Game Over and Over: IRON LUNG

Twenty or thirty years ago it was common to find critics saying a particularly deadening action movie felt like watching someone else play a video game. Little did they know that millions of people apparently wanted to do just that. I don’t get it myself, but younger audiences apparently are all about it, turning watching others play video games into a big business. YouTubers and Twitch streamers get sizable audiences and followings (and paydays) for bringing their viewers along level by level. With 38 million subscribers, YouTuber Markiplier’s gotten quite a large fanbase. Now he’s self-financed an independent video game adaptation called Iron Lung. He cast himself in the lead. He’s a late-30s gamer with long dark hair, broad shoulders, and a deep voice. Squint and you’d think he’s Keanu Reeves’ stunt double. He makes himself a reasonable leading man, especially considering he’s the only one on screen. It shouldn’t be surprising to find a guy who has built a following out of people wanting to watch him for hours on end would make decent company in a movie that’s basically all him. 

The story is set in an apocalyptic future, built out of incomprehensible word-building that’s more alluded to than explained. (Maybe it overly assumes familiarity with the source material.) The guy is a convict trapped in a tiny submarine and tasked with looking for monsters on the floor of an ocean of blood. (It’s the kind of dark Mad Libs that pass for edgy in some sci-fi circles.) This practically means we hear him listening and responding to commands crackling over a radio, then strategizing as he clicks and types, operating nobs and switches and levers while reading charts and numbers. So we’re watching him play the game. I’ll confess my heart sank a little as I realized that we’d never leave the tiny, dingy, dimly lit set, watching iterations on the same scenes over and over, level by level. It’s an adaptation of the game, but just as much an adaptation of his videos playing through it. Yet the movie finds convincing, enveloping sound design and steady canted angles and sweaty closeups to make its little space feel genuinely lost in a larger picture, buffeted by unseen threats, creaking leaks, and pressure changes. A conceit of a large screen flashing pictures from a radioactive camera as the only way to see outside adds some interesting visual interest. And even though the plodding pace grows claustrophobic, it’s also partially the point. 

I found myself wishing the whole was as interesting as the parts as the 127 minute run time gets quite repetitive. We watch the coordinates on the sub’s instrument panel tick by, hear garbled voices rumbling over the speakers, see Markiplier talking to himself. Lots of insert shots and tedious mumbling fill up time. And in all that time, it’s never really getting around to fleshing out backstories or context. We see lots of shots of condensation and vague, grainy underwater creatures, and glimpses of inscrutable flashbacks. Blood drips down pipes. Bolts creak. Lights flicker. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. The whole thing feels as lost and adrift as the submarine we are trapped in. We’ve quickly seen all the movie’s tricks. Soon its surprises aren’t surprising. Even the conclusion, which reaches for wild imagery, ends up closer to discount Event Horizon. I had the feeling that this would be quite a clever calling card feature at 70 or 80 minutes. In the world of cult classic one-location horror debuts, it’s not as clever as the geometric maze torture chamber Cube, but it’s also not too far off. A little energy, concision, and clarity would’ve gotten it there. But, perhaps because YouTubers have been trained by the algorithm to stretch for time, this movie just keeps going and going.