"It's not a real thing."

"It's real to me!"

We got a Machinima produced GTA film distributed by Mubi before GTA 6.

With nothing but hope, ambition and the hellish landscape of an open GTA online lobby, two friends embark on a virtual production of Hamlet, uniting a community of real people left redundant from the Covid Pandemic.

For two out of work actors in the age of Covid-19, the words "to be or not to be" could not speak truer to the dying embers of the performing arts.
Confined to the liminal space of lockdown, where (to borrow the phrase from Hamlet) "the time is out of joint", the government's promise of a temporary isolation became a perpetual monotony. In this moment, the world of cyberspace brought the dire need for escapism and connection to the rest of the world. Grand Theft Hamlet superbly captures that sense of the desperation we all sought, while also capturing the human story to staring defeat in the face and fighting on.

While the real world stood on the brink of uncertainty and looms heavy in the background, the virtual world of Los Santos became a haven for many, and in the hands of Sam and Pinny it became a playground for unrestricted creativity. They encounter people from the real world like them, of diverse skills and jobs all feeling lost within the prisons of their own homes. Alone, they feel hopeless and miserable. Together, they find solace and recover the chance to socialise again.

The documentary does feels staged here and there, but most of the time the cast are able to use the mechanics of GTA Online to their advantage and make it all the more 'alive' in a sense. Contrasted againt the backdrop of the chaos that is GTA Online, the movie uses Hamlet to convey the despair and existential crisis evoked from the pandemic, aptly reciting soliloquies and drawing on personal connections to the Shakespearean tragedy to make the project feel all the more intimate and purposeful.

Not a pandemic or the average GTA griefer could stop this band of players stop Hamlet from being performed on the virtual stage, and by god I was cheering them on from start to finish. Ingenious, hilarious and genuinely touching, Grand Theft Hamlet is a tribute to the lost wanders of cyberspace, a love letter to the GTA community and above all a reminder of the indomitable human spirit.