For most (self-identified, recovering, or undiagnosed) nerds, the “video game film” is a concept that causes revulsion, and not without reason. It is considered similar to the bad adaptation of a novel, the “Netflix adaptation.” The issue is that it’s actually the opposite.
When one looks at a novel, it is strictly text and print, wholly confined to that narrative, and generally within the hands of one (plus or minus an editor, proofreaders, etc.) individual, putting their world into the text to be read and interpreted. When you adapt a story into a film, a radio drama, a video game, you add to it. You add hands, eyes, tools, all working to craft and expand the narrative, to spread it into the further reaches of the medium, to add sound, music, acting, sets, costumes, lighting, and so on and so forth. However, with a video game, you remove mobility, interactivity, force feedback, control of chronology, and often even choice, in the hope of saying something new or different… or in the hope of making a quick buck.
This is why so few films capture the concept of a video game, and what it’s like to be in one. The merged perspective of player-as-audience, player-as-character, character-as-character, and character-as-puppet is difficult to comprehend without experiencing—without delving deeply—into such works. Few creators attempt to do so, in part because they don’t even know there’s something to do.
Most films about gaming fall flat, trying to express video games in terms of pure absurdity. Wreck-It Ralph, Free Guy, even works like Gerry and eXistenZ are built upon the point-of-view characters nudging each other and looking askance at the strangeness of their world. The world does not even feel real to them. They see the lack of logic, and they do not interact with it. At best, it’s Stoppard-esque. At worst, it’s bad comedy.
The film that best understands the actual experience of a video game is one that was never based on one. In fact, it is a movie that people thought was ripping off a video game.
Enter Nicolas Cage in Willy’s Wonderland. The plot is simple on its face: a man runs afoul of local law enforcement and is pressed into a night shift at the local scary abandoned fun palace/massacre site, as a set of disposable teenagers are brought in to be killed one by one in random and strange ways. What is new here? What does a two-bit slasher flick have to tell us about the human condition? What does it say about video games as art? And why this and not Five Nights at Freddy’s?
It comes to an acronym that does not exist in any other medium of fiction: NG+.
New Game Plus—NG+, Extra Mode, or “a golden run”—is the idea that a story is changed by interacting with it a second time, within the frame of the narrative itself. The “true” ending, or the “best” ending, is locked inside of a second run-through, often with a walkthrough and a guide. The guide usually has some checklist that seems utterly insane from an outside perspective, like “all missions must be completed with a Gold Medal ranking” or “You must save the dog astronaut before liftoff, but it is okay if he dies during re-entry.”
When someone reads a novel twice, what changes is their own perspective. Even House of Leaves doesn’t have a hidden “Johnny Truant Side Story” that you can only get if you read through it in two hours.
But this storytelling function is so ubiquitous to games that it’s second nature. Hell, the only attempted examples that come directly to mind are Clue’s many endings (one in each theater, or all of the above on the home release) and a shredded concept from Megalopolis that would have involved audience interaction. Funny enough, it’s most pronounced in games that are more like films or books; visual novels and dating sims make their bread and butter on all the myriad ways interactions can occur. Cinematic choice games from Supermassive and Quantic Dream have more branches than Yggdrasil.
And more often than not, the solution to bringing those choices from game to screen is to simply lop them all off and make them ancient history, or make the timeline long enough that the survival rate hits zero (looking at you, Fallout).
But I digress. Back to Nic Cage and the survivors of Willy’s Wonderland. You look at the survival group, and you could very easily see something out of the game Dark Pictures Anthology: characters just annoying enough to be fodder, but just charming enough (for the most part; I’m sure I will get arguments) that if they made a couple different choices they might survive it all. The problem is, the world they’re in is not one where that is programmed.
Another small digression: by my definition, a horror movie needs you to root for the ones who live. Directors like Dunstan and Melton and Roth are fools. If you don’t empathize or identify with a character, there are no stakes. Yes, I am saying this about a story where two people bang in a ballpit and are then murdered. But part of that is the strength of the acting—with an additional shoutout to Emily Tosta, who portrays the final girl, Liv, as both realistically shortsighted as a teenager, and somewhat hardened and street smart—and to the larger cast as a whole.
Which brings us back to the start, and the crux, of the situation: Nic Cage is playing an entirely unspeaking (though not mute) badass. From environmental storytelling, we know three things: he hates to waste time, he has a nice car, and he has military experience. Beyond that, there is only one other thing: he fulfills his mission to its fullest. Cage’s performance recalls the Kuleshov effect: he has a jaded, suspicious, somewhat angry look throughout the entire film. Despite the fact that he is strong enough to fight multiple mascot maniacs to a point of destruction on zero sleep, he falls into the obvious trap.
The introduction to the titular Wonderland is perfect tutorial fodder: Cage’s character is shown the various elements to clean and tend to, told to rest often, keep hydrated—oh and hey, pinball! Then he hops right to it, keeping on a regimented schedule. Is it because he’s a special forces badass? Does he have some kind of mental thing going on? Is he secretly trying to uncover the mystery? Or does he really want his car?
None of those are the actual answer. They’re true for the character, but not for the controlling “player.” The “player” has done this before. Or at the very least, they have a walkthrough by their side from someone else who has done this before. Look at the requirements for golden endings in most games with choice, or at least challenges. Games like Dead Rising, Ocarina of Time, anything by Supermassive—all of these games feature fatalities. Some people die (canon events, for lack of a better term). Part of the storyline. Unavoidable.
If you look at Nic Cage’s character as a person, his morality is confusing, scrambled, nonsensical. Why does he do anything? Whatever internal moral code he could have is completely gone.
He wants to clean everything up, but when attacked by the animatronics, he will destroy with extreme prejudice. Hell, he practically combos on them. There’s little reason for him to fear anything, and once he knows they’re all evil, why not just break them and destroy them? Why not just smack them while they stand there? Why wait until the boss music starts playing in the bathroom? Does he not have a responsibility to act? Is it some strange form of OCD?
If you look at it as a player, though? He is doing everything that he can to ensure that the golden ending occurs: the one where the other main character gets to live, the monsters all die, and the villains get their comeuppance. He doesn’t care because there is no point in caring. More than that, there is no mechanism to care. He cannot press A to give someone a cooldown hug. There’s no dialogue choice or speech check to get them all to go home so he can do a solo run, Cyberpunk 2077-style.
Look at the way he manhandles characters, and pushes them around and out of the way—just kind of walks into and shoves them along and continues with his one-night-only janitorial duties. If you look at it as a character with a player? It’s like this is an escort NPC without a button prompt to click, and Cage is interacting in the only way programmed into the constraints of the system. As in Jump jump jump jump, shove shove shove push, “Oh my god, get out of my way, if I don’t get into the room I’m going to miss the cutscene and the run is ruined” kind of stuff.
It’s all of those questions about how Zelda’s Link looks from the outside: the stoic stranger who communicates only through movement and the attack button. The other characters even act like NPCs with a few extra lines—not just that he’s being utterly weird, but a step beyond that.
He cannot attack the bosses until the boss fight. He has to fight them in an exact order, while ensuring that the Wonderland is still cleaned to S rank on every stage it is graded on. Anything less risks the golden ending, mechanics and concepts of which are little more than a checklist by some unknown hand above, some guiding game master who has coded the world to have choice… but only just so much.
Finally, the cornerstone of this whole interpretation? The hourly breaks. Throughout all of this chaos, somehow Cage’s character finds time to get some cola, and play pinball, regardless of what new and fresh madness he gets into. On the one hand, it’s a perfect metaphor for the autosave—Suda51-codified bathroom breaks as a save mechanic back in the late ’00s. But on the other? It’s part of the checklist.
The first bit of evidence for this is a bit of tonally perfect improv. The last time the character plays pinball, he does this strange Nic Cage dance that wasn’t in the script. It’s glorious and utterly out of nowhere, a symbol of his individuality and personal freedom as an actor. But look at it through the game lens—it’s the little cutscene you get as proof you’ve completed part of the checklist. The jingle of opening a chest. The level-up animation. More than an Easter egg, it’s something that you would have been doing from the very start of the game, and doing diligently, without any dialogue box warning—something you’d only be doing with a walkthrough, or after a lot of trial and error.
The second bit of evidence is the fact that a Five Nights at Freddy’s game actually had a similar mechanism. In Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach, a set of three retro arcade cabinets are hidden throughout the sprawling Pizzaplex you run through, all titled “Princess Quest.” One ending is entirely locked behind finding and playing through all three cabinets, the last of which can only be found at the very last chapter. In fact, it even involves saving a female supporting character!
So, why does this make Willy’s Wonderland the best video game movie when it’s not actually based on a video game—when it’s just taking general elements and vibes from a larger series, easily mistaken for a knockoff on a streaming selection rather than true art?
The answer is: it’s not trying to be a video game movie. The film is perfectly enjoyable without this interpretation; it’s just elevated by that interpretation. It isn’t winking at the camera every ten seconds about how to heal, or inside references that just drop a name for an item with no plot relevance. The screenwriter didn’t shove in a Nic Cage voiceover about how he’s stuck in the face of some Max Payne, perma-scowled body and longing to get out.
Those things are not part of most video game experiences. Most video games are an escape, an embodiment, an exploration. They ask you to suspend your disbelief, to believe that the world its characters inhabit is not some metanarrative, but simply is—a place where people live and die, a place for you to not only enjoy, but to care. They don’t see their health bars, they don’t see their relationship meters, they are not aware of some programmer who has not given them a part in the epilogue cutscene. They simply are.
In fact, Nic Cage’s Janitor simply is. He does as he’s told. He kills the monsters. He saves the girl. He drives a cool car right into the sunset. But if you look close, even if it’s not intentional by the actor, even if it’s not even considered by the creators, you can see another figure inside of that frame, two thumbs on joysticks, triumphant as he effortlessly destroys another mechanical mascot, hitting X to shove aside someone he can never save. Just beneath the skin, he’s screaming.
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