Grand Theft Hamlet dives headfirst into a topic that is extremely close to my heart: the impact of online gaming during the pandemic. Like many others, I spent months with gaming as my only escape from the daily drudgery and loneliness of the pandemic. I formed closer relationships with my friends and made new ones along the way, playing Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto Online, Golf With Friends, and many other games I haven’t touched since. I also drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of cigarettes. It was a dark time.
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Grand Theft Hamlet is a great premise (Hamlet performed inside GTA), the sort of hook that grabs you, and you’d think it would provide an opportunity to talk about this strange time when people found solace in online communities through the medium of games. However, Sam Crane and Pinny Gryll’s documentary film about a group of friends (and internet strangers) attempting the play in GTA: Online is, unfortunately, a smug and inauthentic look into the world of online communities, a horrible safari where my friends and I are the attraction.
“No one has ever done this before!” Yeah. Right.
Friends and out-of-work actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, decide to play Grand Theft Auto: Online during the pandemic. After Crane had “seen some stuff” on YouTube, he decided to start recording their interactions within the world of GTA Online. Some of this is real, authentic gameplay, and the first half of the film has some laugh-out-loud moments. It doesn’t go beyond the levity of watching a bunch of YouTubers play a game, however, and the idea that what they’re doing is any grander or more interesting than this is the first step down the dark path of smugness.
Crane posits the whole film as, “No one has ever done this before!” which, in the absolute base sense of that phrase, is probably true. No one has specifically ever put on a staged production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in GTA: Online. Maybe. There’s not even a feasible way of corroborating that. In a sort of infinite monkey way, it’s quite possible that players of GTA: Online have accidentally stumbled into Hamlet’s iconic monologue.
But communities have been producing theatre in games for decades. Our own Meg Pellicio has attended several fantastic shows in Final Fantasy 14. YouTubers have elaborate roleplaying scripts and entirely acted series, and Yogscast with Shadow Of Israphel were doing this nearly 15 years ago. Grand Theft Hamlet sits there and says, ‘We’re better than you because we’re putting on Hamlet, you know, from Shakespeare.’
Ticking Boxes
Once the film moves past its initial promise and begins to slow down, there’s a touching moment with one of the random players the two actors encounter, Parteb. They ask Parteb, dressed in a green alien suit with a perfectly pronounced arse, to audition for a role in Hamlet. Worried about his English, as a man from Tunisian-Finnish descent, Parteb recites a verse from the Quran. It is a powerful, somber, and important moment. It throws the rest of the scripted interactions and poor acting into stark contrast with the real world. This is a real person, with real problems, reciting something that has a deep personal meaning. Everything else feels like a farce in comparison.
Moments later, actor Oosterveen is discussing his family with Pinny Grylls, the acting-documentary-maker. What should be a touching moment where Oosterveen talks about mortality and the loss of loved ones is marred by the fact that this clearly isn’t a real moment. It’s scripted. It’s the first of many scenes where the actors in question seem to forget the premise of their own film: they move beyond the core concept of authentic experience online, the sort of organic coming-together that marked the Pandemic in video games, and into a string of poorly written, poorly acted shorts about their own lives.
Grylls and Crane are in a relationship and live together. Crane invites Pinny to play GTA: Online with him, because he’s spending more and more time on the game. Relatable, particularly during the pandemic, and games were a way for people to connect, sometimes from within their own homes. “Great,” I thought, “this bit seems real enough.” But just seconds afterward, they hit me with “You’re playing the game too much,” “Think of the kids,” and so on, which just wasn’t a real interaction. You can tell from the inflection in their voices that this is scripted b*llocks. Bad acting, ultimately. That’s not to say that these issues weren’t present during the pandemic, but if you’re positing your film as a behind-the-scenes documentary, don’t try to pull the rug like this. The overuse of GTA’s emotes during these scenes really tipped me over the edge here.
At many times, it feels as if the actors are simply ticking boxes about some of the big topics in that sort of A-level filmmaking way. And in many ways, this unintentionally mirrors the Danish prince himself, the actors feigning reality when, in fact, the scenes are scripted. And in many ways, this unintentionally mirrors the Danish prince himself, the actors feigning reality when in fact the scenes are scripted, much like Hamlet puts on his antic disposition. There’s definitely plenty of acting theory on show here, and the detailed pamphlet we received before the start of the film detailed all the ways the filmmakers had thought about the project, which should have been a red flag at the smugness inherent.
These topics include male loneliness, suicide, and the power of online communities to either help or hinder. Once again, these are important issues to me. As I sat there and watched these rather well-to-do actor types discuss these problems, I couldn’t help but feel a sort of disconnect. I actually found the whole thing to be a bit invasive: who are these people, and what are they doing in my space? What gives them the right to pry into these things in such a way? Some stage-acting heritage and a bit of MUBI money? These moments never felt genuine, and left me feeling empty.
The Production
Rather than focus on the real stories of those they encounter in the game, a direction the film flitted around a few times before giving up on entirely, the film becomes an indulgent vehicle for the lead actors. Poor editing and pacing makes it difficult to focus on anyone else. It’s like a badly made YouTube video, where the editors don’t understand simple concepts – sometimes, in games, it’s good to have subtitles that correlate to who is speaking in the game, rather than your standard subtitles. Name tags above players also help with understanding what’s going on. These are the fundamentals that YouTubers learned years ago.
The actual production of Hamlet, which comes as rushed, busy, cluttered chaos at the end of the film, is entirely hard to follow. The levity of GTA: Online has worn thin at this point. Anyone who has ever played the game can only laugh at someone getting blown up with an RPG so many times. It’s the sort of film that will appeal to those who have never played GTA: Online, or have just a shallow understanding of it. What could have been the very ecstasy of a love letter to the power of video games comes across as a self-indulgent, holier-than-thou affair, marred by a deep misunderstanding of the medium. Anyone who has spent more than a few hours playing games with their buddies, through the good times and the bad, will quickly see through the thin veneer of Grand Theft Hamlet.
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