The late ’90s was a great time for post-modern existentialist science fiction movies. This was the period that saw the release of the under-rated Dark City, the over-rated eXistenZ and a bunch of others that were doomed to obscurity in the wake of The Matrix. And I’ve just seen another one.
The Thirteenth Floor is the story of Douglas Hall, a software designer whose boss is killed just as they were putting the finishing touches on a massive experiment involving AI and artificial reality. Specifically, they’ve built dozens of supercomputers, each of which is constantly generating a thinking, conscious artificial human being unknowingly living in a reconstruction of 1930’s Los Angeles. Our hero has to go back and forth from the virtual world to the real one as he investigates the murder of his boss. You know the rest.
Seriously, you know the rest. Hall does indeed start to question what’s real. He does start to believe that the artificial constructs are every bit as real as flesh-and-blood humans. The programs do get pissed off when they inevitably realize what’s going on. There are a few twists here and there, but aside from a rather novel idea involving Vincent D’Onofrio in the third act, this film is completely and entirely predictable to anyone with a working brain and adequate knowledge of this movie subgenre. I won’t give away every spoiler, except to say that there were multiple times when I thought “They couldn’t go there. They couldn’t be that stupid,” only to find that they could and did.
The sci-fi aspect is made even more terrible by the technology used to jack in. The virtual reality machine uses a whole ton of green laser lights that are apparently supposed to be cool, but just come off as lame, useless and excessive. Additionally, the computer uses a keyboard interface and has a perfectly good text display, yet the system has a loud and repetitive female voice that reads off everything that’s on the monitor. To put that in perspective, try to imagine your computer reading off this article to you in a loop as you read it. It doesn’t take a genius to realize how annoying the concept is in terms of user interfacing. But the real cherry on top is how totally unsafe the system is. It’s stated multiple times that users could die if they stay in the system too long and we see this very nearly happen to Hall at one point. Yet when he goes back in — totally unsupervised — the countdown timer to end the session fails to begin and the machine starts up anyway with our hero none the wiser. You’d think these computer science geniuses would have put in some kind of failsafe to keep that from happening, wouldn’t you?!
Then of course, we have the mystery half of this movie’s story. And it sucks. Again, the movie’s predictability totally ruins any suspense that the murder mystery might have had. It’s also filled with plot holes, most notably when Hall says that he’s not at liberty to discuss his project, yet we see security grunts and a detective (with no visible warrant) coming and going through his workspace. Moreover, we see Hall’s co-worker with the aforementioned detective, giving him a complete rundown of his supposedly confidential project with absolutely no prodding whatsoever!
A big part of what makes the mystery aspect so completely boring is that our characters are not given the dialogue or the acting chops to take on any substance. Hall is played by someone named Craig Bierko, whose charisma and screen presence here could be measured in negative numbers, especially when he’s first introduced. Making things worse is that his chemistry with the mysterious love interest is very visibly forced and totally unbelievable.
In this case, the love interest is played by Gretchen Mol and her adorable natural charm is totally wasted here. Also wasted is Vincent D’Onofrio, who’s quite clearly only in this for the paycheck. Dennis Haysbert (the Allstate guy) also makes an appearance as the homicide detective and he’s slumming it just as badly.
The visuals for this movie range from misguided to awful. The 1930s setting wasn’t gritty (way too clean), it wasn’t vibrant (the colors were all bleached out) and some of the backgrounds were poor CGI. It all adds up to an illusion of the past that completely fell flat. The real world wasn’t much better. It was way too close to modern-day to make the concept work (though there’s a reason for that….), yet the world was also populated with cars, buildings and pinball machines that had a very retro feel. Additionally, this is where the film uses some very cliche and threadbare tricks to give the movie a darker noir feel, with lightning flashes being perhaps the most prominent. If the film was trying to set up two contrasting worlds — as it should have done — the result was a complete failure.
To sum up: The writing is subpar, the fight scenes are pathetic, the mystery is boring, the story is predictable, the production design missed its mark and effort from anyone in the cast is practically nil. Most unforgivable of all is that with one exception, every single one of the science-fiction concepts in this movie was better-explored by its contemporaries. In an era that yielded so many great post-modern science fiction films, there is absolutely no reason to witness the mediocrity of The Thirteenth Floor.