The Thirteenth Floor
Sep. 6th, 2008 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethJust watched The Thirteenth Floor on channel 5. Nice little bladerunner-noir about how real is real and who counts as a person in the tech age. I hadn't read good reviews on it, and having watched I can't really see why. Sure, we knew the answers as fast as he did, and he got the answer to the first riddle inside the first half, but he wasn't the sole protagonist. The mystery woman had a story to play through as well. And there was a whole philosophical discussion threaded through it. Only pretty much as expressed through sex and murder.
So, if you have a VR world, what do you do in it? A lot of sex and a lot of murder. But what if they turn out to be as real as you are? Would you still act that way? And what happens if you get killed in a sufficiently convincing VR? Well there the credibility flaws show up, because seriously, the programmers aren't going to think of that? But assume she's a programmer too and she set things up... the whole thing isn't about solving one murder, it's about how he unwittingly gets used to commit two. Well, more, if you count the people killed to cover up the first one. But first he's the instrument of his user, to commit murder in VR world, then he's the instrument of his user's wife, as she commits the perfect murder in her 'real'. By the end her husband has been killed and replaced with this avatar, like him but with the annoying bits taken out. See her as the player, and she's brilliant, in a twisted kind of way. So I like this film.
I also like that, visually, the future-perfect looks just as unreal as the past-perfect, with almost the same saturation problem, since they're both done in shades of beige. It leaves you wondering how real any of the three worlds are. As it should be.
So, if you have a VR world, what do you do in it? A lot of sex and a lot of murder. But what if they turn out to be as real as you are? Would you still act that way? And what happens if you get killed in a sufficiently convincing VR? Well there the credibility flaws show up, because seriously, the programmers aren't going to think of that? But assume she's a programmer too and she set things up... the whole thing isn't about solving one murder, it's about how he unwittingly gets used to commit two. Well, more, if you count the people killed to cover up the first one. But first he's the instrument of his user, to commit murder in VR world, then he's the instrument of his user's wife, as she commits the perfect murder in her 'real'. By the end her husband has been killed and replaced with this avatar, like him but with the annoying bits taken out. See her as the player, and she's brilliant, in a twisted kind of way. So I like this film.
I also like that, visually, the future-perfect looks just as unreal as the past-perfect, with almost the same saturation problem, since they're both done in shades of beige. It leaves you wondering how real any of the three worlds are. As it should be.