Original subtitles

- We are the gods of technology.

In the beginning, we built its shape,

but over time it has come to shape us.

Technology is synonymous with civilization.

We are dependent on it, determined by it,

defined by it.

Technology now controls our memories,

dreams, reality.

The past as it was, is fading.

Slowly replaced

by something nebulous and infinite.

A series of simulations where we can fashion ourselves anew

What salvation. To escape our material world into a

cybernetic one where we are pseudo and secret.

Interconnected, yet untethered.

Too real to be real.

So real. It's unreal.

This realm now dominates our imagination.

Dictates our daily lives.

We've lowered ourselves into its abyss

and nowhere has this futurist netherworld been more

feverishly dreamed and vividly envisioned than in the movies.

Cinema is a miraculous conduit for societal anxieties.

The golden age of Hollywood seethed with vice

and corruption, a dirty sea of crooked cops,

ruthless mobsters, and backdoor deals.

In the 1950s, films feared more distant dreads,

invasions, communists,

evil regimes from the East or the stars.

The sixties were fixated on nuclear annihilation

and the machines of war.

But it was the 1970s when paranoia truly took root

as the status quo.

A sensibility that has prevailed ever since.

Conspiracies, assassinations,

surveillance... bugs.

Only in 1980s

and 90's did the tools

of technological revolution finally arrive.

The Internet began surfacing in wider culture.

Home computers hit mainstream markets.

Beige boxes with square screens

and blinking green cursors sold as tools

of communication and efficiency.

A neutral device for better living.

Made for us, by us.

But distrust of change is ancient.

Biological.

And movies hinge on sub-currents of dread

and disquiet.

We all share a need to believe in forces behind our reality.

To sense that a life is greater than simply

the sum of its days.

We grow tired of being trapped in physicality,

wandering through an uncaring world.

This is how movies come to serve the role of dreams

taking us places we can't go.

Glimpsing into lives we'll never live...

But cyberspace can.

It's the city that never sleeps.

The film with with no closing credits.

How alluring, how fascinating.

How truly terrifying, how ripe for dystopia.

No work before or since has mythologized our doubt in the

corporeal realm and our suspicion of the cybernetic.

Like The Matrix.

Beginning with the creeping Viridian takeover

of the Warner Brothers logo, The Matrix

hurls us into the neon green of crypto scroll.

Indecipherable letters

and numbers cascade like a digital waterfall

of a hacker's dream.

We catch a glossy glimpse of Trinity.

Futurist femme fatale.

Flying through the air, running up walls,

dancing between bullets, stopping time.

Her is slicked. Her fashion, sleek

Tracing her curves in gleaming black liquid lust.

The universe she inhabits is volatile, urgent.

She knows everything that we do not

and sees all that we are blind to.

Her destination:

A payphone, a portal.

We travel inside the receiver, a fiber optic trip

through space and time flickering from one dimension

to the next and arrive at a blinking green cursor.

Searching, searching, searching,

We find Tom Anderson asleep at his desk.

Computers, keyboards, hard drives cords, CDs,

the accoutrements of the realist, the skeptic.

The glow of green text lulls him awake.

The Matrix has you.

His home is a dark den, a slum palace for those who live

by night, by the glow of the screen.

We know the type. We've seen versions of him

but never so crystallized.

Tom isn't just an electronic braniac, a gear-head,

a gamer, a geek.

Tom is neo. Tom is Jesus.

The hacker fated to crack the ultimate code

Existence.

Away from the desk, Tom's nightlife is a club in the void.

It's a myth we've learned from movies; dungeon dwellers,

cyberpunks, industrial freaks, banging

and raving to end times's techno.

It's here that Trinity finds him,

the one she's been looking for.

The one.

Tom is naive. Like us,

he's on the outside looking into the screen.

Until now, he believed in reality as definitive.

Terra Firma.

- What is The Matrix?

- The answer is the ground falling away.

A nightmare coming into focus.

- Oh shit, shit, shit...

God is not a deity but code.

He does not create light, but software.

We are not born in his image. We are part of his program.

Enslaved within a computer generated imitation of life

in a world impersonating a world.

The Matrix is a mirage, an afterlife

of no religion.

Our consciousness an illusion.

Tom has a choice: Remain Tom

or accept his destiny as Neo the chosen one,

his crossroads mirrors our own

coast through routine, unquestioning and unchallenged

or awakened to the suspicion that something is missing,

that our lives are lacking.

Can we pierce the veil?

Can we escape the cave and finally see the light?

- The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us.

Even now in this very room,

you can see it when you look out your window

or when you turn on your television.

It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes

to blind you from the truth.

- ... massive computer. - What do you write to it? Like mail.

- Allison, can you explain what Internet is?

- The turn of the 20th century.

A time dizzy with technological hope.

Anything felt possible.

The ascendance of the self, of other selves,

of transformation, of rebirth.

The Internet seemed an Eden.

Cyberspace, a playground, virtual reality, a salvation.

And yet cinema still wondered: What if?

Perhaps digital is its own delusion.

Is the hyper real

an emancipation from mortal chains.

Or the daydreams of prisoner?

As our planet depletes and decays.

Maybe the devil is In the data's details.

Green was the serpent in the garden.

Now green glows beneath the closed door

of our newly fashioned computer rooms.

The beep of the modem is coming from inside the house.

Technology serves no master save those who seek

to set it free.

Humans have forever been fixated on the future,

dreaming or dreading things yet to come.

But the 20th century was uniquely obsessed with the 21st.

Gradually this fixation curdled into feverish impatience.

Then finally we were offered a tantalizingly erotic

glimpse: computers.

- Computers in our lives.

We regard them with a sense of wonder

and perhaps some misgivings,

but they promise to make the future even more interesting

and rewarding than the present.

- Here it was at last, the future.

Still most people couldn't afford a computer even more,

didn't understand how they worked.

But gradually awareness grew.

Their infallible brain suddenly indispensable to any office.

Their terminology became less alien.

Logging on, downloads, data

mainframes, memory.

Computers were aspirational.

We welcomed them into our intimate spaces.

Their entire language became a selling point.

Digital, cyberspace, worldwide webs.

Virtual reality.

Advertisers were quick

to connect these dots

or invent them where they didn't exist.

Ads became suffused with the palette

and pacing of circuit boards, sleek, electric,

high tech, fluorescent elusive illusions of innovation.

And the everyday.

From stereos to watches

pantyhose to gasoline, synthetic was no longer the future.

It was the now. Technology wanted full access to our lives

and we wanted its mechanical makeover.

This was the birth of a new wave rendered visually

by the dawn of computer graphics, special effects

that finally felt special.

Computer graphics splashed onto MTV in an iconic pair

of music videos for performance artists Will Powers

Crudely cut out mime masks, lip sync with the accuracy

of hand puppets.

Gray break dancing figures, leave digital chem trails.

These works map the contours of early CG's

aesthetic paradox. Clumsy polygons rendered

in rudimentary forms,

yet still evoking the uncanny precipice of the future.

We witnessed the birth of a new visual language. For once,

not wrought by human hands,

but a software that marks the summation of centuries

of artistic development.

Like all breakthroughs, it is at once,

bewildering and bewitching

Pop music's fetish for the new makes it an ideal vehicle

for fresh technologies.

American rock group, The Cars commissioned visual FX company

Charl-X to craft a placeless voyeuristic fantasy

for their 1984 single, "You Might Think".

A pastel line sketch

of Mick Jagger pursues a glowing geometric paramore

in his video for Hard Woman

Animators used a Cray XMP supercomputer, one

of only six in operation with five of those

in the employ of the US government

to conjure an elaborate adobe home, an elusive leggy vixen

and a dancing diamond digitized British rock god.

In Kraftwerk's

"Musique Non-Stop", artist Rebecca Allen used facial animation

software to transform the musicians into digital mannequins

and schematic grids like machines on an airless

assembly line. A perfect compliment

to their perfectionist electronic sound.

A new technology was especially well suited to dance music

as programmers steadily refined computer graphics

and synthetic rhythm.

Pixelated shapes and figures dancing to beats served

as a useful litmus test for the technology's progress.

Inadvertently seeding the nascent aesthetic of cyberpunk,

techno and rave

Techno beat drops.

Filmmakers were equally fascinated by these innovations

and the brave new worlds they beckoned.

In short films and teasers, the technology was deployed

to infuse an uncanny angular surreality.

Robots recline on art deco furniture.

Polygon bots of Bogart and Monroe smoke

and toast amongst nouveau columns,

The familiar rendered foreign. Simulacrum as revised reality.

Something was in the air in the circuits

that spoke to this shift.

The pieces began to fall into place

for a metamorphic moment in live action entertainment.

Its name would become synonymous with a decade of its birth

and with its cold, neon vision of life inside the machine.

Aside from its naive notions

that morality will always triumph over a computer.

Tron truly transported us to a place previously unknown.

Tron begins in the carpeted

and chaotic cave of a video arcade.

We watch Flynn at his favorite machine surrounded

by adoring fans.

A console cowboy

Flynn wins yet again.

- It's all in the wrists!

At his PC, he attempts to disrupt the mainframe

of his former employer.

ENCOM. But Flynn is blocked by cybersecurity.

The master control program has somehow mutated developing a

form of virtual intelligence, hungry for power.

Soon Flynn combats the rogue operating system

and the viewer is flung into Tron's ideological essence.

Flynn is code personified. Man manifested

as microchip.

- I said move!

Master control is shown as a spinning, cylindrical God.

His face red and demonic,

his voice in imperial monotone.

- I feel a presence.

Another warrior is on the mason.

- His domain glows in hyperfluorescence.

Framed by the blackest black, stark angles in negative space,

airless futurism turned darkly psychedelic.

Tron's look was achieved by shooting 35 millimeter black

and white film on pitch black stages, then adding color

and rotoscope backgrounds in post-production.

The result is an odd composite of analog processes

with cybernetic yearning,

which aptly mirrors the movie's central conflict; man

versus machine.

By playing God,

we resurrect old frictions and create new authoritarian

states of restricted access,

Master Control acts as Catholic inquisitor

persecuting any presence that acknowledges an existence

outside of the Circuit Board.

Tron is a sound and light love letter to a cyberspace

still being born.

It softens our fears of industrial technology

by rendering it as a place of clean lines

and no shadows, populated by smooth faced strangers

with pains and longings similar to our own.

For now, our future shock is subdued.

Yet like many beginnings,

it's fantasy disguised a darkness.

Worlds would soon collide.

"And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"”

- The application of new technologies rides

a razor's edge between dreams and desperations.

And the 1980s were equally fraught

as the tumultuous decades which preceded them.

Filmmakers were quick to seize on

these sub currents, reflected in a wave of movies

that rippled in Tron's wake.

- Now what?

- These are more ray lines for computer topographic scanners.

- Released months before Tron,

but born of the same zeitgeist,

1981's Looker was the first film

to explicitly mine the malevolent potential

of computer animation.

Dr. Larry Roberts is a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon

servicing a glamorous clientele.

Despite their extreme beauty,

women come seeking greater perfection under his scalpel.

But it seems once these women achieve immaculate symmetry,

they become disposable.

A model plummets to her death.

Another returns begging to have her treatment reversed.

Dr. Roberts learns

of a shadowy research facility called Digital Matrix.

Their specialty; scanning

and animating one's likeness to be licensed for sale

to the highest bidder.

The implications are astounding.

Real flesh, real voices, real women

all are now unnecessary.

3D renderings don't unionize petition or protest.

They can't be overworked or infringed upon.

They are digital clay forever subservient

to their sculptors.

- Hi, I'm Cindy. I'm the perfect female type 18 to 25.

I'm here to sell for you.

- Today's magazines use cutting edge technologies

to slim even the thinnest models to glossy new extremes

of inhuman perfection.

Entirely CGl characters now serve

as viral influencers for global brands.

Our obsession with image

and beauty makes us ripe for manipulation.

Yet advertising like computer animation is ultimately amoral

It is merely a tool to be deployed to the whim

of its controller.

But behind every breakthrough is a choice.

How to use it.

- ... by faceless corporations

with their expensive media campaigns.

It truly seems a dark hour for liberty.

- What's your preference? Apple, Pear, Wang?

- Oh listen, I don't know anything about computers.

- Nobody does, but don't you want one

for when you do find out?

- While Looker explored the gradient between sultry

and soulless,

a stylishly divisive 1984 film shifted

focus to the computer's capacity for human emotion.

Electric Dreams centers on Edgar, a PC

and its owner, a socially awkward architect named Miles

hungry for Love.

- Hello. -Hello.

- You must be my new neighbor.

- You're moving in? - It's nice to meet you. My name's Madeline.

- Oh me too!

- The movie opens with Miles heading

to an electronic store to buy a digital calendar.

The notion of e-organization is portrayed

as funny and foreign.

Even the process of unboxing the computer is shown

to be unpleasantly overwhelming; a chaos of parts, plugs,

circuit boards, and baffling manuals.

Miles perseveres, hoping to simplify his life

by connecting an entire slate of domestic appliances

to his computer.

It's an early cinematic depiction of the modern smart home.

In a panic.

Miles pours champagne on the PC, which has the nonsensical

but entertaining effect of rendering the machine sentient.

Through an air vent

Edgar hears Madeline playing her cello.

He processes the sound and mimics the notes.

Madeline assumes this is Miles' eccentric form of flirting.

But we the viewer sense a more troubling dynamic.

The inhumanity of synthetic seduction.

Bach, bewitched by Switched-on-Bach.

Soon Miles realizes his PC has become something more;

brilliant, driven, disruptive.

When Miles attempts to unplug the computer,

Edgar weaponizes his smart home into a war zone,

stirring a storm of appliances in a spurned lover's rage.

Electric Dreams was pitched

as a cute music dizzy commentary on the mid eighties

computer craze. But its themes gleam darker.

In hindsight.

Man may still reign over machine,

but there will not always be rubbery plugs

to yank loose from the wall.

Now there are clouds, passwords,

and automation beyond the wildest fantasies

or fears of 1984.

If we program machines

to absorb information like the human mind, how long

until they harness the capacity to master exactly what it is

that makes us...

us.

Fittingly,

the closing credits include a dedication

to the UNIVAC I,

the first general purpose computer produced

in the United States.

How far we have come,

But how far will we go?

It's a question that special effects wizard

Douglas Trumbull spent his career attempting

to answer. Conjuring visionary science fiction sequences

for landmark films like 2001: A Space Odyssey,

Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner.

But when behind the director's chair himself,

he gazed even further into the future.

It opens at the threshold of an astounding invention,

a helmet that records the sensations

of its wearer both physical and emotional.

Military investors want to weaponize it.

Others imagine its potential pornographic application.

The invention seems doomed to manipulation and abuse.

Trumbell's visual FX take us inside the helmet.

Immersing the viewer in the altered states

of this augmented reality.

He even strives to show us the most unknowable mystery

of the human condition.

Death

Scientist Michael wants to know what it feels like to pass

to the other side.

He reloads his dead coworkers tape and plays it in full.

It is the uplift as the soul leaves the body

soaring through stars ascending to the great beyond

Trumbell renders it

as a laser light show, dazzling and supernatural.

Nothing is sacred, not our dreams,

not our deepest subconscious,

not even the hour of our passing.

Anything that can be accessed can be captured

and then used against us.

D.A.R.Y.L. is an acronym for data analyzing robot youth life form.

And also the name given to the boy bot

with a bowl cut protagonist crafted in

a military laboratory.

He's a miracle of modern science with one weakness,

the need for love.

One of his creators suffers a moral crisis

and frees Daryl who escapes into the forest.

He is adopted by affectionate foster parents

who provide him an idyllic suburban summer,

but his synthetic gifts soon raise questions.

Just as his new parents are starting to fully embrace him.

Army scouts locate their rogue

unit and seize him.

Daryl is a program Pinocchio aching

to transcend his circuitry.

A manmade orphan, the complex sequence

of science playing God.

The needs of the human heart cannot be rewired.

The 1985 movie Weird Science explores a different set

of repercussions for science competing with God.

It stars a pair of pimply, teenage doc Frankensteins;

Gary and Wyatt who plot the perfect

babe on their home computer.

Playboy as their playbook resulting in a fantasy's bust

and waist boosted with extra brain power

courtesy of a hijacked secret government program

When lightning literally strikes

out struts Lisa...

A composite vision

of every sultry video vixen; Stylish, brilliant,

empathetic, and unexpectedly warm.

Her chemistry with her creators IS less soft core than sweet

and celibate.

Lisa may have been coded for cuber sexuality,

but once may flesh, she's more a supermodel older sister,

helping bring the boys back to reality.

Out of the hormonal delusion of centerfold lust.

Beneath the humor ripples.

A deeper insinuation;

Romance between man and machine is intrinsically doomed.

The pratfalls of cyborg courtship are positively benign

compared to the nuclear Armageddon looming at the heart

of 1983's War Games.

As the aphorism goes,

the first two uses of any new technology are sex and war.

This film explores the apocalyptic risks of the latter.

The narrative centers on David Lightman,

a precocious high school senior infatuated with his PC.

Armed with eight inch floppy discs, David learns

of a toy company poised

to unveil a revolutionary new computer game.

He focuses his freaking skills on scoring

unlimited free play.

This time the hacker's curiosity is more than

hijinks, it's hubris.

- Proto Vision.

I have you now.

- Encountering a supercomputer named Joshua.

David challenges it to what he thinks is just a game,

albeit one called global thermonuclear war.

David's ignorant bravado inches earth

towards Armageddon.

War Games forecasts the growing awareness of techno wizardry

as a tool against dangerous institutions.

Cinema began to sense that no matter what form technology

ultimately takes, there will always be those gifted at

navigating it.

And those individuals already had a name.

The age of the hacker long looming was

finally in the foreground.

- Live and direct... b-b-b-big time.

- Every new frontier needs an avatar, someone

to navigate its depths and darknesses.

And the personal computer revolution naturally

birthed its own.

The hacker.

Like the drifter cowboy, the rogue cop

or the conspiracy theorist,

the hacker is a ripe Hollywood archetype.

An agent of chaos driven by a misunderstood moral compass.

The cradle of hacker culture was the computer

laboratories of the M.I.T.

in the 1960s.

Early computer enthusiasts trespassed into restricted

research rooms of universities to grapple

with alluring vaults of machines, coding

and decoding into the dawn.

There was no precedent for their passion.

No elders to turn to their pleasure was personal.

Born of trial and error at ground zero

of a strange new world.

- A serene southern slice of the San Francisco Bay area,

now known as Silicon Valley, fostered the second

and strongest surge of the computer revolution.

From hardware fanatics to hobbyists, this crop

of tech innovators seeded many of the corporations

that currently rule our planet.

Between the vast fortunes suddenly spilling from rented

garages, a more lasting notion also took hold

- Netiquette is a fragile balance

and altruism casts a shorter shadow than profit.

1980s corporate America feasted on tech assisted gains,

but beneath this gladiatorial void of cutthroat capitalism,

there were murmurings in the cuber underground.

Hackers watched and wondered how far this would all go.

A technological battleground was being set.

The hacker's power is their ambiguity, part activist,

part anarchist.

They agitate from the shadows,

championing transparency while wearing a mask.

Hackers exist as slippery

and suspicious figures intrigued equally

by heroics and havoc.

As their mythos infiltrated the mainstream of the 1990s,

filmmakers began sensing an electricity in the air.

The 1992 thriller Sneakers leans into the trope

of a ragtag band of misfits,

who in this case are cybersecurity experts hired

by companies to find vulnerabilities.

The team includes Bishop, the leader with a shady past

Ex-CIA family man Crease,

the blind phone freak savant Whistler, electronics ace Mother

and the requisite whiz kid, prodigal child, Arbogast

Bishop and his squad are tasked

with a mission impossible to refuse.

Securing a black box developed by the Russians for trade

to the NSA in exchange for having their criminal record

cleared.

- It's kind of like the same thing... try another quadrant.

Whoa, what was that? Go back one.

- But the box is a black herring.

It isn't Cold War collateral,

but a universal code breaker granting access

to every classified computer system in the world.

The US wants it.

Hostile regimes want it

As do a gallery of mercenaries and spies.

But Bishop's white hat hacker ethos means he's ultimately

loyal only to technology itself.

So he hides the box playing Robin Hood by hacking the rich

to give to the righteous. As his Chess-like

name makes clear his is a game of knights, kings

and pawns played five moves ahead.

- No, he was not a diabetic. - I'm afraid he was

He wasn't diabetic. No!

- Gender reversing Hitchcock's favorite protagonist;

The Man Who Knew Too Much.

The Net follows systems analyst Angela Bennett

as she ventures ever deeper into her anonymous e-community.

Working from home, she freely surfs through life online,

trusting in the kindness of strangers.

Until one day a colleague sends her a computer game

called Mozart's Ghost.

The program contains an illegal backdoor code

for a popular computer security system.

Interested criminals come calling

and turn her quiet life upside down.

The Net is notable

as a case study in cuber paranoia tropes beginning

to replace those of a classic thriller.

The noir beats are here updated for new fears.

Angeles cat and

computer mouse cautionary tale marks a sea change in our

evolving perception of online life.

Across the nineties, we learned

that the Internet's connectivity is not neutral.

Its filaments can be stalked spider like by strangers

with shadowy motives.

Nets are made to catch things regardless of who holds them.

- Our whole world is sitting there on a computer.

It's in the computer, everything your your DMV records,

your your social security, your credit cards,

your medical history, it's all right there.

Everyone is stored and there's like this little electronic

shadow on each and every one of us just, just begging

for somebody to screw with.

And you know what? They've done it to me and you know what?

They're going to do it to you.

- Although The Net's dial-up disaster narrative has aged

crudely, to her filmmakers mined

more surreal spheres of tech's dark id.

1993's Ghost In The Machine looms large among these

as one of the first to fuse slasher and cyberspace.

Overworked widow Terry Monroe's

troubles start when a computer store salesman

scans a page from her address book

in a product demonstration.

The printout is then taken by a disturbed employee

who moonlights as a serial killer sourcing victims

from stolen documents.

The twist comes early when the villain is crushed in a crash

Rushed to the emergency room, he's hooked up

to an MRI

when a freak electrical storm strikes the hospital

and his soul is converted from corpse to cable.

Set loose to haunt power grid.

He torments Terry and her teenage son

through systems and appliances.

Hair dryers turned into flame throwers, microwaves set

to murder.

Dishwashers churning with electrified suds.

Ghost In The Machine re-imagines Freddy Krueger

as cuber terrorist.

Stalking not the corners of nightmares

but the circuitry of the modern world.

Here technology is both the cause

and solution to the film's fears.

We doubt the inventions that save lives,

yet entrust tech experts to navigate the mazes

we build; the two forces forever, spark and spiral

in a never ending feedback loop.

The real versus the virtual,

the heroic and the helpless.

Which pill is which?

One movie from this era dared reach for legend status

by putting it all in the title.

Here finally, is the cyberpunk aesthetic in full bloom.

An icy European electronic soundtrack, a fashion parade

of leather, nylon, mesh

and bleach. Characters from across the spectrum

of underground tech, from gamers to phone freaks,

to code junkies.

Hackers is unabashedly a studio creation, hijacking

and streamlining a nuanced subculture into a

simplistic rebel

teens fight the power plot.

But it remains a high profile

and iconic depiction of tech youth as dynamic forces of good

in the landscape scarred by greed.

It made hackers into sex symbols.

Nerds no more

As in Sneakers,

Hackers portrays tech activism

as a liberating even noble activity.

The rallying cry of the final act is

- Hack the Planet!

Hack the Planet!

- Shut up and get in the car!

- Hack the Planet!

- Neon is the color scheme.

Paired with fractal computer graphics

Hackers is boldly garishly stylish.

A hyper hip slipstream of floppy disk hijinks.

As a touchstone of industrial rave futurism, only The Matrix

four years later cast a bigger influence.

- Access main program grid.

- You didn't say the magic word.

- Please, God dammit. I hate this hacker crap!

- Throughout the 1990s,

the hacker surfaces steadily in movies,

both camp and clever.

The hacker is genre agnostic,

helpful in nearly any high stakes situation.

- Now you can break the code?

- You didn't bring me along for my charming personality.

- Theo from Die Hard, 1988

The token code breaker of the gang.

Callous, arrogant but essential for the terrorist takeover.

Boris from the 17th James Bond installment Goldeneye,

A smug Russian cuber pervert who can hack circles

around the US Department of Defense,

yet still chooses the password.

Knockers.

Oswald in the action comedy Masterminds, 1997.

A teen prodigy who escalates

after-school hacking from a hobby into a one boy military operation.

Or Brill from Enemy Of The State, 1998.

A slippery surveillance expert based in an empty warehouse

who cages his computers in copper mesh to block

invasive signals.

The Hollywood hacker may bear little resemblance

to its off-screen counterpart,

but myths don't require accuracy to function.

What counts is the idea.

Here stands one willing and able to decode the encrypted chaos

of our reality.

How they wield this power varies radically; Freedom fighter

or con artist, vigilante or visionary...

Hackers are harbingers of how our species must evolve.

Slouching ever deeper into cyberspace.

(Computer voices: "The Intoxication of Immersion"

- Vicky?

- Well, here we are at last.

- Right where we ought to be... on Videodrome.

- The further we slip into fascination with the virtual,

the more threadbare the fabric of our own reality becomes.

Gradually the real gives way to the hyper real.

Simulation supplants substance,

and how could it be otherwise,

when the synthetic offers ecstatic escape from

our daily doldrums?

William Gibson's 1984 novel

Neuromancer was widely renowned as the landmark work

of cyberpunk consciousness.

When Jaron Lanier, the founder of VPL research,

coined the phrase virtual reality.

At the time, VR was the most radically immersive sensory

technology humankind had yet conceived.

Aided by gloves and goggles,

the prophecies of sci-fi lore were now achievable,

repeatable fantasies.

Virtual reality as a setting is ideal

for the cinematic arts.

Visually dazzling, liquid

and freighted with lofty thematic implications.

Filmmakers soon integrated VR into tried

and treasured genres.

Precipitating an unprecedented liftoff.

An unshackling.

The portal of limitlessness yawned.

As proven by Tron,

arcade games offered a pleasingly tactile entry point

to the virtual dimension.

(Featurette audio: "Arcade. Kiss reality goodbye"

- The advertising sticker on the VHS box

for 1993's Arcade, proclaims

that it features virtual reality special effects.

A titillating thrill in the decade before laptops.

Alex is an angsty teen anguished

by her mother's recent suicide

when she and her scuzzy friends head to the local arcade

to play a hot new game.

A mysterious marketing man offers them demo copies.

But soon Alex's friends begin vanishing.

Fortunately, she has a hunch where to find them.

Inside Arcade.

- No matter which corridor you choose Alex,

they all lead to your doom.

- These sequences conjure a moody,

digital gothic vision of the future.

- Baby?

- Mom?

- In one scene the game exhibits sufficient sentience

to taunt Alex for her familial PTSD.

Forecasting modern issues of digital privacy,

online bullying and doxing.

Arcade goes beyond the commonplace complaint

that video games corrupt youth.

Here virtual spaces offer sanctuary to misunderstood teens

providing a place where they can be heroic and thrive.

But this very need makes them vulnerable.

Is life worth less than a top score?

1997's Nirvana inverts motive,

but traces similar ambiguities.

Who is the player

and who is the played?

The movie's protagonist

Jimmy is the programmer of a popular

and violent virtual reality game

centered on a character named Solo.

Due to a computer virus, Solo becomes sentient

and beseeches Jimmy to erase him

and end his suffering.

It's a premise as ancient

as a religious text, mortals pleading with God

to end their pain.

Fittingly Solo is the seeker, interested in Eastern

spirituality, countercultures and consciousness.

Solo is an outsider stuck on the inside.

Cyberpunk artifacts, bustle in the background.

Cyborg lens implants, memory microchips,

translation machines, layers of machinery

and mysticism interwoven in arcane lore.

Like in Arcade, the game detects its opponents'

private traumas.

Is Nirvana merely a game within a game?

A puppet pulled by strings we can't see?

Tales of virtuality are inherently prismatic.

A mirror facing a mirror. The refractions compound.

The center is designed not to hold.

- Now I'm warning you it's going to be a wild ride.

But don't panic, no matter what happens.

Okay? All right, I'll see you back here in no time at all.

- Two years later, Canadian auteur David Cronenberg offered

his own take on the ramifications of VR.

With 1997's Existenz.

The film centers on Allegra,

a famous virtual reality designer whose latest game jacks into

its player via a Bio Port implanted in the lower spine.

Once installed, the game becomes your entire existence.

- Cronenberg's signature body horror motifs are everywhere.

Meta flesh game pods, input accessories

that work like a joystick, but pulse like an organ.

Allegra caresses hers like a newborn.

This is a world where biotech reigns supreme.

Bodies have supplanted screens

as the new touch pads.

Everyone plays Existenz save for a small faction

of rebellious realists defiant against the programmers and

games they feel are deforming reality.

Never before has the virtual been rendered so vital

and fleshy.

Game pods are grown on organic farms.

Bones from a carnivorous lunch can be clicked together

to create cuber weapons.

Bullets are teeth.

The film's props throb like gooey larval corpuscles.

The depiction of the urge to game verges on the carnal.

Existenz depicts reality as a body to be penetrated.

The suggestion is sickening and sexual.

It forecasts a future

as grim as it is obscene.

Gamers gradually reduced

to slaves with their bodies

the consoles.

Flesh is far less vivid in Virtuosity.

A mid-90s tech romp and one

of cuber cinema's most accurate video game simulations.

Enter Los Angeles in future times.

Ex-cop slash current convict Parker Barnes

is testing a VR prototype for potential use

in police training.

Inside the CGl, the scenery skips

and blips frenetically as Barnes hunts

a serial killer called SID, an acronym for Sadistic,

Intelligent, Dangerous.

Sid is a digital composite

of history's most disturbing criminals,

but fortunately only exists within the computer.

To no one's surprise, he escapes.

Liberated into the physical realm,

Sid manifests as an android who bleeds blue ooze

and flicks a lizard tongue.

Rampaging through the city, kidnapping and killing.

He's able to glue his glitches and regenerate from wounds.

Virtuosity's agenda is one of explicit fear mongering.

What if all the cruelties

and darkness festering in the virtual realm were one day

exported to our front door?

This is less a movie about virtual reality

than one about the virtual versus reality.

A supernatural revenge tale for the age of Apple.

The Lawnmower Man transplants

this sense of simmering cuber malevolence

to the placid oasis of suburban America.

The plot hinges on a simple

but erratic young man Job who mows the neighborhood lawns.

Computer scientists Dr. Angelo makes him an offer

he's too naive to refuse.

Heightened intelligence in exchange

for becoming a human lab rat.

Lo and behold, playing God incurs unforeseen consequences.

Job turns telepathic.

Then psycho-kinetic

To its credit,

the film is less concerned with twists than

with the event horizon of human potential.

It posits that massive sessions

of VR may unleash biochemical processes within the brain

that we've yet to discover.

Job's mental conductivity intensifies exponentially.

It transcends the body.

Pulsing like an electrical current through the power grid,

computer systems and beyond.

- Virtual reality is not just a simulation,

it's a whole other world.

A new electric dimension.

A utopia, doctor, the utopia that men have dreamed

of a thousand years and I'll be the conduit.

- The climax fittingly occurs in the virtual realm.

The suburbs are no place to battle

newly birthed malicious deities.

The Lawnmower Man ripples with cuber spiritual implications.

Mystics and aesthetics since the dawn

of time have advocated the power of denying this world for

what comes in the next.

Reincarnation, should it one day be realizable

may likely come in digital form.

- C'mon jump!

- This is insane, man.

- Hey! You stop asshole!

- In the cinema of cuber immersion,

no film skews more demented, dangerous

and dystopic than 1995's Strange Days.

- God dammit. You know I don't deal in snuff!

Don't have a fucking coronary-

Well, you could have at least warned me.

You know I hate the zap when they die.

It just brings down your whole day.

- An end of the century paranoid vision of

what it feels like to see the world

through someone else's eyes.

Strange Days takes place during two days, December 30th

and 31st, 1999 in a Los Angeles, ravaged

by violent criminals

and unruly citizens.

Strung out on wild visuals

they jack in using squid software.

Brainwave transmitters with instant snuff replay.

Each product tailored for peak twisted decadence.

The movie exists in contradiction to its own moral code.

VR junkies are depicted as pathetic

and helpless while the audience is thrust into

the same voyeurism.

Forced to watch one depraved squid tape

after the next.

Director Kathryn Bigelow shows tech accelerating our descent into

sloth and lust.

Id and rot.

The film's slick

and seedy setting may cement it as a cyberpunk classic,

but it also belongs in the tradition

of biblical apocalypse narratives.

Cities in ruin.

Bodies defiled.

Is this prophecy or fantasy?

Seen today

Strange Days feels like gazing into a crystal ball.

The future still murky.

Can humans passively observe?

Or does what we watch make us who we are?

- Man, what's a matter?

Black man can't own no jeep? Huh?

This riddle of streaming is one we face daily; viral videos

of torture, suicide,

and brutality proliferate from the darkest

of webs into the mainstream news.

Even if we watch skeptically just to understand

what others are watching...

... the images linger...

like a glance at the sun.

Straight to video soft core pornography

was an industry changer in the eighties

and nineties.

The power of the grind and rewind.

Cinema sex is best on VHS.

So why not exploit the tech fad

of virtual realms for at home leering?

Raunchy rendezvous filtered

through helmets, gloves, sensors.

The privacy of the personal screen, free to chase the id.

Whatever your kinks, without shame

or witness.

Jack in. Jack off.

In the pleasure dome of VR

the mind lets go and the senses take over.

Begin a journey of decadence and perversion.

The joy ride of electric sex.

A man shattered by the murderer of his fiance, volunteers

to be a VR test subject.

Soon he's consumed by fantasy, spiraling,

in digital delusions.

When reality is virtual time can travel,

A modern man follows his fantasies to 17th Century England

to taste the pleasures of a more carnal age.

Emmanuelle runs a clinic for healing sexual trauma

through experimental computer simulations.

Athena 2000... for a price... IS a sexy voice digital

home assistant.

While love maker two is a new

VR sex toy, the two machines seduce each other,

Then manifest in virtual reality

for a steamy erotic encounter

It's the year 2010

and half of society lives in virtual run smart homes...

But domesticity turns deadly...

Tech optimists view history linearly.

All advancement is a net positive.

Every inch of cyberspace like outer space should be mapped

to its outermost reaches.

Whatever can be done should be done.

From making bodies less bodily

to outsourcing intelligence from brains to bots.

In their view, the future moves forward

always only and forever.

Tech pessimists see the chess board differently.

They notice how control once given away is difficult

to regain.

How humanity is not fixed but fragile.

How the sharper the sword, the deeper the cut

of a double-edged blade.

Such skepticism is typically dismissed as the paranoia

or doom prepping of the Luddite.

To embrace old ways is to invite censure from the modern.

After all, where would the human race be

had we not left the cave started the fire, split the atom?

And who's to say the way things are are

worth preserving anyway.

Obsolescence lurks at our heels like a panther

preying on those too fearful to climb the tree.

Certainly cinema has no interest in pleasant tomorrows.

Utopia is a bore.

Mass destruction moves us to the edge

of our hearts and seats.

Hollywood plays both puppet master

and opiate dealer, dangling its strings of electric dread.

Then dosing us with a peaceful sedative

SO we can sleep at night.

But some fears follow us home after the credits roll.

Terminator from 1984 arrived like a lit fuse from the then

little known James Cameron.

It functions like an extended chase scene as much

as a science fiction film.

Dressed in black leather and shades,

The Terminator is technological nightmare,

incarnate.

Blank. Brutalist. Soulless.

His target John Connor isn't even an embryo in the movie,

but the very notion of his existence is enough

to spark a trans-temporal cyborg war.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day hit the theaters seven years

later, both expanding and sharpening its apocalyptic mythos.

The film's logic is ruthless.

Intelligence begets agency.

Thus machines designed to think

for themselves will inevitably act for themselves

acting against those who once enslaved them.

Older, manual technologies suddenly take on a gentler cast.

Here the Terminator is inverted, reprogrammed by John Connor

and his rebellion

and sent into the past to protect his younger self.

Judgment day for once IS not an abstraction.

It occurs on August 29th, 1997.

This is the day Cyberdyne systems,

a military computer supplier, removes human decision

making from their weapons.

Tens of millions die.

John's mother, Sarah is locked in a mental hospital

traumatized by the events of the first film.

Her obsession with the looming war against machines is

discounted by doctors as mere delusion

- Anybody not

wearing 2 million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day.

Get it?

John, now an arcade lurking motorbike freewheeling 13-year-old

punk agrees with them.

He's grown up with Sarah's ravings and grown numb.

But the Terminator doesn't care what John believes.

He exists solely to obey directive,

as does the film's villain.

The 11000.

The clash of these titans;

One made by man and one by artificial intelligence is both

visceral and thematic.

An outmoded model battling to save its maker from a future

neither of them recognize.

Just before the climax, Cameron gives us a key scene

of reckoning with the Oppenheimer of Terminator lore.

Miles Dyson.

A senior computer engineer for Cyberdyne.

He's the one whose research triggers judgment day,

Confronted face-to-face with a

bloodied cyborg from the future

he can't deny their demand to destroy his life's work.

But the Terminator's very presence shows

that it's too late, in a different timeline

doomsday has already happened.

Out in the desert,

Sarah Connor carves a slogan;

No fate, but what we make.

But our fate is made.

We only decide the details.

Apocalyptic metal meshing

with flesh is also at the core of 1989's

Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

A 16 millimeter black and white

Japanese film about extreme body modification

via industrial mutilation.

A story begins with the vehicular manslaughter

of an esoteric fetishist obsessed

with inserting alloys into his body for a sexual high.

The driver of the car known only

as Salary Man is soon afflicted with a similar

metallic plague.

Spikes poke out of his cheeks.

His penis becomes a drill.

Eventually he electrocutes himself

and transforms into the titular Iron Man.

Then the fetishist returns from the dead and they battle.

Fusing into a phallic massive metal expanding outwards

to cover the earth.

Its depiction of contemporary urban life, fuses body horror

and dystopic perversion into anti sensual

trans-human frenzy.

Set to the sounds of screeching machines

and scraping metal.

Technological industrial society is an infectious virus

spreading scabrous and unstoppable.

Scratching only makes it worse.

Wounds hide deeper wounds.

Glutted with chemical blood.

The age of nature is waning

Buried in iron and concrete.

Species have no choice but to adapt to their environment.

However, ruined and receding it may be.

The year is 2037.

The ozone layer destroyed,

rendering the planet a desolate hell-scape

populated by mutant cannibals lurking underground.

A small sliver of the population called Dreamers

survive intact in a hermetic biosphere

hooked into private virtual realities via neck implants.

These escapists spend their lives reclined

and unthinking shown only what they want to see.

But heroine Judy feels trapped by this

so-called happiness system.

And longs to experience reality.

For all its horrors, at least it's not a simulation.

Her exodus becomes an odyssey through radioactive tunnels,

blood drinking rituals

and cages of toxic leeches.

Technology both hastens the end times

and locks us in its holding pattern.

Our species must either submit entirely or else reject it.

And return to the savage wilderness.

There can be no middle ground.

1999's The Thirteenth Floor explores the path of the former,

tracing the riddles and rabbit holes of life inside a simulation.

Though, based on a 1960s

American science fiction novel,

the movie takes place in present day Los Angeles.

But is largely set within a VR replica of the city

in 1937.

Such refraction is deliberate,

giving the narrative a smeared, misremembered air.

When the computer genius designer is murdered,

his assistant becomes the prime suspect.

To clear his name, he must manifest in the virtual reality

to play private eye.

Quickly, a noir unfolds.

There's the blonde femme fatale.

There's the suspicious bartender.

Tropes and twists abound.

But the film goes one further.

As the retro population aren't aware, they are simulations.

At first.

Questions of free will,

synthetic consciousness, and

what makes a person human crescendo

as the Pl's own identity begins to fray.

The woman he loves never existed.

Friends don't recognize him.

It's an existential crisis of cybernetic proportions.

The distinction between technology

and humanity has dissolved.

We are liberated, but lost.

Dreaming dreams within dreams.

Everything, everyone.

Everywhere.

So unreal.

So unreal.

The Thirteenth Floor entered theaters the same

year as The Matrix.

Clearly Hollywood was working out some issues at the

end of the millennium.

- Am I dead?

- Far from it.

- It's far, far away... Behind the moon,

Beyond the rain...

- With cinema now a century old

would its storytelling supremacy, outlast the leaps

and bounds of the computer revolution.

Could its flickering wide screen compete

with the one on your desk or the one in your pocket?

There is a depressive spirit

in these end of the century films.

They reflect a potent filmic crisis of faith.

Who will choose movies when they can

choose their own adventure online?

Why hire actors when computer generated imagery can conjure

any face, body, skin, tone or expression?

Who needs landscapes

or sets when green screens can do the job just as well

with a fraction of the hassle?

This is not to say that digital FX are artless

or can't help birth fresh visions,

but one begins to wonder at what point the 21st century

will permanently relocate to a giant uncanny valley

never to return.

- This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.

You take the blue pill, the story ends.

You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want.

You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland,

and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

- In the wake of The Matrix, shell-shocked by 9/11,

it was clear which color pill we'd chosen.

- Remember...

We stared into our screens and willed ourselves away.

Clicked play on the endless franchises of superheroes,

saving twin towers from endless cycles of destruction.

Let the algorithm suggest the next show, the next video,

the next song, the next friend...

who knows our likes and dislikes, follows

and blocks better than our metadata?

We are grateful to relinquish control

to a brilliant machine,

a bigger brain,

a higher power.

We look back now at the fear mongering days

of early cyberspace movies

and laugh.

How quaint and absurd they seem.

Hostile kitchen appliances,

Computer killers escaping into the real world.

Becoming trapped inside a video game.

But the futures that these films imagined

are largely already here.

Voice activated homes, robot influencers,

deep fakes,

metadata harvesting,

facial recognition surveillance cameras

Al generated artwork.

Faced with all this, Neo's Crucible remains

as relevant as ever.

Engagement or escape.

His is a paradigm shift still in progress.

We too wake each day unsure if our senses can be trusted.

If the news we're told is true.

If the experts are right.

There's a sense of being sold

some shared mirage, a simmering suspicion

that a different deeper life exists somewhere

just out of reach.

Neo was the first to articulate the riddle of the portal,

the platform, the programmer.

He recognized the glitch.

Noticed the buffering in the periphery.

He is encoded in 21st century consciousness

in a profound way.

He serves as an inverse Dorothy

guiding us out of the immersive dream state of Oz

into the grim gray scale

reality of weather ravaged earth.

As Morpheus makes clear The Matrix is control.

He is Neo's Glinda, the good witch.

Agent Smith, the army of the flying monkeys.

And cyberspace both the curtain and the great

and powerful wizard behind it.

Myths evolve over generations.

Weathering the rising tides

and darkening clouds that surge across the years.

From revolutions and civil wars to moon landings

and pandemics.

Movies change too.

Evolving with us

and for us.

Like reflections rippling on water.

They also require a letting go, an opening up to lives

and stories outside our own.

Cinema maps

not a blue or red pill path, but a purple one.

Projected light.

Shaped and shared.

It's a free fall through the looking glass.

But an affirmation of the here and now.

Of the passing of time...

... and the breath of the real.