Iron Lung ★★★☆☆
Replicates the big clunky interface from the game in a way that is comical to see a real person interacting with, but doesn’t spend that long trying to replicate the isolation or dread of the game. Far from people stranded by himself at the bottom of an ocean of blood, people won’t leave Markiplier alone. Which is a shame; I quite like the scenes that focus on him doggedly navigating the oceanbed, cut off from everyone else.
What the film does instead is to (unsurprisingly) focus on and expand the scant lore of the game into a more surreal and heroic journey for the convict forced into this suicide mission. That could work fine but a lot of it felt more like it was just trying to do creepy, surreal, horror movie stuff rather than being thematically coherent (or just coherent) at all. That said, it does mostly do creepy, surreal, horror movie stuff fairly effectively and it’s not like I wasn’t enjoying myself, though I rolled my eyes at the big heroic ending.
Despite finding the replica video game room funny I did like the X-ray camera and I do think the film generally looks quite good other than a few naff shots of the big fish and when it gets too dark to see anything that is happening.