R U There by David Verbeek

Virtual worlds are not yet integrated into most people’s daily lives. Nevertheless, Verbeek’s feature R U There implies is that they could create problematic issues in the very near future. Set in Taiwan, one of the few places in the world where people are already deeply embracing these forms of entertainment and social interaction, the film follows Dutch gamer Jitze and his difficulty in balancing reality with unreality.

Not being able to cope with witnessing the death of a young girl, Jitze begins to wonder about his position in the real world as opposed to in his computer-generated one, where he’s a winner most of the time. His doubts are amplified by the strangeness of his relationship with local girl Min Min, who admires him in Second Life but otherwise maintains her distance.

Verbeek not only makes us face the possible implications of such online-offline confusion, but also the fact that filmmaking itself will be affected by the popularity of computer imagery and avatars. If some movies have mainly depicted characters and stories inspired by computer games (Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil) or mixtures between virtual and real worlds (The Matrix, Avatar), Femke Wolting and Jorien van Nes’s Another Perfect World together with R U There are actually showing that computer-generated landscapes can be represented in cinema in their actual form.

However, even though 20% of the film is actually shot in Second Life, R U There seems to be lacking some initiation as far as basic behaviour in this world is concerned. Not being a second lifer myself, I didn’t quite feel the evolution of the emotions between Jitze and Min Min. Considering though that in the age of Google, YouTube and Facebook the virtual is slowly invading our lives, R U There poses questions that we should all reflect on sooner or later.

By Maria Diceanu