Moderna Promotes NON-REALITY in Spikevax Ad.
New Moderna commercial features a detached, metaverse existence.
[Both the Spikevax video and the Welcome to the mRNAge video are included at the bottom of the article for you to watch.]
Moderna’s latest COVID-19 Spikevax booster commercial is a continuation of the simulation. Following in the virtual footsteps of its unsettling “Welcome to the mRNAge” commercial from April this year, Spikevax features characters, situations, and locations that seem eerily metaverse.
The commercial opens with its main character—an over-tanned, oddball geezer with a white sweatband and Adidas-style, ziptop tracksuit—plunking on his Walkman headset as he enters an old-fashioned gym with trophy cases and three ping pong tables. In fact, the commercial itself, the voice-over and bopping music, doesn’t really start until the headphones hit the geezer’s ears—as if reality isn’t reality until you plug in one way or another.
The geezer smacks the ping pong ball, sending it flying into our face—and it turns into a full moon hanging over an elderly Asian dude, pulling his swimming goggles over his eyes (another five-senses filter) as he plunges into an ice tub.
Every location in Moderna’s previous “Welcome to the mRNAge” commercial was a conspicuously fake indoor set filled with non-player-like characters performing stilted actions. But in Spikevax, all the characters do their own thing in unreality-realities. Even when there are supporting players to engage with, the lead characters treat them as if they’re not there.
A middle-aged man is shooting hoops but not looking at the other players or even the basketball net when an indoor rainstorm suddenly engulfs the gymnasium. A woman is buried in a kitchen busting with garden vegetables as if trapped in a fantasy, lockdown grow-op. An office nerd swings his hips next to the printer-room water cooler while reading a salsa dance instructional manual—then suddenly wins a dance contest with his jazzed-up female partner, not even looking at her. A man rides an exercise bike in a stylized meta-home wearing a pink pastel tracksuit with a matching VR headset.
The whole thing is bizarre. Nobody looks at each other! Every character lives in a solo, metaverse fiction. Nothing is remotely real about the pastel pharmacy where the tanned geezer shows off his flu vaccine band-aid, a creepy pose with the sleeve torn off his tracksuit—which is followed by the even weirder pose of a woman with a glazed-over smile brandishing her Spikevax bandaid.
The final static shot is the geezer engaged in a Forest-Gump-style sped-up back-and-forth ping pong match. But his opponent, a woman in a white med coat, faces the camera, ignoring him as she flicks her paddle with her wrist, like a non-player character.
You can watch the Spikevax TV commercial below (the YouTube channel, Commercial Archivist), and under that, you’ll find the Moderna YouTube channel’s “Welcome to the mRNAge” video from April. They are quite the pair. “Welcome to the mRNAge” is so jam-packed with hackable human symbolism and non-reality reality that it deserves a shot-by-shot breakdown, perhaps better suited to a video.