Nerve - All flash and no substance.

Are you the type of person that tends to look on IMDb before you watch a movie to see what the review says?

Certainly it makes a difference if a movie has a 2.8 versus an 8.2.

What if that movie has a 6 though?

It should be better than average right?

What if those reviews were propped up and skewed in such a way to make the movie get a better review than it actually deserves?

Do movie company executives actually go onto IMDb in order to make a movie get a high review so that it will sell better?

That sounds like paranoia doesn't it?

Well I really do believe that it happens on occasion, and I think it happened here with this movie Nerve.

Let's get into the specifics in order to find out why I think that.

Imdb

Nerve.... We Dare You.

Starring Dave Franco & Emma Roberts.

I guess things like tastes are subjective, but in my opinion it's not the best Franco and it's not the best Emma either.

However, far be it for me to judge a book by the name of the people playing the characters in that book. Or something.

The most obvious thing about the movie poster here is actually the strongest feature of the movie itself.

No I'm not talking about the faces of the actors, the street view, or the motorcycle itself.

I'm talking about the striking neon colors. This movie is full of fantastic colors.

If you are watching it on a nice 4K TV that does a great job of up conversion......then you are in for a real treat....when it comes to color scheme that is.

Lots of pretty colors.

That honestly should have been the tagline for the movie. Look at all the pretty purples and oranges and yellows and greens!

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There's a new game that is all the rage on the internet. You can either be a player or a watcher. Most people are Watchers.

The Watchers have a lot of power because they're able to influence the players and they are able to get the players to do things.

At one point near the beginning the ad for the game called Nerve says something like it's almost like Truth or Dare except that there's no truth involved. It's all dare.

That's me paraphrasing.

Essentially it's a game of dares.

The main character Vee is kind of a stick-in-the-mud. Sure, she's pretty.... but even the high school jock doesn't have any interest in her because she is shown to be such a joyless person.

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Her friend Sydney is lots of fun though. At the beginning we are shown that Sydney is getting involved with playing Nerve. She becomes a player.

She's also apparently a cheerleader. A cheerleader in high school. A cheerleader in high school that does a cheer near the beginning without wearing any panties, because of a specific dare which someone films.

She's just showing off her buttocks, however that is still something that is quite a thin line for a game to be advocating.

It doesn't take long for us to figure out that the game is essentially no holds barred. These people that are doing the dares could possibly have their lives put in risk on multiple occasions.

In fact, we find out later that lots of people have actually died playing this game in different rounds. This game is essentially a death trap.

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To be honest, as a horror fan I'm liking that idea right off the bat. It has a lot of promise, and in fact reminds me of a similar movie called Would You Rather.

I liked that movie. It was a decent but not fantastic creepfest.

It doesn't take long for us to run into a serious problem with this movie though.

It's a problem that all of us on the blockchain should be familiar with.

The question of decentralization.

The reason that this game can work and that it hasn't been shut down by the police is because each person's cell phone is an individual server.

There is no centralized authority, and no way for anyone to find out what your actual name is. All of the Watchers are identified with an anonymous name.

That is essentially what we are told from the very beginning. Working with a blockchain like Steem we here definitely understand the concept of decentralization very well.

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That's where the main problem comes in. More than halfway through the movie we find out there's actually a third category in addition to Watcher and Player.

Prisoner.

The prisoners are the people that have tried to go to the police and are now having their lives completely controlled by the people that are in control of the Nerve game.

That is to say that their lives are being controlled now by what is a centralized authority.

That goes completely against what we are told originally in that this game should be a decentralized system.

Nerve is not decentralized but we are told every step of the way that it is.

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The final frustration has to do with a team of hackers at the end that try to take over the Nerve system.

I know I'm spoiling the movie a bit here, but let me just tell you that they do succeed.

So what happens when they succeed?

Everybody's phone reveals what their actual name is and then gets a message saying that they are accessories to murder.

That means that the central server somewhere actually had all the names of the people who were anonymous based on the decentralized system.

That is a horrible thing to happen. Add to the fact that the ending is completely overly happy you get a complete pile of nonsense here.

There are also quite a few paradoxes. If you think too much about the plot holes in the ending you'll realize that it is very unlikely things would have gone this way and that in the real world things would have gone very differently.

Nerve is a very pretty movie with a couple of good looking actors that do a decent job.

For the most part, the script is okay and the special effects are pretty great especially when it comes to the varied color scheme.

However, they get most of this hacking stuff completely wrong. They mix up the concept of decentralized and centralized leaving us with something that seems completely unreal and overly dumb.

Additionally the ending is just completely stupid. It's not just overly happy.... it happens in such a way that it's likely both of the characters would have died.

They make it seem like they pulled off some kind of miracle, and it is true that a miracle happened, but it had very little to do with what they did.

It's just that things happened to work out that way, but they really wouldn't have worked out that way if this movie had been even a tiny bit realistic, which it isn't.

If you're looking for a good-looking movie that's going to show off your new TV then definitely grab this one, or download it, or watch it on a streaming site.

Don't expect a logical plot though and don't expect a movie that's going to leave you feeling like you have any brain cells left.

This is a movie that has a dumb overly happy ending that doesn't make any sense.

It's not only all over the place, it's also a movie that will leave you saying What? more than once.

Aside from that it is pretty, it is fast-paced, and it does have some good looking people in it.