“Life doesn’t happen to be something that just happens to us.”
Free Guy is more than just a hilarious and lighthearted movie about Guy, a non-player character (NPC), in Free City, a massively multiplayer online role-playing video game. It is a story about freedom and choices.
Guy lives a mundane life as a bank teller, doing the same thing each day, like all other NPCs. But one day, a specific moment wakes him up, out of his repetitive everyday life. He meets the woman he is programmed for, a player named Millie, and everything changes. Like Guy, we are programmed for a specific person and when we meet Him we are awakened. We are programmed to meet the person of Jesus Christ and to have a personal relationship with Him. Like Guy, once we are awakened, we can live a life of freedom: freedom to choose, to choose the good.
After meeting Millie, Guy starts living out his new freedom. He takes a player’s sunglasses (sunglasses distinguish the real players from the NPCs) and now sees the world he lives in with greater clarity. He sees that he has choices; and he does not have to do the same monotonous thing every day. This changes him in such a profound way that he wants others to experience this as well, especially his best friend, Buddy. He comes to Buddy and invites him into this freedom.
Free To Make Your Own Choices
“What if I could tell you that you could be more, your life could be fuller, you are free to make your own decisions, your own choices.”
“Just put the glasses on and you are going to see, you’re going to see.”
Guy takes the sunglasses and asks Buddy to put them on, but Buddy is scared and will not put them on. There have been plenty of times I have been too scared to grow in my understanding of my faith because I feared that it would cause me to change the way I live. I think we are all faced with this moment in our lives, where we have a choice to follow something greater, to be more than mediocre. We love to be comfortable though, so when that moment comes it can be difficult to choose which path to go. Buddy is so relatable in this moment; he states, “I love my life. There’s something about finding your lane and just staying in it.”
And Guy responds, “That’s why they call them comfortable zones. They’re so comfortable.” Being comfortable is safe, it makes us feel in control, but is that really living? Is that really living our best lives, our lives to the fullest? As Pope Benedict XVI says, “you were not made for comfort, you were made for greatness.”
We were made to live out greatness, once Guy chooses the path of greatness, he transforms the world around him. He helps to open the eyes of his other NPCs and together they save their world, their lives, and the reputation of Millie and her friend. The way we live our lives matters; by choosing greatness, we can and will transform the world around us.
“It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
– St. John Paul the Great
This article was originally published HERE on More Than Entertained. Learn more about this incredible ministry that exists to share how we can encounter the divine in entertainment.
