what am I doing here?

"Here" is one of the pods of a movie-showing multiplex in a nearby downtown. I haven't been in a movie theater in 19 months, and that wasn't a multiplex, and I hadn't been planning on going back to one soon. But our nephew and niece, a married couple who have waxed fat (not physically) on Silicon Valley largesse, rented out this pod for a private showing for just family members, siblings and parents and an aunt and uncle or two, that's us. So thanks, E. and L. and anybody else whose idea this was.

The movie we saw was Free Guy, the prospect of which made me a little nervous. My knowledge of video games only goes up to about the time of Pac-man. Would I even be able to follow this story of a non-player character in a contemporary multi-player video world who becomes a self-aware AI?

Turns out I found the movie passingly enjoyable, and I didn't have any trouble grasping the outlines of the plot, the difference between the game world and the real world and how they interacted and shaped each other. And I got jokes like the unfinished NPC hastily dumped into the game whose catchphrase is "Catchphrase!" and whose list of favorite activities includes "TBD." I was kind of skeptical of the way the evil game designer planned to destroy his own work in order to launch a non-backwards-compatible sequel, killing off everything the players had accomplished in the game, and my nephew the computer professional confirmed that this was a little implausible, but what he found most unbelievable was that the servers were in the same building where the programmers worked.

However, there were a number of things about the practice of playing the game that confused me. I didn't understand, when the hero first puts on the data-display glasses, that one of the things he sees is a bouncing first-aid kit. What was that for? Nor did I understand the purpose of the snatches of popular songs that would appear briefly. B. tried to explain these things to me afterwards, so you needn't worry over it.

But what most puzzled me was this. (Mild spoiler.) On one hand, an appearance, grabbed out of some electronic storehouse, of Captain America's shield, plus a cameo shot of a startled Chris Evans watching the game (B. whispered to me that that was the actor who plays Captain America: I did recognize the shield by myself), passes by entirely without explanation. But when, a moment later, we get a light saber, complete with a crashingly obvious hint in the form of a background playing of the Star Wars theme, the watching characters tell us about six times that that's a light saber. Y'know, from Star Wars. Has Star Wars really passed so far into the background of today's culture that viewers need to be told six times that something is a light saber before they recognize it?