Science-fictional Hollywood satire that just barely qualifies as science fiction: an embattled filmmaker (Al Pacino, having fun for a change) fires his female lead and substitutes a computer-generated cyberstar known as Simone, short for Simulation One. In a nutshell: "Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it." The whole element of fraud -- the director's refusal to come clean on his ruse, his erection of an inviolable Garbo-esque mystique around his elusive "star" -- causes problems of plausibility as the plot rolls along to additional film projects, a J.Lo-like singing career, TV interviews, and so on. But where plausibility suffers, truthfulness nevertheless thrives. The particulars of the premise -- though it has been carefully set up and inventively fleshed out -- do not matter as much as its reverberations. These extend into such fertile territory as the Hollywood teeter-totter of technology vs. art ("This is a classic case of technology in search of an artist"), the directorial ego (the Pygmalion complex, the Svengali syndrome, the Frankenstein mania), the eternal power struggle between director and star, the unchanging public preference for the visible puppet and indifference to the hidden puppeteer, the escalating frenzy of the press, the expanding dominion of computers, and above all, the illusory nature of whatever we see on screen. Writer-director Andrew Niccol, the writer and director also of Gattaca and writer only of The Truman Show, is certainly a man of ideas, less certainly a teller of tales. Although the whole thing sags by the end, it stays with you afterward. Catherine Keener, Evan Rachel Wood, Rachel Roberts, Winona Ryder. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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