives in theaters (in about three hundred theaters, among other things), we cannot fail to notice the banality of the script and its construction, the quality of the costumes that disfigures compared to some cosplayers seen in I go around specialized fairs, the acting is insufficient, the average level is that of a webseries that is not particularly inspired. Because that's the feeling it gives.[8]Davide Turrini of Il Fatto Quotidiano wrote that: "it was enough to scroll through a few sequences to understand that Game Therapy is related to any of the cinepanettoni of the nineties/early 2000s who wanted to entertain the viewer at all costs despite the tired repetition of the successful original matrix".[9]
The film received the David di Donatello award for Best Visual Effects.[10]