The Thirteenth Floor

Saw The Thirteenth Floor, the film that my father swears (to this day) is The Matrix. His confusion is understandable: it deals with a simulated reality which the inhabitants do not know is simulated and was released in 1999, the same year that The Matrix was. It was one of those weird doubles of movies, like A Bug's Life and Antz, or all of those penguin movies that came out around the same time. Anyway, the film is a sort of mystery, opening with an old man being murdered. He is the head of a computer firm and it's up to his handsome lead programmer to find out who done it (spoiler alert: he never does anything remotely resembling programming.)

The tech firm is building a giant simulator which is so complex that it can simulate hundreds of human-level intelligent people at the same time. Naturally, you can jump into this world and wander around in it. It's a short jump of logic when the characters begin arguing that the simuloids are really alive, in the sense that you and I are alive. Souls are spoken of. This film is really most interested in throwing these ideas around, so things like character and plot play second fiddle, alas.

The ideas being thrown around are interesting but I frankly prefer histrionics to philosophy. What there is is explored naturally and entertainingly, but there's only so far you can push thought-experiments and paradoxes before they become slightly tedious. Also, the problems being fretted over are largely imaginary (what if a person escapes from the simulation, one character wonders. I too have lost sleep over what would happen if Microsoft Word were to escape from my laptop.) Also these problems are of course 100s of years down the road. I know about exponential growth and so on, but we don't understand our brains well enough to even duplicate them, never mind simulate new ones.

Anyway... the film brings interesting ideas to the table relating to very sexy, exciting concepts like consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the reality of the world. Unfortunately, the writers lack the skill to weave these ideas into a relevant or gripping screenplay. The plot is fairly tedious and the characters are fairly flat. A quick example of this muddly-ness: the film opens inside of the simulation. Later on, someone enters the simulation and there's a full-on, crane-shot, swooning soundtrack, reveal of the simulated world which is undercut a bit by us already having seen the damn thing in the first scene! The film is a good conversation-starter and, like I say, full of interesting ideas, but it's heart is so invested in those interesting ideas that it's just not very full of the things that traditionally make a good movie.