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Retro SciFi of the Week…
Virtuosity (1995)
Films about the mind comprise a huge chunk of the science fiction genre. They trace their roots all the way back to the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the 19th century. Themes include mind alteration, mind control, telepathy, direct neural links, the hive mind, virtual worlds and much more.
Virtuosity marked a turning point and a refresh of this subgenre. Although this isn’t the best example of mind films, it’s significant because it began to pull together the elements of the next major phase of the subgenre. This led directly to “The Matrix (1999)”, and later to “Inception (2010), “Time Sleeper (2020)” and many other groundbreaking films about the mind and virtual worlds.
Predecessors influencing this film include “Altered States (1980)”, “Brainstorm (1983)”, “Max Headroom (1987)”, and “Lawnmower Man (1992)”. Most of the earlier influential works were tied more to the “hardware” of the brain, such as “Spock’s Brain” (from ST:OS) and “The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962)”.
When Virtuosity first came out, it looked like the subgenre had finally jumped the shark, but the somewhat goofy features in this film came to define the next phase of this subgenre. (I’ll highlight some of those elements under a spoiler content warning in this thread.)
(Image: low-res movie poster, fair use)
movie spoilers
****SPOILERS*****
Virtuosity (1995) isn’t the best in this genre, but it’s certainly entertaining and innovative. It brought together several elements that came to dominate the subgenre of mind films. The Matrix Series borrowed many of these elements. They include:
- The film begins in the virtual world in a manner that leads the audience to believe that it is real life, then later reveals that it is actually a virtual world
- The use of generic, suit-wearing, identical virtual characters
- A stilted super-villain
- Real life characters who sit in special chairs in order connect to the virtual world
- Subjects in real life can experience real life injuries from events that occur in the virtual world
- The protagonist is a bad guy; in Virtuosity he’s a bad cop in real life but a good cop in the virtual world. In The Matrix, the protagonists are bad guys (Trench Coat Mafia) who kill cops in the virtual world, but in the real world they’re the good guys fighting off evil, repressive robot war lords.
- Virtuosity and The Matrix each prominently feature the use of automatic weapons in the virtual world
- The super-villain is able to become an actual human-like being in real life
- The protagonist is implanted with an exploding tracking device
I don’t think Virtuosity was the first to use any of these elements, but it was the first to bring them all together in a film from the mind subgenre.
Virtuosity really hasn’t gotten the praise it deserves and was completely overshadowed by The Martix Series, which was much better written and produced, and included much more action (and unfortunately more violence), and benefited from the improved CG technology that was available when it was produced four years later.
movie spoilers
@Pat From the content warning, how am I to know which movie you're spoiling?
@peterdrake
I guess you need to follow the thread backwards to the OP (original post). But that's kind of a pain isn't it. I'll try to remeber next time to include the title in the CW.
(The titles are at the beginning of the spoiler post, along with another in-text warning just in case folks have the "auto-open-CWs" feature enabled, but of course folks wouldn't know that until they peek. Duh! 😅