We all know that video game movies are generally pretty bad. There may be the odd exception here and there but generally speaking a movie based on a game is almost guaranteed trash. What's worse than video game movies, however, are movies about video games. The most famous example of this is probably Ready Player One. An unfathomably shit movie about a bunch of morons looking for some thing inside a VR Metaverse that will give them a bunch of money and allow them to escape their shit lives or something. It's an extremely poorly written plot surrounded on all sides by trite video game references and a bunch of money men trying to seem relatable by pointing out that they looked up a thing about Adventure on Atari 2600 one time. But then Choose or Die got made and it makes Ready Player One look like a fucking masterpiece.
There's a short story published by Steven King in 1983 called Word Processor of the Gods. To cut a short story even shorter, some dude has a word processor that has the magical property of making whatever he types into it turn into reality. The guy in the story basically deletes his shitty kid and shitty wife and makes a more well mannered kid his and a woman that's a bit nicer to him into his wife and then the word processor runs out of magic juice and breaks down forever. I think that's what happens anyway, it's been a hot minute since I read it.
The reason I bring up Word Processor of the Gods is because Choose or Die basically rips off that idea wholesale but instead of it being a magic bit of 80s tech, it's an old video game that bends reality. The film follows some woman finds a game called "Curs>r" in her friends failing retro shop and on the back of the box there's a promise of a cash prize for anyone who can beat the game. They call the number and find that it's still in service (with the audio recording being delivered Robert Englund of all fucking people) and so the woman takes the game home and tries to beat it to get the money and pull herself out of the shit, broke life she finds herself in.
"Curs>r" is a text adventure, kind of like Zork or any of those ancient purely text based adventures that you controlled by typing in shit like ">walk north" into a command prompt only this game creates its situations based on where the user is and then asks them to make some kind of horrible choice under the threat of death if they fail to choose in time. For example when the woman first gets hold of it shes playing it in a bar and the game is like "you are in a tavern, should the waitress take a break?". So she types yes and by "take a break" it meant that it forces the waitress to start picking up random glasses off the shelf and smashing them off the floor. Then when asked if she should clean up by the game, the woman picks yes and Curs>r forces said waitress to pick up the shards of glass and eat them. This is probably the only effective moment of the entire movie because I have to admit, watching a woman being forced to chew glass by a reality bending text adventure did make me wince.
After that moment it's entirely downhill. Instead of ramping up the stakes of the choices the game starts doing all sorts of weird shit like making the main character control a rat that's trying to eat her mother and somehow teleporting the characters to alternate fog dimensions to tease her about past traumas. The core premise of the film isn't even that bad but the execution of the movie after the initial couple of scenes is just completely fumbled.
There's one really funny scene where the game traps a character in what I can only describe as "the lag dimension" and kills him by making him puke a never ending stream of casette film. Base Film is soft and fairly brittle but somehow it kills him because this movie things that the inside of old casettes are made of barbed wire.
The whole production feels like it was made by someone who has never actually engaged with anything outside of wikipedia synopsis. Like the writers know roughly what a video game is, have seen tech from the 80s in Instagram reels and maybe have a vague idea of the existance of horror movies and with this vague surface level understanding of these things attempted to make a film.
Choose or Die is a boring movie trying to pander to middle aged men who will eat up any old bullshit if it has things from their childhood in it. It's sad, embarassing and if you were going to make me choose between watching this film again or putting a bullet in my head, I will log out of my Netflix account and you can watch me die.
