So it goes that Skizm’s boss (Ned Dennehy) and his thugs, offended by Miles’s online commentary, slam in his door and bolt guns to his hands, turning him into a participant. The surgical alterations complicate almost any task (other than shooting). Miles’s opponent: Nix (Samara Weaving), a merciless high-scorer. Will this dorky asthmatic, unable to tap on his phone (“Everything looks so HD,” he remarks, finally paying attention to the world around him), summon his inner alpha from the virtual realm?

The message — Miles’s nice-guy demeanor is both his weakness and his salvation — gets a little muddled. In a case of life imitating fiction, the writer-director, Jason Lei Howden, got into a Twitter skirmish shortly before the movie’s release. The distributor, Saban Films, said in a statement that it did not condone his “online behavior.” Considering what happens to his protagonist, that is a slap on the wrist.