It's Review Wednesday again! We're in for a treat, this time. Patrick and I have been doing a lot of "what movie is this?" Youtube quizzes, and we discovered an interesting movie to watch. It's from 1995, and stars a quite young Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. I've loved a bunch of movies they've been in so I wanted to check this one out, called 'Virtuosity'.
Here is the synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:
"A former cop who has been imprisoned for murdering the psychopath who killed his family, Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington) is recruited to test out a new virtual-reality program where the goal is to apprehend a computer-generated being called SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe), who has been modeled on hundreds of deranged criminals. When SID manages to escape into the real world, Barnes must capture or destroy him before the soulless entity can go on a killing spree"
The premise seems simple enough, and this movie was WAY ahead of its time. I mean, it kind of bombed on Rotten Tomatoes, and probably because in 1995 none of this stuff existed yet so it was hard to write about and make it seem legit. I mean, this movie was released the same year as the Virtual Boy for goodness sakes. VR was not a thing yet. So obviously, real AI was also still 20 years away. The CGI visuals... left a lot to be desired. It's hard to say if the budget was enough or if it was just that bad in 1995, but I have to remember that Jurassic Park came out in 1993, and Terminator 2 came out in 1991, so like, it seems like it could have been better.
The plot was kind of awful lol The guy that invented SID decides to release him into the wild to see how he does because he's batshit crazy, obviously, and it feels so Terminator 2 that SID is basically unstoppable with his silicon body that can regenerate if it "soaks up" glass shards. It also seems to pull a lot of ideas from Demolition Man as well, and apparently was the inspiration for The Matrix (??).
I feel like they directly ripped the idea of SID from the Star Trek: TNG episode called "Ship in a Bottle" (released in 1993), where Sherlock Holmes nemesis, Professor Moriarty, becomes sentient and takes over the Enterprise to force them to figure out how to release him from the holodeck so he can go live his life. I won't spoil the ending to Virtuosity if you wish to watch it, but suffice it to say the endings were not that different.
I just feel as if this movie could have been SO much better. The plot felt disjointed as if it were missing pieces or we had to assume a bunch of information, and important parts that could have been fleshed out were skipped. Making Parker the "only" person who "understood" SID because he hunted him once in VR is silly. Even if the creator of SID wasn't available to ask (which he wasn't when he disappeared after letting SID out) there are Behavior Analysis specialists in the real world who would do a better job than Parker, in theory. The things Parker assumed about SID and his motives/location I believe anybody could have gotten.
It's so unfortunate, and I believe strongly that this movie would do amazingly well if rebooted for today. With VR being much more realistic and AI beginning to scare people with its abilities, now would be the perfect time to rewrite this crazy plot and make it something worth seeing. I even think that the writers kind of knew what they were doing when they wrote SID 6.7 in the beginning. AI needs data to work off of, and in the end, it's still only programming, no matter how "real" it seems. The AI of today just pulls its info from the internet or data dumps and adds code for "fluff language" so that it answers you like a real person instead of like a machine. It is not sentient, it can just act like it is.
It makes me wish Tony Scott the director was still alive today. Unstoppable is one of my favorite movies of his, starring Denzel, and his movies just have a way about them that make the action gripping. He directed the Taking of Pelham 123 (also starring Denzel) and you could tell it was the same guy. He also directed Top Gun, Enemy of the State, Deja Vu and Man of Fire. He would have fit in perfectly directing this as a reboot.
Let's do it, bring it on! And I will be in line to see it.
