When I sat down to watch Free Guy, I was expecting some kind of imitation of the movie Ready Player One, where characters from within and without a video game must save it from being commandeered by a greedy tyrant, a pleb rises to prominence, and cheesy comedy and cringey romance abound. What I got instead was a stunningly clever film that tackles some of the deepest questions of human existence while keeping you on the edge of your seat and laughing all the way. Well-made, well-acted, and well-told, Free Guy is profoundly philosophical and effortlessly funny, with an admirable moral. Though imperfect, the film encourages its audience to use one’s freedom for good. It’s refreshing to see Hollywood promote right living through a tale that ultimately becomes a reflection of the divine love story. As a good myth should, Free Guy inspires its audience to live well and to grasp the purpose of beauty.

At the outset of the story, Guy is in bondage. As a non-player character (NPC) in an open-world video game, Guy has no free will. He’s a cheerful prisoner, despite spending every day wearing the same clothes, going to the same job, saying the same lines, ordering the same “medium coffee, cream, two sugars” as he has always done. He goes through the motions and never departs from the “loop” of his programming. Nevertheless, he has one dream: to meet the woman of his dreams and fall in love. 

Then one day, he does, and Guy’s endless loop of sameness is broken. Suddenly, Guy starts choosing things. He asks for a different coffee. He stands up for himself at work. He buys new shoes. After meeting Millie, Guy is not interested in the quotidian world of ignorance he had known before: he realizes that there is more to life than going through the motions. He glimpses a life of purpose and direction, and he runs after it. Guy enthusiastically proselytizes his new freedom to the other NPCs, but most of them are scandalized. Like Guy, they are ignorant of the fact that they are all NPCs in a video game, and they cannot comprehend deviating from their programming. Somehow, love has unlocked Guy’s artificial intelligence, and he — not dissuaded by his companions’ disapproval — puts his newfound freedom into action to pursue Millie, the girl of his dreams. 

The problem is, the girl of his dreams is not an NPC — she’s a real-life woman playing a video game. Millie assumes Guy is another real-life player character (PC) playing Free City, and seeing his complete ignorance of the game, she tells him to level up before even considering talking to her again. “Get stuff,” she tells him. “Experience. … Money. This is Free City: you can rob a store; carjack someone; punch a pedestrian in the face. You’ll figure it out.” Now, it’s important to note that Free City’s morality is basically equivalent to that of the video game Grand Theft Auto: steal, kill, and destroy. As Millie sees it, Free City was created to serve those who want to revel in violence, cruelty, and greed. Yet Guy responds to Millie’s cynicism with a life principle that is completely at odds with her conception of Free City: “Oh, I never hurt innocent people.” Millie, both refreshed and confused by Guy’s naïveté, half-seriously tells him to try leveling up as the “good guy,” not really expecting to see him again. But then Guy does level up. In fact, he levels up so rapidly by doing good deeds that he becomes an internet sensation, upending the entire gaming community’s understanding of success: maybe there’s some good in this world after all, and it’s worth fighting for. 

Guy’s “good-guy” success isn’t the only challenge to characters’ preconceived notions of reality. Eventually, Millie and Keys, the other real-world protagonist, realize that Guy is not a player but an artificially intelligent NPC. They decide to reveal Guy’s artificial intelligence to him so that he can help them restore the game. When he discovers he is an AI, Guy is shattered, and he questions the nature of his own existence and the reality of the world around him. His earlier elation at being free turns into rage at the apparent meaninglessness of his life. Like a madman announcing that God is dead, he cries out to his fellow NPCs, “Don’t any of you get it? None of this matters! None of it! It’s fake! We don’t matter.” 

In intense self-doubt, Guy consults his best friend, Buddy, who responds by articulating the film’s centralizing philosophy: “So what if I’m not real?…Even if I’m not real, this moment is…What’s more real than a person trying to help someone they love?” Although that response does not provide the assurance of reality that we as Christians know we can have, it is refreshing to see a movie that is willing to intelligently interact with sincere human doubts about life and reality — especially one that comes to an optimistic conclusion. Even if this world is an illusion, the film states, love is real and life is still worth living: this world and other people need our help. Perhaps we can find purpose in caring for them. 

In the same way that love overwhelms Guy’s bleak despair, hope shines forth in the midst of Free City’s depravity. Despite Millie’s earlier comments about Free City’s recommended path to success, the game wasn’t made to be a self-serving hellhole at all. As it turns out, Free City was programmed using the source code that Millie and Keys created for a different game called Life Itself (also referred to as Paradise). They sold the code to a game developer named Antwan, who promised to publish it, but instead distorted the code for Paradise to make a game that served his own selfish purposes. Thus, the game’s reality is not as it seems. The world, though it seems crafted to serve evil and promote injustice, was originally created to be a place of bliss. Antwan was only able to make the game, with all its appearance of selfish evil, by hijacking the code for Paradise. Yet despite his best efforts, Paradise’s arch-nemesis failed to conceal every trace of it. When Guy finds a physical reflection of the code — or “build” — for Paradise in the game, Millie cries, “Antwan hid our original build past the horizon, making it invisible, but he forgot to scrub the reflections!” 

Antwan is not the only one who forgot to — or could not — scrub the reflections of a world that was meant to be Paradise. This world, the one that you and I live in, was also created to be Paradise. God created a world of bliss, and although he was not hoodwinked like Millie and Keys were, His world has been similarly perverted by one who seeks only to steal, kill, and destroy, and to deceive people to do the same. And yet, no matter how much the devil tries to twist our world’s design to cause us to think that life is not worth living — or that we don’t exist and life is meaningless — he can’t get rid of the reflections of Paradise. Our perverted world still proclaims God’s presence and power. 

Despite the pain and suffering in this world, evidence of God’s love abides in its every solitary corner. Take a hint from the Romantics and contemplate the beauty of the earth: grace abounds in flower, tree, and sky. Pause, and look at the friend sitting across from you, or think of a beloved family member: love is real. These people, with all their flaws and imperfections, are images of God’s love. God has embedded His glory in our very nature as humans. Christ plays in ten thousand places — in the features of men’s faces. We have each been imprinted with the divine image that reflects the Divine Image Himself. Like prisms refracting our Creator’s light, we through our creative acts and our love toward others can restore pieces of Paradise to our distorted world. In those tiny acts of love, we reflect the divine Lover who sacrificed himself to restore the world to the way it was meant to be, to bring us into Paradise with Himself. Yes, our world has been hijacked. Yet God, who is rich in mercy, has redeemed us, and plans to one day replace our “Free City” with “Life Itself.” In the meantime, he has implanted in this world a multitude of images that reflect eternity, calling forth to the life and the world that will be. Though it is now Paradise lost, one day it will be Paradise regained. 

Ultimately, Free Guy accomplishes more than its creators set out to do. Despite the movie’s artful though possibly unintentional allegory of the Fall, its articulation of Paradise falls short: Guy states that in Paradise we can do “whatever we want.” Yet never has Guy promoted doing “whatever he wants” — Guy does what he feels ought to be done. His behavior implies a conception of Paradise distinct from the film’s overt messaging: if “whatever we want” meant the license to follow our fancies and indulge our desires, then Paradise would allow for the very same cruelty that Antwan provided in Free City. 

Perhaps the showrunners want to promote that unlimited version of reality. Yet my mind calls back to Guy’s comment earlier in the movie: “I never hurt innocent people.” Even in the midst of his freedom, Guy limited himself. He recognized that it would violate his freedom to abuse it in the way that so many of the Free City PCs do. Thus, the movie does not actually promote what its dialogue states. Guy’s actions make it clear that Paradise is not a place in which everyone can do “whatever they want,” but rather a place where they ought to choose to do what is right and good and loving. In Paradise, we will not be confined by a set of hijacked programming, but will have the freedom to choose not to harm, but to heal; to live as we ought to live; to use our freedom not to steal, kill, and destroy, but for good. Of course, “Paradise” is merely the name for the game that Millie and Keys created, but the name practically begs the audience to consider the game’s implications about the afterlife. And despite its flaws, this Paradise becomes but another mirror of eternity. 

The movie ends with one more stunning reflection of the divine love story. Coming to terms with the fact that he is artificially intelligent, Guy urges Millie to seek love in the real world: “I love you, Millie. Maybe that’s my programming talking. But guess what? Someone wrote that programming. I’m just a love letter to you. Somewhere out there is the author.” Guy perceives that his love for Millie must have come from somewhere, and he tells Millie to seek its source. In the same way, the beautiful things in this world are not meant to be loved for their own sake, but are inscribed as love letters to us, urging us to seek the Author. Just as Guy is a reflection of Keys, so each of us is an expression of God’s love for those around us. The deepest and truest love — the love we need — will come not from others, but from the One whom others reflect.

Love for Millie breaks Guy out of the vicious cycle of his hijacked programming and makes him seek the way the world was meant to be and the way he was meant to live. He doesn’t go back to the ways of his programming in which he once walked, but rather he lives in freedom and seeks to free those around him. He is like the man going back to the Cave to bring his fellow people into the light, freeing them from their bondage of ignorance to be the self-aware, growing, willing beings they were intended to be. He does this not only for his fellow NPCs but also for those in the real world. Guy sees that Millie is caught up in the game, but he doesn’t let his love become greed: secure in his identity, he knows that he is a reflection of another’s greater love, and he urges his beloved to seek that lover. Thus Guy becomes a figure of hope for us: perhaps our mission of returning to the cave after receiving the Light of Truth will be successful, and we, too, may lead our friends to Paradise — to the true Paradise where the Author, our Lover, will dwell with us. 

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Juliana Undseth is a junior studying English with a minor in classical education.