The game of Avalon lets teens and adults alike enter a virtual reality war zone where they fight to level up, get equipment, earn money in the real world and ultimately - Survive. One famous player Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak) fights to find the zone of the game called 'special A' and find her friend Murphy (Jerzy Gurdejko) who has been stuck as a vegetable in the real world due to being 'Unreleased'. Will she find him on Special A, or does the mysterious Bishop (Dariusz Biskupski) have other plans in store.
As you might imagine from fro the description, this is another film that follows the same train of thought as The Matrix and Spy Kids 3D, but unfortunately Avalon can not hold a candle to either of them. To be fair, Avalon does some very clever things with colour and special effects, and Oshii's directing is pretty prominent throughout. That being said, this is another one of those films that could have been good, but somehow missed the mark. There are lots of confusing, unexplained and often pointless factors in the narrative and even when there are action moments that ought to be exciting, they just aren't. And again with this concept for a film - game world gone wrong - everything is predictable from the vegetable real world people to the 'want to level up' hero. The result is under 2 hours of dragging blandness. It is important with a film like this to comment on the game world it has created. The Game makes no sense - its just a war zone with a bunch of people in cloaks running around and shooting helicopters.
The makers really should have pressed 'reset' on Avalon and given it another go as something that might be slightly more entertaining.
