Watch On
David Fincher was a music video director with clips like Madonna’s Vogue to his name before he became a feature film director in the 1990s, responsible for movies like Seven, Fight Club, and The Social Network. His new commercial for Xbox and Samsung called Wake Up, co-directed with Romain Chassaing, will probably end up somewhere on the lower end of his filmography.
It depicts a society of rats living and working bleak urban lives right out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or perhaps more blatantly Steve Cutts’ similarly rat-themed short film Happiness. Only some of the rats aren’t rats at all. Some of them escape the rat race by transforming into humans for the brief moments they spend playing Microsoft-published videogames.
The funny thing is, only the protagonist playing Valorant on his Samsung OLED TV at the end actually seems to be playing an Xbox. The other humans are all playing Xbox Games, but on other devices—South of Midnight on a phone, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on a PC, and Avowed on a handheld that I assume is an Xbox-branded ROG Ally.
The ad’s trite in a way that harks back to Fincher’s music video beginnings, like the kind of clip where office workers break out of their doldrums thanks to the transformative power of guitar music or whatever. It’s even more reminiscent of an era of videogame advertising begun by Sony in 1999 with its Do Not Underestimate the Power of PlayStation campaign, wilfully weird ads like Double Life in particular. Microsoft got in on the trend with its 2002 ad Life is Short, which I think got its point across a lot better than this one does.
It just feels a bit weird to have the corporation firing employees who publicly criticize it for supplying AI technology to the Israeli military out here pretending it’s some kind of cool subcultural alternative to the drudgery of a workaday life. The people responsible for Microsoft Teams should not be allowed to get away with this.
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