Keanu Reeves in Amazon's New Armored Core Film?
- Keanu Reeves stars in an Armored Core short film for Amazon's Secret Level.
- Secret Level is an animated series with shorts based on video games.
- Tim Miller and Blur Studio, creators of Deadpool, are behind the series.
- Reeves' involvement highlights the trend of A-list actors in video games.
- Armored Core is known for intense mech battles and post-apocalyptic settings.
Entertainment: It Sure Looks Like Keanu Reeves is Starring in an Armored Core Short Film for Amazon
Cyberpunk 2077's Johnny Silverhand Returns to Gaming
By Ethan Gach
Published Tuesday 4:50 PM
Keanu Reeves sweats inside a mech suit.
Screenshot from Secret Level
Earlier this month, Amazon announced an animated series full of shorts based on video games like Spelunky and Mega Man called Secret Level.
Now we have our first look at the teaser trailer for the series, and it certainly looks like there's a short based on Armored Core, the FromSoftware mech games, starring none other than Keanu Reeves.
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Secret Level, out December 10, is being made by Tim Miller and CGI house Blur Studio, who were behind the first Deadpool movie and Netflix's Love, Death & Robots sci-fi anthology.
The new trailer showed slices of different shorts from the new series, and one of them definitely looks like three seconds of Reeves sliding his head forward in the sweaty cockpit of a robot.
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Here's the trailer:
Here's the part that looks like Reeves:
Gif from Secret Level
And here's FromSoftware confirming that it's an Armored Core story:
There are two reasons this is blowing fans' minds.
First, Reeves is awesome and in addition to starring in timeless classics like The Matrix, John Wick, and Point Break, he also delivered an incredible performance as Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077.
This showed you could bring A-list Hollywood talent to a blockbuster video game in a way that felt elegant and earned rather than as a cheap cash-in.
Idris Elba demonstrated the same in the game's Phantom Liberty expansion last year.
Second, Armored Core is a beloved but relatively obscure video game IP to mine for an Amazon Prime adaptation.
It's a series known for tense mech fights, brutal post-apocalyptic sci-fi settings, and effective but extremely austere writing and storytelling.
And of course, its red robot eyes, which you can see in the teaser.
Pilots for these mechs are usually drugged up and spliced with all kinds of weird body-horror cyberjunk and tasked with keeping their existential crises at bay by blowing stuff up with giant guns.
Reeves seems perfect for the part.
Last year's Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon demonstrated each of those virtues and was excellent but not exactly the type of phenomenon you'd expect to jumpstart a transmedia cameo, even a relatively small one like representation in an anthology series.
FromSoftware's other games, including Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and the mega-seller Elden Ring, all seemed like much more likely candidates.
What Armored Core fans lack in numbers, they make up for with diehard devotion.
If you doubt that, consider this five-and-a-half-hour YouTube explainer on Armored Core VI's story, which has over one million views.
I assume the one for Secret Level's Armored Core entry will be shorter but not by much.
