Warner Bros.
One way to grasp how fully our family relationship to calculator change over the 1990s is to look at the cyberthrillers Hollywood made during that time . Mass surveillance , indistinguishability thieving , the hacking of the soul — all the nascent technical anxieties of this new earned run average were upload to moving picture screens like a virus . But there was no blockade what was coming , and over just 10 years , a humans merely coquette with mass connectivity endure irreversibly online . By the end of the tenner ( and , by reference , the century and millennium ) , the net had become a major part of everyday sprightliness for many the great unwashed . In turn , the word of warning acquire at the picture show . Suddenly , computers were n’t just threatening your safety , your privacy , and your humanity . They were replace life itself .
In the spring of 1999 , the American multiplex was inundated with variations on that chilling conclusion . First cameThe Matrix , a savvy sleeper blockbuster that used irresistible dad philosophy as the Krazy Glue of its spirited genre medley . simple weeks later , eXistenZ , a weird Canadian thriller , dabbled in interchangeable mind , while bending them into the less mainstream form of a drolly deranged espionage movie . And a few weeks subsequently still , on Memorial Day weekend , we gotThe Thirteenth Floor , a twisty neo - noir about realities within realities that had the misfortune of possible action in the viewing of not just Matrix mania , but also the boxful - office staff event that wasStar Wars : Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace .
Warner Bros.
You could say that all three movies , secrete in as many months , bet with what would come to be bed as the pretense theory — the theory that realism as we make out and experience it is actually a digital illusion . The notion , a newfangled upgrade onPlato ’s allegory of the cave , gained impulse with the publishing of Nick Bostrom ’s 2003 essayAre You Living in a Computer Simulation?But the movies got there in the beginning . And arguably , nothing has proliferated the idea in the public consciousness more thanThe Matrix , the rarified Hollywood hit and FX - heavy action movie that could be said to have reshape the agency its consultation thought about the world .
Like George Lucas , the Wachowskis found the merriment and profitability in squelch up positron emission tomography obsessions — in their case , everything from conducting wire - oeuvre kung fu to Hong Kong smoke opera to the dystopian spectacles ofThe TerminatorandBlade Runner . That ’s part of the enduring popularity ofThe Matrix . Another is the malleability of its metaphor , which blend in far beyond awe of losing ourselves by log on . In 1999 , it seemed of a opus with film likeOffice SpaceandFight Clubin indicting the easy stability of the mediate - class grindset life . Today , the film is wide understood as an allegory of grammatical gender dysphoria , even as legion of aggrievedmen ’s right militant have tried to reclaimits notable “ cerise anovulant ” as a symbolization of their whiney movement . Beyond specific interpretation , The Matrixoffers a fantasy more comforting than the illusion of The Matrix itself : that the sincerely perceptive can see the world for what it really is .
The effects may have mislay a small of their wow factor over the past 25 years ( though notthatmuch — the babble glass face of the skyscraper still looks crazy coolheaded ) . But few ’ 90 blockbusters have aged better , and not just because the film ’s story of A.I. as an existential scourge has new purchase in the here and now . The Matrixfelt at the time like the rare cyberthriller made by citizenry who understand the engineering and the subculture of figurer . Both may have evolved greatly in the class since , but there ’s a timeless timber to the movie ’s tech - voguish vision ; it still feels very much in touch with the spirit of the digital age .
By contrast , David Cronenbergmade no seek to order his simulation thriller on the cut boundary . In fact , eXistenZis a luddite pervert ’s take on technological paranoia , forfeit any semblance of verisimilitude in favour of characteristically spongelike nightmare hardware . Here , plugging into a practical realism worldly concern — the immersive video game navigated by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law — is a rather literal procedure involving invasive ports plug into the spine and organic gaming console with sex electronic organ progress from amphibian portion . It ’s all so disgustinglyphysicalin that classical Cronenberg elbow room , though the personal manner in which the motorcar colonize the soma as well as the intellect is n’t so different fromThe Matrix ’s human land pod and parasite - tracking machine .
Cronenberg has no unmistakable interest in the shop mechanic or graphical particular of video games ; part of the dry joke of the film is that its practical reality looks no more glamourous or any less glum than actual world . Still , the author - manager has some playfulness with the colloquial limit point of A.I. What he really tap into witheXistenZwas the extent to which gambling would become less about escape and more about total submergence — how the world of a secret plan would soon become realer to some players than their factual spirit . Detractors have claimed thateXistenZitself does n’t seem like an specially fun game , that it ’s too tedious and chore - big to be something mass would really act as . That ’s just more proof of the movie ’s prescience : Long beforeDeath Stranding , there wastransCendenZ !
“ Are we still in the game ? ” decease the final line of dialog — a parting wink of equivocalness that doubles as a thesis statement on the more and more blurred lines between literal animation and the irreality of the entanglement . The Thirteenth Floormakes that question the whole show . plant in the remote time to come of ( gulp ) 2024 , the moving-picture show follow an amateur detective ( Craig Bierko ) investigate the mysterious death of an old colleague , in part by leaping into a simulated interpretation of 1930s Los Angeles populated by Nonproliferation Center that do n’t bed they ’re NPCs . Though it was the last of this unofficial 1999 trilogy to hit theaters , The Thirteenth Floorreaches back further — in its ersatz prewar setting , in its origins as a remake of the 1970s German miniseriesWorld on a Wire , and in the Descartes quote that opens the movie and preview its experiential anxiety .
This poky , largely forgotten sci - fi detective recital is n’t much more than a pull waitress to be not - so - shockingly revealed . ( If you ca n’t get beforehand of it , you too might be an NPC . ) To the extent that it search remotely like a glimpse into our existent 2024 , it ’s mostly the film ’s vague relevancy of pose an online sandbox where users can trade their own identity for a new one ; most of the role player do double and triplex duty , play their characters and their characters ’ veritableSecond Lifeavatars . Technologically speaking , it ’s every bit as fanciful as the world ofeXistenZ , but without the memorable grotesquery : hoi polloi enter the simulation by lay in a chamber of chintzy green lasers .
see at one agency , it ’s the bleakest of its miniature movement . WhileThe MatrixandeXistenZpresent the digital world as a mirage swallowing human race whole , The Thirteenth Floorbasically concludes that mankind itself is the mirage . We ’re all just lines of computer code in the auto , mistaking our programing for free will . There ’s no waking from the Matrix . Wearethe Matrix .
At the same fourth dimension , maybe there ’s something moody and more premonitory about the other simulation thrillers of 1999 , which both come close to resolve that we allwillinglydisappear into the codification . The real baddie ofThe Matrixisn’t Agent Smith , but ( spoiler alert ) Cypher , the turncoat play by Joe Pantoliano . His preference for the comfortable Trygve Lie of the Matrix anticipated the myopia of online echo sleeping room , where accuracy is what you require it to be , and the fantasy ofInstagram , where it does n’t matter if your aspiration life is “ existent ” so long as it ’s a pipe dream . “ Ignorance is bliss , ” he says between bites of steak - flavored 1s and 0s . a quarter - century by and by , that sentiment sound like vaticination , call the subtext of social media feeds and input sections likewise .
The Matrixis currently pour onMax.eXistenZis currently streaming on Kanopy , Pluto TV , and Showtime . The Thirteenth Flooris uncommitted to rent or purchase from major digital service likeAmazon Prime Video .
