“Vive, Muere, Repite”: el blockbuster ante el desafío interactivo

Abstract

The appeal that interactive apps and games have been gathering has put in jeopardy the dominance of the film industry. The threat of interactivity has not only affected technical processes in film production, but their influence is felt in the storytelling devices of the flagship product par excellence of mainstream cinema: the action blockbuster. This paper proposes the analysis of the poetics of the contemporary action film that features certain traits of video game narratives by bringing up the case of Edge of Tomorrow (D. Liman, 2014). In particular, we focus in the construction of the time loop in which their characters are trapped, unable to escape death in the battlefield and forced to repeat the process ad nauseam. The spectator, identified on the protagonist, experiences a similar situation to the life cycle of the avatars in the game: a symbolic death in the form of a setback punishment, to which follows a new opportunity by going back to a immediately preceding state in the game. As if it were a difficult level of a platform video game, in Edge of Tomorrow this reversibility of death becomes an indispensable requirement for overcoming a narrative challenge that demands for the active participation of the spectator/user in the context of the contemporary digital entertainment.