The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) meets They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) in Shawn Levy’s science-fiction comedy Free Guy (2021), which marks the director’s first collaboration with charming Canadian Ryan Reynolds and is a film that confronts head-on contemporary anxieties around technology, choice, security, and artificial intelligence. Joining Chris and Alex to separate out their NPCs from their AI engines is Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature at the University of West England, and author of a number of books on the aesthetics, politics and philosophy of science-fiction storytelling. The focus of this episode of the podcast is on Free Guy’s engagement with the spectacle and industry of videogames, as well as questions of sentience, play, and hyper-distracted spectatorship; its representation of the internet, digital culture, and communications technologies; repetitious acts and the labour of gaming; and what the smartness of Levy’s film has to say about incremental freedom and better social relations via nods to the absurd normalising of gun culture in the U.S. and the damaging effects of toxic masculinity.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**