n a future Earth where status is determined solely by combat experience, Grey is a soldier on a fast track to the top. His meteoric climb through the classes of less proficient troopers has spawned legends. He scores more enemy kills than anyone, frequently ending up as the only survivor of whatever battle he enters. Though young and a veteran of relatively few skirmishes, he's earned the nickname "Grey Death."
Grey seems destined for a quick trip to citizen status, a level only 3 percent of troopers reportedly live to see. But he seems detached and uninterested in the process. He spends his time mooning silently over a woman he loved in the slums before he became a trooper--a woman who left him for the battlefield and the dream of citizenship. Her death prompted Grey to enter the profession himself, with her old commander, Red, becoming his mentor, friend and combat trainer. The kill points Grey racks up are clearly more for her than for himself. He's not beating the status system, he's robotically enslaved to it.
But Red's capture by enemy forces shakes Grey from his rut. He and a woman named Nova--the only other survivor of Grey's last mission--defy "Mama," the town computer, and head out to find Grey's friend. In the process, they accidentally step outside the regulated borders of their own society and begin to see the strings they've been dancing on all along.
Maybe if we inserted another quarter?
Grey: Digital Target posits an intriguing dystopic society that functions like a shoot-'em-up video game, one so simple that the designer didn't bother to write a backstory. Every player's a soldier, every soldier and vehicle's worth points, and every thousand points admits the player to the next level. Troopers don't question why they're at war, or with whom--they just rack up points and try to "win."
But Grey and Nova don't really escape the game, they just move up another level. The secret of their society is uncomplicated and cliche, a hoary old science fiction standby. Once they clue in, they're dropped into a plodding series of predictably escalating fights, building up to the inevitable "boss" monsters and a final confrontation. Grey pointlessly denies viewers even artificial game-based satisfaction--it ends seconds before the last battle, with a post-credit note dispassionately noting the war's outcome. This ultimate cop-out is only the last straw in a series of anticlimaxes.
Grey does feature some deeply human, instantly likable characters, but it quickly sacrifices them to the mechanistic storyline. It's ironic that a story so clearly about escape from an artificially aggressive, externally induced worldview would so utterly thwart its own symbolism. The story may be about individuality, but neither the writer nor the characters ever gets beyond the most trite shoot-'em-up paradigm. Instead of watching this, viewers might prefer playing their own video games--preferably ones without this many unfulfilled pretensions.
