The basic idea that The Game operates on – of a man becoming wound up in a series of reality games where he can no longer be sure what in his life is real and what is illusion – has its template in John Fowles’s novel The Magus (1965). This was made into the film The Magus (1968) featuring Michael Caine as a teacher on a Greek island who becomes caught up in a baffling series of games masterminded by a mysterious Anthony Quinn. Another close antecedent was the British mini-series The One Game (1988), which has many similarities to The Game in its story of a computer game designer being wound into an elaborate reality-based game created by his former business partner. A science-fictional antecedent to all of these would be the works of writer Philip K. Dick, which are constantly questioning the assumptions that the story’s protagonist make as to what is real.

The Game also claimed some antecedent in real-life, notably with The Game, a campus escapade that began in Los Angeles in 1973 wherein students would engage in an elaborate 24-hour scavenger hunt to follow clues littered throughout the city. [The Game also formed the basis of the Disney comedy Midnight Madness (1980)]. Subsequent to The Game, the ideas of similar real-life games, which have been termed Alternate Reality Games (or ARGs), began to take off. The most notable of these was The Beast, which was conducted as a promotional gimmick for Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001), involving cryptic clues about a robot-related murder mystery that were littered through the film’s trailers and across the internet and quickly developed online communities that discussed the puzzles. Similar games have sprung up since then, although most of these are cryptic scavenger hunts in nature and are not known to involve players in masquerades involving details of their own lives or undermining their perception of reality as shown in the film.

The Game is certainly a well made film. David Fincher creates an air of disquiet with some subtlety – the spooky sense of things being overturned is never more eerily conveyed than when the presenter on Michael Douglas’s tv starts talking directly to him. Thereafter though, The Game proves a considerable disappointment. A film like this needs to enwrap one in a Chinese Box-like series of revelations, each peeling back a successive layer of what one thinks is real to reveal illusion. However, all that happens is that everything is treated as part of the Game. This is a film that has only ever been predicated on the basis of having everything that one assumes is happening at any one particular point is constantly turned upside down. The Game is a film entirely of effect, not one of any underlying rationale. This results in a rubber reality where every time Michael Douglas starts to believe something you predictably sit back and realize “It’s just another trap he is being lulled into.” The constant effort on the part of the scriptwriters to lull us into a sense of comfort and then overturn it contrarily ends up becoming predictable.

Moreover, much of the scenario is difficult to believe. It is hard to accept that anybody would regard being shot at, framed, financially ruined, dumped penniless in another country and nearly drowned as entertainment. Matters of basic practicality keep rearing their head too – who pays for such an elaborate set-up, surely not Michael Douglas’s destitute brother Sean Penn? One cannot help but think how much of the plot is dependent on a person doing the right thing – the climax implausibly involves Michael Douglas jumping off a roof in exactly the right place so as not to miss an airbag, for instance.

Early on, the film seems to suggest that The Game is a transformational experience that has given people’s lives a greater vitality but at the end of Michael Douglas’s particular game you are left wondering what the point of it was – if he was transformed in any way by it, we never find out how. At most, we are left to presume that he is no longer the bored, detached businessman he was at the start – which, considering all that he has undergone, cannot help but come as an absurd understatement. To the contrary, surely any normal human being would be left a shattered wreck by the last minutes of the film that has Michael Douglas shooting his own brother and then attempting suicide by jumping from a rooftop, only to learn that this it was all part of an elaborate charade – but here Douglas merely shrugs it off and joins in the party held in his honour.

In the end, The Game is an irritating house of cards that has no particular logic behind it other than forward momentum ie. once the surprise is out of the bag, you are only left wondering how contrived it was. The Game is also the least involving of David Fincher’s films – his other works venture into a darkness and bleakness, here there is merely an uninvolved seeming Michael Douglas being thrust from one incident to another with the film rarely engaging with him emotionally.

The screenwriting team of John Brancato and Michael Ferris had previously written several B-budget films including Watchers II (1990), Mindwarp (1992), which also involved Virtual Reality reality games, The Unborn (1991) and Severed Ties (1992), all under the pseudonym of Henry Dominic. They then moved to A-budget films under their own names with The Net (1995), wherein Sandra Bullock’s life is likewise turned upside down by an elaborate conspiracy of shadowy computer hackers; The Others (2000), a short-lived tv series about a team of psychics; Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003); the much ridiculed Catwoman (2004); the killer crocodile film Primeval (2007); the SF film Surrogates (2009); and Terminator Salvation (2009).