Spoiler Warning: Free Guy (2021)
The 2021 action hit Free Guy is a thrilling, fun, funny, and emotionally powerful summer ride for audiences. Ryan Reynold's confirmation that a second film is coming soon, and meta-comedy auteur Shawn Levy's quick confirmation of the announcement, seemed inevitable after the film's surprise success and potential for a follow-up. Still, the news comes as a relief for those of us who can't wait to see Blue Shirt Guy continue his quest to puzzle through the ultimate meaning of life and build a better world for his NPC compatriots; something we wish somebody would do for us (though we aren't video game characters, as far as we know)!
There's a lot to love about Free Guy. It's a fun, action-heavy comedy with heart and a deep understanding of the philosophical questions occupying many of us at this particular moment in society. It deals in the ethics and possibilities of artificial intelligence, the utility of video games, the personal and spiritual truths within all of us that feed into the technology we develop, and the real and virtual worlds we create. Tonally, it's just plain fun while dealing seriously with real, relatable existentialism. Free Guy's characters and themes emphasize care about individual development and greater social need, which we could really use in the real world. It also turned out to be a pretty pivotal romance.
Here is everything we loved so much about the movie and what we hope carries over in Free Guy 2!
What Makes Free Guy Worthy of a Sequel
In the age of meta movies that call upon the very mediums they communicate messages to the audience, Free Guy is a great entry. In addition to Taika Waititi being his hilarious self, there was a lot in this movie that was nuanced, enjoyable, and provocative in a big way. Blue Shirt Guy's coming to terms with his status as a nonplayer character in a world dominated by the destructive whims of "real" players, or living humans who enter the game to exhibit unbridled greed, lust, and violence, is intense and has a philosophical life outside the movie.
Blue Shirt Guy, or simply Guy, shouldn't even be conscious. He shouldn't be aware of his existence, and he shouldn't have the ability to make choices based on free will or veer from the path programmed for him by the minds outside his world. His developers eventually discover that he is the first example of sentient artificial intelligence. This catalyst gives Free Guy something exceptional to boast about when it comes to humans versus machines.
Guy's programmers, Keys and Millie, played by the impeccably charming and endearing Joe Keery and Jodie Comer, respectively, originally developed the code for Guy's world, Free City, with the intention of building it as the first observation-only game. These programmers came together to try and make the first artificial intelligence by creating a game that could evolve and live on its own, to be strictly visited by outside players who were free to roam and observe the world but never to influence or interact.
In this way, Keys and Millie were sitting on the greatest invention in computer science history: the first self-sufficient and self-evolving code. Unfortunately, they were preyed upon as college students by the tech giant Antwan, played eccentrically by Taika Waititi, who purchased their idea under false pretenses and illegally repurposed it to create Free City. It became a game with guns, ammo, and general Grand Theft Auto-type pubescent antics.
Millie has entered the game to try and prove that Antwan misused her and Keys' code. Enter Blue Shirt Guy, who, the moment he sees Millie's Free City character Molotov Girl, awakens and becomes a conscious, artificially intelligent entity. The day after Guy sees her, he is motivated to break his routine by wearing a differently styled blue shirt and ordering a different kind of coffee, setting off a chain reaction of encouraging other NPCs to fight back against the players' violence and, well, brew different types of coffee.
Keys eventually realizes that Guy woke up when he met Molotov Girl. Keys himself designed Guy to always look for love with a specific girl with particular tastes, quarks, and personality traits. Keys designed Guy to be in love with no one other than Millie because Keys himself is in love with her and infused the AI engine with his affection for her by programming it to love her. Ultimately, Keys' love for Millie generates the world's first artificially intelligent engine.
Exploring Love All Around Us
Love is what makes the world go-'round, and the world of Free Guy is no exception. If Keys hadn't loved Millie and built his life's work around her, he would never have been motivated to create something that became the greatest technological discovery in history. Free Guy is, at its heart, a deeply human love story and, most importantly, the things that love enables us to do. Without it, we are all just NPC zombies, wandering through a world with no desires and no control.
If nothing else, we hope that Free Guy 2 continues exploring the ways love manifests itself in the world. This includes the changes, new discoveries, and sometimes total craziness it is capable of spurring.