NERVE

NERVE. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, dirs. Jessica Sharzer, script, based on the novel by Jeanne Ryan. Chris Trujillo, production design. Marc Benacerraf, art direction. USA: Allison Shearmur Productions, Keep Your Head, Lionsgate, Supermarché (prod.) / Lionsgate (US and UK dist.), 2016; see IMDb for details on distribution.

Present-day, "mundane" teen action-adventure movie, with a plot including one-and-a-fraction rather sweet love stories and, relevant here, the premise of an on-line, crowd-sourced, wiki-like game of Truth or Dare, but without the "Truth" part. The anonymous plot summary on IMDb on 8 August 2016 is somewhat misleading about the nature of the game but insightful as talking of the main player (and the others) "immersed" in the game. Some of the visuals show an augmented-reality aerial view of New York City with graphics identifying and locating the players; other images also suggest the real world of the film inside of the world of the game and in intimate relation with computers and social media. Dialog and imagery in NERVE give a nod to the MAD MAX series, with a climactic scene in an Industrial space that functions as a contemporary Thunderdome, but with a very large number of smart phones. See for very frequent, eventually threatening surveillance by "Little Brothers" with smart phones, and by oneself, and an antagonist that is both those who designed and run the game and the significantly anonymous crowd of "Watchers" who individually and as a social-media crowd can participate as well as watch the game. Also, note the brief shot that shows a ceiling decoration of fluorescent hexagons; there is no obvious significance to the hexagons — the possibility of "the cybernetic hive" isn't developed in NERVE —but, as has been noted, the trope of the hexagon is very common.

RDE 08/VIII/16