“You can’t make a deal with machines, Commander.”

Justin’s rating: Player one has left the chat

Justin’s review: One of the strangest and ugliest developments in ’90s video game technology was FMV — full motion video. Thanks to the leap in storage capacity on optical discs, game studios flirted with the idea of shooting real footage, digitizing it, and including it into their titles. This was a significant novelty for a couple years there, mostly showing up in adventure games (which were already movie-like) but also making cameos in other genres.

The thing about FMV is that “novelty” was all it had going for it. It looked like grainy poop  in super-small resolution, and once people got used to it, they were done with it. Yet there was a lot of FMV shot during this period, and someone had the not-so-bright idea of taking some of that extra footage and stitching it into a movie.

Why? Because someone’s a down and dirty cheapskate, that’s why.

So if you’re going to use a half-hour of FMV from various video games dating back to 1993, you’re going to want to theme your movie as something video gamish. In this case, it’s some weird future where a rebellious hacker named Steve Hunter is forced by a new supercomputer named Drexel to play a lot of games in order to stop it from going rogue and erasing all other computers in the world. Steve’s also got to contend with the famous Net Police, who hate him tremendously because reasons.

That’s all the excuse this film needs for trotting out nearly 10-year-old video game footage that matches not at all with the rest of the footage. It’s in this game that Steve connects with his AI girlfriend Jo (Yasmine Bleeth of Baywatch fame).

If you took the visual style of soap operas, meshed it with a whole lot of generally clueless hacker lingo, and then slathered it with Sega Saturn game footage, you’d end up with an indigestible mess called Game Over. It’s a movie that missed the boat on trying to comment on video game culture by about a half-decade back when people would watch and care about this sort of thing.

But it is gloriously bad in a way that only TV movies can be. Star Trek’s Walter Koenig even shows up as the human visage of the supercomputer, although he’s dubbed over with a creepy kids voice in a move that I find perplexing.

Have fun learning about obscure games — one of which is a Mike Ditka football title, another was never released — and immersing yourself into the finest CGI that a mid-90s mid-budget studio could make. Another thing about FMV is that it was usually shot in a first-person perspective, which means that this movie has people breaking the fourth wall constantly to talk to the viewer/player.

As you might expect, none of this makes sense narratively, and it also doesn’t look that cool because it’s 1993 computer cheese handed to viewers in an era where they’d just seen the full Lord of the Rings trilogy. And because he’s the glue that holds all this together, Steve Hunter must spend the entire film doing chair acting — writhing about as he’s hit, jerking his head as people talkl to him, and fiddling his hand over a trackball.

It’s captivating.

I’m sure you could make an argument that Game Over preserves this extremely niche era of FMV, but I’d counter that YouTube has that covered quite well. Otherwise, it’s a bizarre anomaly that never had the chance of being a good movie. Weird, yes, but not remotely good.

Intermission!

• This is also called Maximum Surge, which one of the games from which this movie steals its footage
• The Net Police! Policing the net since we were calling it “The Net”
• “Maximum Surge” sounds more like a high-energy drink than a video game, I think we can all agree
• Who puts a keyboard ON THEIR WALL?
• AI was invented and perfected in the ’90s, didn’t you know
• That girl has the most sunken eyes I’ve ever seen
• “Teenage mutant hacker” sounds awesome
• Shooting a car computer with your pistol will not make you deaf, apparently
• That is awful headshot rendering
• Computer hackers love lava lamps, haven’t you noticed?
• Zoey is adorable and really loves basketball
• Drexel could make Gary Coleman president? That’s a deep cut right there.
• Battling scorpions! Is that a metaphor?
• “I’m a… I’m a virgin sir.” OK this is not professional conversational topic.
• “Stick with the flock!” is such a good military command
• Island zombie! Defeated by a flipped machete thrown by a Rastafarian.
• Hey it’s that weird dude from Ghost as a voodoo dude