For all its innovation in storytelling—which is truly remarkable and gripping—the movie lives and dies by three things: Its characters, performances, and realism—for without these grounding the experiment, drawing the viewer into this world and making the audience feel like this syuzhet is necessary, the film might hardly feel like one at all. Too often underutilized, John Cho sinks his teeth into a well-rounded and human role, bringing life to the layers of screens within screens, giving a face to the interface, which is no small task in a movie overwhelming inhuman—so that’s check one and two. What is more, except for a couple twists near the end of the movie, everything here, while new to the screen, feels utterly banal and familiar, a reflection of how we really interact with our media ecology. While the film may have a short shelf life, feeling dated even by the time it left theaters, there is nonetheless plenty here—a parent’s love, a teen’s angst, the paranoid structure of digital knowledge—that is true and universal.
Note: Listen, I watch more than my fair share of movies. They are as often incredible examples of ideology and political economy as they are works of world-expanding art. At best, they are thought-provoking, and at worst, they are mediocre entertainment (especially when they fall into that uncanny valley of “so awful it’s fun”). Since I generally write up a few quick thoughts for each movie I watch, and in the interest of making public more of my thinking and writing processes, I figured that I might as well post the occasional review to this blog as well as to my Letterboxd/Rotten Tomatoes accounts.