Respectable piece of science fiction, although coming so close on the heels of The Matrix and eXistenZ, it tends to show up the limits of the virtual-reality topic. The big ideas here, both of which can be found in one or the other of those predecessors, are that what we accept as reality in the present day may only be the virtual reality of some more advanced intelligence in the future (heavy, man), and that we never, ever, can trust the reality of what we see on the screen. The fact that the movie camera can lie is of course a fundamental axiom of the medium, and it has inevitably lost some of its power to stun and to startle in the eighty years since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (That artifact of German Expressionism seems perhaps a little less remote when the current filmmaking team features such a heavy concentration of transplanted Germans: director Josef Rusnak, producers Roland and Ute Emmerich, executive producers Michael and Helga Ballhaus, cinematographer Wedigo von Schultzendorff, composer Harald Kloser, not to forget cast member Armin Mueller-Stahl.) Virtual reality is just the latest-model vehicle to carry the message. The Thirteenth Floor, however, shores up its science-fictional interest with some staples of the classical detective story — the murder by person or persons unknown, the purloined letter, the imposter heir — and it sets these down in a virtual-reality arena near the Golden Age of murder mysteries, Los Angeles in 1937. The marriage of genres is a reasonably happy one. Place and period are lovingly re-created, even if one might have some misgivings about the tendency towards rusty monochrome. (One of the virtual-reality masterminds has some misgivings of his own: "Colorization needs a little work.") Craig Bierko, Gretchen Mol, Dennis Haysbert, and Vincent D'Onofrio can do little for any human interest. Only the last-named, in his more maniacal mode, does any real harm. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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