“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” as I knew that it was going to tear me apart and I am a coward. Several friends and coworkers claimed that they started crying from the first minute and didn’t stop till the end. And being a dad of three boys, I knew that after a person has been taken away at a very young age and the person endures an agony of years, such a tale would hit me hard. It did. But it is also necessary to note how much this wonderful film is not about sadness or suffering. It is about strength, compassion, and the ways in which we can touch each other, regardless of whether we know the person or not. You will weep. And the tears will be worth it.
Mats Steen can be remembered for being born on the 25th of March, 1989, and throughout his childhood as he took his first steps, it needed no superpower to sense that he wasn’t developing normally. This was later confirmed when he was diagnosed with some fierce ailment which crippled him constantly by the name of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, with its last stage remarking his life at 25 years of age. “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” follows in the next half hour of its running time how he lived through his parents and sister who always tended to be highly emotional along with those spine chilling home videos that showcase the gradually degrading condition of the man. It’s a most tragic story in which among other things, days on which the family went away on trips and even family meetings could be gathered as pieces of the bigger puzzle. However, this is not the end of this film.
After his death, his parents found out that Mats had possibly spent a total of 20,000 hours with his character Ibelin in a game called “World of Warcraft.” To say he had a rich online life would be an understatement, and director Benjamin Ree unpacks Mats’ alter ego Ibelin through the reams of text messages that the game saved online. It helps comprehend not only why this experience was important for Mats, but how much he actually influenced the lives of some through his interactions. He made friends, had his first love, fostered other people, and lost his best self. Many aspects of modern culture do not appreciate screen time and consider it a waste, however, one of the things that director Benjamin Ree does best is highlight the constructive aspects of the time spent. It’s understandable that it does have the capacity to change many in ways that they may never expect.
Ree’s film is improved by the interview excerpts with people who knew Ibelin, who he was on the internet, and how much he meant to them. Whether it was the time when he wrote a letter to the girl he liked after her parents had taken away her computer or simply how he nearly fixed a set of broken relationships between a mother and child Mats wasn’t just within the realm of the game he was living the life. And he was doing that in the most frank, truthful, caring way possible something that we should all aspire to be like in real life.
Thanks to Steen’s personal anecdotes, written content, and audio conversations he conducted with Ree, the audience early on gets to see how the game ‘WOW’ features in many of Steen’s life. This is a beautifully executed feature, for it enables us to understand his perspectives about his surroundings. “In there, my chains are broken,” teaches us to reconsider what the word ‘I’ really means, and how technology evolved the idea of what being human means to the core. Mats Steen was not only a different character in the virtual space he actually was that character in real life. He was nice, he was compassionate, he was a mammoth. And so what Mats was is not found in the notes of the writer. Ree takes you where Mats Dew felt most of his life.
A friend at his funeral, “You made a difference.” Is this not what people want to hear at the end of their lives At times, we don’t actually think about the difference we make in this life especially when going through depression or just the struggles of life in general when one gets to value themselves. Who knows how the kindness that you showed, so casually, so many years back changed someone’s life whom you hardly know Or perhaps, someone remembered what you said when they were depressed and in a dark place We feel that being ‘there for people’ is restricted to large moments of performance, but, even in little things in everyday life, being nice and significant matters also. This is the lesson I learn from the story of Mats Steen, not of a boy who died but of all of us who ought to learn how to live.
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