A new Xbox advert suggests a flight from capitalism! [VIDEO]

The 1990s and 2000s style ad is from David Fincher, but it’s a little interesting when you think about what Microsoft is doing.

David Fincher used to direct music videos. He directed Madonna’s Vogue, for example. He later became a film director, and some of his films we may be familiar with (a few examples: Seven, Fight Club, and The Social Network). He co-directed with Romain Chassaing his new commercial for Xbox and Samsung, Wake Up.

The film depicts a society of rats living and working in a bleak urban environment that looks like something out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. But some of the rats are not rats. Some of them escape the rats by becoming human for brief moments with video games published by Microsoft (this idea paints a somewhat interesting picture of pro-Sony and pro-Nintendo gamers…). Only the protagonist, who ends up playing Valorant on a Samsung OLED TV, seems to actually play Xbox. The other characters all play Xbox games, but on different devices. South of Midnight is on a phone, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is on a PC, and Avowed is on a handheld PC (this could be the Asus Xbox handheld of which we only know the codename – that would be the unannounced Kennan…).

The ad is trite. It reminds me of Fincher’s early days as a music video maker, the kind of clip where office workers break out of their stupor to a guitar solo. It’s even more reminiscent of the era of toy commercials that Sony kicked off in 1999 with its “Don’t Underestimate the Power of PlayStation” campaign. Microsoft followed suit in 2002 with its Life is Short ad.

For example, Microsoft portrayed the ad as a way to escape capitalism by buying Xbox or Xbox games… even though the Redmond-based tech giant is one of the pioneers of late capitalism.

Source: PCGamer