Take the red pill and we’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes
Forget Oculus Rift and HTC Vive – Ready Player One will be hitting cinema screens all over the globe in March 2018, bringing novelist Ernest Cline’s original vision of a rich and extremely life-like virtual reality gaming world, called the OASIS, to the big screen.
But this isn’t the first time a movie about virtual reality has aroused our cultural craving for fantastical future technology and employed some of the same tropes about all the wonders and horrors it could bring.
In fact, exploring the endless possibilities, ethical minefields and advanced technological inventions around virtual reality has played a central role in science-fiction from the early days of Doctor Who through to the nightmarish visions of David Cronenberg to the storylines of Rick and Morty.
So as we wait for Ready Player One to be released, we’ve decided to go on an adventure. From horrifying, hair-raising games and holodeck adventures through to sprawling sci-fi worlds, we bring you a brief history of VR in TV and film.
It’s worth bearing in mind as you make your way through the list that there might be some titles missing that you would have included and their omission is sure to make for some interesting discussions. For example, is The Grid from Tron virtual reality? Or more digitisation and miniaturisation? We thought the latter. And is Inception an adventure into someone else’s subconscious or an example of a simulated reality? We settled on the former.
Needless to say, we’ve tried our best not to lift the lid on endings and twists, but there’ll be some spoilers in here. So without further ado, it’s time to take the red pill – we’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes:
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1990: Total Recall
This Arnie-powered, action-packed adventure is loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, written in 1966. In 1990 it got the big blockbuster treatment complete with lots of guns, crazy characters and, of course, slick one liners from good ol’ Schwarzenegger. It explores a future in which virtual memories are implanted into people and big corporations are running the world – and the rest of the solar system to boot.
It’s more focused on the creation of virtual memories than the virtual world environments of other movies, but its blurring of what’s real, what’s implanted and what’s imagined makes it a solid entry on our whirlwind tour of simulated realities in film.
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1992: The Lawnmower Man
Many people think The Lawnmower Man is based on a Stephen King book and although it kinda, sort of, is King actually sued when his name was attached to the film because according to him it “bore no meaningful resemblance” to his story.
The movie is about a greenskeeper called Jobe who takes part in an experiment run by Dr. Lawrence Angelo of Virtual Space Industries. He’s essentially given lots of drugs and undergoes a number of virtual reality experiences in an attempt to raise his intelligence. It works. But, as you’d expect from a movie loosely based on a King story, it begins to have a strange effect on Jobe’s psyche too.
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1996: Johnny Mnemonic
Years before Keanu Reeves knocked our socks off with the sci-fi masterpiece that is The Matrix, he’d already earned his VR stripes in cyberpunk thriller Johnny Mnemonic. The film is set in a dystopian future and is all about Neo, we mean John Wick, sorry JOHNNY who has a cybernetic brain implant that stores information. His job is to carry sensitive information around that’s too important to be sent via the Net, a VR equivalent of the internet. Like many other movies in the list, it’s not an original story and is loosely based on a book with the same name by William Gibson.
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1995: Virtuosity
For some reason, the brilliant minds in Virtuosity have created something called a SID, which stands for Sadistic, Intelligent and Dangerous. It’s a VR amalgamation of all the most dangerous serial killers that have ever lived, but it’s trapped in a VR world so that’s all fine, right? Can you guess where this is going next? That’s right! The SID escapes into the real world. It’s a serial killer movie, a crime drama and a shaky tech story, which is saved by having Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe at the helm.
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1999: The Matrix
Possibly the most famous and epic virtual reality movie out there, but did The Matrix strike you as a VR movie on first viewing? After all, where’s the fancy headgear and cool games? But that’s because all of humanity is supposedly hooked up to a big, fake virtual reality that makes up The Matrix and the worst part is, no one (well, mostly no one) knows it. But the truth is that the Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. We’ll stop now.
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2017: OtherLife
OtherLife is a movie about a form of biological virtual reality, which is an interesting spin on the head mounted displays we’re used to seeing – even in sci-fi movies. It’s about a scientist who creates virtual memories and environments and comes up against the government who want to use her work to ‘imprison’ people in virtual worlds that seem to last years, but only actually last a few minutes. It’s not the best movie on the list, but using virtual reality to not just transport your senses somewhere else but to distort your perception of time is a fascinating avenue to explore.
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Source: Louis Cacciuttolo