Avalon (film)



Avalon is a live-action film directed by Mamoru Oshii (of Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell fame) and released in 2001. It is a joint Japanese-Polish production: written and directed by Japanese but filmed in Poland with Polish actors speaking their native tongue.

At an unspecified time Twenty Minutes Into the Future, a run-down Cyberpunk society offers so little to its youth that they turn en masse to an illegal virtual reality online wargame, Avalon. Some players have become so skilled that they have turned gaming into a job of sorts, while others have dived so far into the addictive online world that their physical bodies have become vegetative.

Avalon starts out as a First-Person Shooter game, and players level up as they earn points. It's possible to team up.

The film's protagonist is Ash, a reclusive young woman who ekes out a living by cashing in the points she earns in the game. A former teammate of hers talks her into searching for an alleged Secret Level in the game, a level so realistic it is supposed to be undistinguishable from real life. Ash finds the way to level up to that "Special Class A" and discovers what's behind the game...

Watch the trailer here.

Do not confuse this with the Josh Phillips webcomic of the same name, the Meg Cabot young adult novel and manga series Avalon High, or the Barry Levinson movie about Polish-Jewish immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s.

"Welcome to Avalon."
 * Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene
 * Action Girl: Ash.
 * Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: It is feared that reaching the "Special Class A" means leaving one's physical body behind in the real world.
 * Bilingual Bonus: Well, kind of. If you understand the original Polish, the acting sounds painfully wooden.
 * Broken Bird: Ash.
 * Cyberpunk
 * Deep-Immersion Gaming
 * Deliberately Monochrome: The real world is so hopeless, it doesn't even have color.
 * Dog Food Diet: Played with. Ash can afford to cook decent food, but she prefers to feed it to her dog while she sustains herself on cold anger and dog biscuits.
 * Lampshaded by her gamer teammate: "Your dog eats better food than most people!"
 * Gainax Ending


 * Invisibility Cloak
 * Level Up
 * No Body Left Behind: When player characters are killed in-game, their bodies disappear.
 * Playing Against Type: the lead actress up to that point specialised in soap operas. Needless to say, she was quite surprised when someone asked her to run around in a Badass Longcoat.
 * Powers That Be: The Nine Sisters, the mysterious designers of the game.
 * Product Placement: Great polish beer, as seen in the image at the top of this site.
 * Secret Level: "Special Class A".
 * Shout-Out: Ash's dog is the same basset hound as Batou's in Innocence: Ghost in the Shell. As for her hairstyle, it's the same as Motoko's.
 * More to the point, Ash's dog is just like the basset hound that Mamoru Oshii owns in real life.
 * Show Within a Show: The opera Avalon.
 * Unwinnable Training Simulation: Avalon's training program.
 * Viewers are Morons: The North American DVD release features added narration explaining the storyline, which generally wrecks the film.
 * In a particularly shameful instance, a reviewer for one (now-defunct) games magazine complained that Avalon is boring and doesn't show how shooters really function (ie. doesn't include rocket jumps and other moves from Quake). Mamoru Oshii based the Avalon game on Wizardry.
 * Welcome to The Real World:
 * World Half Empty: The real world is a run-down dystopia reminiscent of Eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism (it was shot in Poland). Avalon's world is a permanent battlefield in which civilians run from advancing tanks and get casually bombed to pieces.