Information Technology Reference
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snuff movie, which plunges him into a conspiracy involving police
and others in authority. David Cronenberg's
eXistenZ
(
) features
Jennifer Jason Leigh as a virtual reality games designer who, in
fleeing pursuers intent on taking her life, enters the world of her
latest game, the eponymous eXistenZ.
Despite having reputable directors and scriptwriters these films
were on the whole unsatisfactory, not least in their attempts to
portray the effects and possibilities of new technology. In each case,
as with more egregious productions such as
The Lawnmower Man
(
1999
), the technologies themselves are supposed to suggest brave
new worlds mediated to unprecedented degrees by media and
information technology. Yet in the main they come across as no
more than unconvincing gimmicks. By having to give the technol-
ogy substance in order to make it visible and filmic, the sense of
its ubiquity and power is lost. These problems were overcome in
the Wachowski Brothers' film
The Matrix
(
1996
) by a simple, yet
brilliant sleight of hand. The film is set in what appears to be
an American city in
1999
, in which the central character Thomas
Anderson (Keanu Reeves again) is a computer programmer by day
and a hacker at night, known to others as Neo. Neo is plagued by
a nagging sense that all is not as it seems in the world. This is
confirmed when he meets a young women and fellow hacker calling
herself Trinity. Trinity takes Neo to meet Morpheus, who is a kind of
hacker guru figure, and who reveals to Neo the reasons behind his
unease. It is not the end of the twentieth century, Morpheus tells
Neo, but sometime in the twenty-second. The world, everything
that surrounds them, is no more than a computer simulation,
engineered by intelligent machines who have taken over the world
and, in effect, farm human beings cocooned in pods in order to feed
on the energy they generate. While in their pods humans are given
the illusion that they are in the world of
1999
. Morpheus, Trinity and
others have liberated themselves and are now actually in a space
ship, evading the attentions of the machines, while trying to find
1999
