Gaming & Culture —

Creative Control explores the dark side of augmented reality—with humor

Review: The story of an ad exec and his AR rig feels more like reality than science fiction.

In the film Creative Control, set in near-future New York, people can slip on a pair of normal-looking glasses and experience a world that is part reality and part fantasy. This is what companies like Google and Microsoft have been trying to achieve with AR: technology you can wear on your face that doesn’t look completely ridiculous and allows the wearer to access a constant virtual overlay on the real world. There are obvious privacy concerns associated with this kind of device, namely, that you can record people without their knowledge. But there’s also the risk that your real and virtual worlds become so intertwined that you won’t know the difference. That's exactly what happens in Creative Control, with fascinating and genuinely funny results.

David (Benjamin Dickinson, who also directed and co-wrote) is an ad executive who hires musician Reggie Watts (playing himself) to create something using augmented reality glasses for a new client, the appropriately named Augmenta. David is also tasked with trying out a pair of the AR glasses. He talks to friends in the street, goes to parties, and works while the glasses collect data on anything he sees. He then uses this data to create virtual fantasies—which are centered around an avatar of his best friend’s girlfriend. Whenever he is having a bad day at work or gets in a fight with his own girlfriend, he puts on the glasses and escapes into his fantasy world. It’s probably not giving too much away to reveal that David’s virtual world does not make him any happier—the technology makes him anxious, paranoid, and unable to focus on his real life.

Augmented reality eyeglasses aren’t on the market yet, but Creative Control feels like it could happen in the next five minutes. The film captures the addictiveness of consumer technology—and sometimes, the loneliness and anxiety that can follow—with alarming accuracy. We see characters use their smartphones (which, in this vision of the future, look like see-through iPhones) to argue and flirt with each other over text messages. And David often chooses his Augmenta glasses over human interaction. David’s girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), serves as the film’s voice of opposition to technology. She’s a yoga teacher who dreams of living away from the city and its plugged-in culture. Together, they represent two familiar desires of people who use tech from the moment they wake up until they go to sleep: one is to always stay connected, and the other is to throw your phone in the trash and return to nature.

This might sound like yet another melancholic take on how technology is ruining our lives, but it's not. Creative Control is fast-paced and funny. Most of the scenes, even when they show an intense or stressful moment between characters, are embedded with humor. Dickinson admits that he borrowed heavily from the 1979 Woody Allen film Manhattan. Creative Control, like Manhattan, centers around a small group of friends who work in creative fields in New York, is filmed in black and white, and uses a strictly classical music soundtrack. (One greatly appreciated change from the Allen film: the lead character is not dating an underage girl.) These touches don’t feel derivative or out-of-place. Instead, they make the film’s subject matter lighter and more palpable.

An ad for the fictional AR company Augmenta
Magnolia Pictures

One downside to the film is that we mainly only see how David experiences AR. We don't get to look into the heads of the other characters or see their virtual fantasies. The one exception is a video that Reggie Watts creates with Augmenta glasses, but we don't see much of his creative process. This keeps the film focused on one character's perspective, but it leaves us wondering how the AR experience would vary from person to person. Still, Creative Control is effective at imitating the hold that technology has on our lives—something that is a very personal experience to writer/director Dickinson.

Dickinson says he has fallen victim to opening his phone and obsessively switching between various apps. Dickinson told Ars that he had to make a few changes in his life to limit his use of technology. He doesn’t allow any tech in the bedroom—which means that he wakes up to an actual alarm clock instead of reaching for his phone and then scrolling through Twitter and Instagram for an hour. He also uses a regular watch to check the time throughout the day so he doesn’t get distracted by something on his phone. “I think everybody has different thresholds,” Dickinson said. “I’ve instituted some boundaries in my life, for peace of mind. I’ve decided that I want to be the one to decide how I use technology and not have it tell me how to use it. Those are small things that have made life better for me.” Yet, he added, people in your life notice if you disengage too much from tech. “Through [my cell phone], I’m connected to my family and closest friends,” he said. “And if you don’t respond to a text right away, people worry or they get hurt.”

Dickinson sees the upsides to technology as well. We can easily connect to people in our lives who live anywhere in the world, and we can create and share work with colleagues. Dickinson said that augmented reality might even allow people to be less sedentary at the office:

Working might also become more physical, and there might be less working at a desk and staring at a screen. We might just start being a little more active in our workstations, and we might be able to collaborate more if we have a shared, virtual computing space. So I think that’s the potential for good. My movie explores the dark side of that: what could happen if you start to edit out anything in the world that you don’t like. And then you create you own feedback loop with a projection of your fantasies, which is kind of what David does in the movie.

At the heart of Creative Control is a story about connecting with other people, IRL. Parts of the film draw obvious comparisons to the TV show Black Mirror or movies like Strange Days and Her—although it’s far more upbeat. Unlike episodes of Black Mirror, which can leave the viewer feeling a bit uneasy, Creative Control goes down smooth. It shows us that a world filled with VR and AR might not be so bleak after all—as long as we remember to talk to humans in person occasionally.

Creative Control is currently in theaters. 

Listing image by Magnolia Pictures.

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Channel Ars Technica