The first feature film about esports is almost here and it looks historically bad

Over the past few months we’ve written about the rise of so-called “esports”, from the “athletes”, to the regulators, to the technology that has allowed a boom in remote viewership. It’s a nascent culture, to be sure, with its own tropes and mores and beliefs, and as such it seems ripe for a well-observed filmic treatment, perhaps a Duplass-brothers mumbleganza about an eathlete who can’t quite grow up despite his essential goodness and the essential goodness of his also-stifled not-quite girlfriend.

Instead, this month, we get “Noobz”:

(Permit me an aside: has any movie that makes a big deal about having both a “red band” and a “green band” trailer been anything better than atrocious? Does anyone really care that they are watching a trailer that is not approved for all audiences? Is the internet not the font from which every kind of inappropriate content ever created geysers endlessly?)

OK. This trailer manages the neat trick of being offensive to everyone: women, men, black people (of whom we see three: an obese stripper, a kid with an afro and a fro pick, and Bill Bellomy) white people, gay people, straight people, people, strippers, non-strippers, gamers, non-gamers, and so on. I’m not entirely sure how to marshall the outrage of the internet, but is there a way to petition Big Air Studios not to release this horror? And to convince everyone involved with this movie to return their paychecks and use that $340,000 to plant some trees?