Films about virtual reality | Hacker News Reader

Films about virtual reality

moriareviews.com

75 pointswalterbell54 comments

Love this post. Adding a whole bunch of things to my watch list.

One thing I don't see mentioned is the TV mini series "Wild Palms". I remember watching that as it debuted on TV back in '93. Haven't seen it since though. I remember Kim Cattrall being in it and I remember VR being a big part of the plot.

In looking it up I had no idea that Ryuichi Sakamoto created the music for it.

Here's a trailer for it. It looks so bad now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJMPCGo42cE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Palms

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106175/

And William Gibson has a small cameo as himself. I remember the show as being quite good, but I suspect it's not aged well.

That’s interesting because he just had a cameo in third season of Upload as himself, too.

Took me a moment to recognize him when I watched that episode.

I was mesmerised by the trailers but never watched it for some reason. I know it can never live up to my imagined version! I daren't even watch that trailer :)

Wild Palms was a real disappointment from a sci-fi perspective. I felt like VR was just a "tech the tech" kind of adjunct instead of actually being integral to the story. Other generic technologies or mysticism could have been plugged-in and it wouldn't have made any difference.

> The striking Japanese film Avalon (2001) had players gradually becoming aware that the environment they are inside is a videogame simulation.

This film was made by Mamoru Oshii, director of Ghost in the Shell. It was the next film he did right after it. I loved this movie when came out. He filmed this movie in Poland and all the actors in it are Polish. Highly recommend it if you haven't seen it.

Probably not the most important anecdote, but IIRC his dog (Basset hound) also features in this film, like he did in Ghost in the Shell (inserted as Batou's dog I think). It seems he has a thing for adding it to every film.

EDIT: apparently the dog is called Gabriel.

It's on Prime Video:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.93cb12a5...

Excellent movie with an absolute brilliant score from Kenji Kawai. I love the elements of applying an anime-style (i.e. the set design and how background characters physically behave) to live action. The ending also hits hard with a kind of magical indescribable feeling I don't know how to articulate.

"Log Off" from the OST... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cAYtOPw1jc

Not VR, but I really enjoyed Devs:

"The box contains us. The box contains everything. And inside the box, there's another box."

The Sora announcement had me recall Devs.

Soundtrack for that show is an incredible mix of contemporary artists and unique tracks, something to artists I hadn't heard of before. Also, Alex Garland is an amazing director people should check out his other work.

Have you seen Men? Don't.

I have and I love it it's a very disturbingly weird movie. I'm still trying to fit it in my brain with how Alex Garland makes every movie about a technology and I'm trying to think if that's what he was going for there as well in an abstract way.

It's so disturbingly weird, I can't unsee the end :(

Great title as well. It really is about devs, in a way. But then at the end you remember that it's the same director as Ex Machina.

The article mentions Red Dwarf… but only in context of Rimmer.

There was a whole Red Dwarf episode devoted to AR. Has Haptics and everything.

Gunmen of the Apocalypse S06E03

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0684158/

Completely hilarious like all Season 6 episodes

Brainscan was especially perplexing in that it played with possible, impossible, and fantasy at the same time. And the main character lived in an attic sans parental oversight with an OK Google.

It had a great soundtrack too, especially its main theme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LivLNdeHmww

Looker (1981) is a great film, but it's a stretch to call it depicting virtual reality. Perhaps you could say superimposing the computer-generated humans into real world scenery is like AR. (Yes, the computer can generate lifelike moving 3D representations of people, but static furniture is far beyond its capabilities ...)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/

As mentioned in the article, Welt am Draht (World on a Wire 1973) is really good. Smart, strange, unpredictable. Highly recommended.

https://www.moriareviews.com/sciencefiction/world-on-a-wire-...

> The big breakthrough work was The Lawnmower Man (1992), a conceptually absurd film where scientist Pierce Brosnan uses VR to somehow turn an intellectually handicapped gardener into a psychic genius. What made The Lawnmower Man a hit was the ground-breaking computer graphic effects used to depict the virtual environment. An even sillier work was the sequel Lawnmower Man II: Beyond Cyberspace/Lawnmower Man II: Jobe’s War (1996), which had the psychic genius trying to become a messiah in cyberspace.

Lawnmower Man was both awesome and ridiculous. Loved it.

I still want to give that hamster ball thing a go though, it looks fun. Also the obstacle flying game, the hardware for that could be made and I believe almost exists.

There's a SNES game based on the movie that has some decent sections.

>somehow turn an intellectually handicapped gardener into a psychic genius

waddya mean somehow? They got him to understand the Sacred Geometry. I saw it in San Francisco when it came out and the guy next to me said "oh shit! it's the SACRED GEOMETRY!"

Shameless dual-plug:

The director of Lawnmower Man (and Virtuosity), Brett Leonard, presented at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup recently. After everyone thanked him for his movies, he talked about how he is currently involved in using VR for remote physical and mental therapy.

https://www.ubiquityvx.com/about

Lawnmower Man is probably the strangest license ever. IIUC the story is licensed from Stephen King. That story has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the movie. It's entirely about some person who morphs into a lawnmower. Has zero VR. There's a like 3 second VR scene in the movie of Jobe becoming a lawnmower but otherwise, zero connection. I guess the director or the producer just used it as an excuse to get funding then made whatever they wanted to make

It's been what, 30 years, but even the ending has way more cgi/vr than 3 seconds. The movie may not have been made had they not used the name of King's short story, which isn't all that good to begin with.

That said, I think the Johnny Quest remake had plenty of vr. It was pretty cool for its time.

I think the trigger for that is that 1992 was around the time of the first commercial VR headsets. They were hugely cumbersome and low res but they worked. I remember playing Dactyl Nightmare with my family circa 1991. It was probably in the mainstream press and some Hollywood executive got overly excited and decided to insert it into whatever project was on hand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product)

> which had the psychic genius trying to become a messiah in cyberspace.

And Jesus wept. For there were no more worlds to conquer.

Interesting to watch Lawnmower Man alongside Being There (where an intellectually handicapped gardener is merely perceived to be a genius)

i loved the first one and was so hyped for the sequel, what a disappointment

I don't know if it really counts--though maybe so if Strange Days makes it on the list--Cypher (2002) with Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu is a pretty fun ride filled with corporate espionage intrigue.

there is an episode of The Avengers where the main characters have to run a drive simulator fast enough that they don't get electroshocks https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0516819/ would that count?

The Avengers was so full of great / weird ideas.

(I have a soft spot for series 7, not a very popular opinion! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054518/episodes/?season=7)

This post brings back memories about the Johnny Mnemonic "interactive action movie" game, back in the 90s!

They acknowledge the later developments in television as well but left out some other early literature including Philip K Dick, off top of my head the wife/vr religion subplot dropped from Blade Runner adaptation and Samuel Delaney (if one imagines how the sockets in Nova could have worked)

And I just came back from the Berlinale, with another noteworthy addition to this genre: "Another End" https://letterboxd.com/film/another-end/

"Another End" to be released March 21, 2024:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26749648/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Kind of OT, but FWIW... a very fun series was ReBoot. An animated series set inside a computer.

In one exemplary episode, the user initiated a reboot of the machine and this set off an entire string of song & dance numbers by the system's inhabitants.

Don't forget the Murder, She Wrote episode "A Virtual Murder" (from 1993):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0653453/

They missed the most realistic depiction, in Community: https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ?feature=shared&t=40s

I am fascinated by the film The Matrix. The film's depiction of a virtual reality world was groundbreaking at the time, and it has had a lasting impact on the way we think about technology and its potential.

The thirteenth floor was also pretty ok though clearly a low budget effort. Plot wise it was a little in between the matrix and Inception, sans the action.

Is a "VR film" really about VR if it doesn't have some variant of the "If you die in here, you die in real life!" plot point?

This could be possible if some twisted dev mods a VR headset with an API to explode and kill a person if they die, then hosts some kind of squid games type tournament.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7kbq/palmer-luckey-made-a-...

This is an amazing list. I humbly request that the author do a post for AI movies.

Strange Days is sooo good.

The blog is pure gold

I like The Thirteenth Floor. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/

This website is fantastic

When the website looks like this you know the takes will be hot (thoughtful and erudite). Probably the last website standing in the webring.

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