5.7 | / 10 |
Users | 3.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
The Law Enforcement Technology Advancement Centre (LETAC) has developed SID version 6.7: a Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous virtual reality entity which is synthesized from the personalities of more than 150 serial killers. LETAC would like to train police officers by putting them in VR with SID, but they must prove the concept by using prisoners as test subjects. One such prisoner is ex-cop Parker Barnes. When SID manages to inject his personality into a nano-machine android, it appears that Barnes might be the only one who can stop him.
Starring: Denzel Washington, Kelly Lynch, Russell Crowe, Stephen Spinella, William ForsytheThriller | Insignificant |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
The 1995 sci-fi thriller Virtuosity had the star wattage of Denzel Washington and a rising newcomer named Russell Crowe. The effects-laden trailer looked enticing, but the film was DOA in theaters, and time hasn't been kind to it. Director Brett Leonard had made the 1992 cult classic, The Lawnmower Man, which revolved around the transformation of a mentally challenged man into a digital superbeing. Virtuosity must have seemed like a logical next step, as the evolving world of virtual reality spawned an entirely computer-generated character who manages to enter our world and treat it as a homicidal playground. The problem is that this concept had been done before (and better) by James Cameron. In his two Terminator films, Cameron let loose various thinking machines to run riot in a Los Angeles whose buildings and people they destroyed without a moment's hesitation. Even the humans trying to stop these cyborgs regarded the urban landscape as a disposable war zone, because they knew what others didn't, namely that everything around them would vanish in a nuclear holocaust just a few years into the future. For everyone involved, both persons and property were as temporary as pixels on a screen. Virtuosity's computer-generated character didn't behave any differently, and he wasn't especially original about it. Leonard and screenwriter Eric Bernt (Romeo Must Die) got things backwards. Their story moved from virtual reality to the outside world, when the more fertile direction was precisely the opposite. Four years later, the Wachowskis would plunge us into The Matrix, where reality could be reshaped, humans interacted through their avatars, and you never knew for sure whether you were talking to a person or a program. Leaving aside the problematic sequels, The Matrix hit the conceptual targets at which Virtuosity aimed and missed.
Virtuosity was shot by British DP Gale Tattersall (From the Earth to the Moon). Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has been taken from a Paramount transfer and master with which Warner had no involvement in the preparation. The future in Virtuosity looks almost antiseptically cool and uniform, even inside the prison where Parker is serving his time. The VR simulations are filled with businesspeople in gray walking through a landscape of steel and glass, and the world outside isn't much different. SID, by contrast, is attracted to more colorful locations, whether it's the Japanese restaurant in the simulation of the opening scene or the real-world disco with its elaborate light show where he takes the clientele hostage. He also likes flashy clothing. The Blu-ray image nicely balances these various palettes, and it also manages the transitions between the sharp, flat present and the softer, darker, distorted memory images that torment Parker as he recalls his family's fate at the hands of Matthew Grimes. Except for those portions, which are deliberately blurred, the Blu-ray image is clear and sharply detailed, and the film's grain pattern is finely resolved, with a touch of sharpening visible from time to time. Virtuosity has been mastered on a BD-50 with an average bitrate of 33.97 Mbps. This is a departure for Warner, which has too often compressed films of this length (106 minutes) to a smaller file size in order to fit them onto BD-25s. With any luck, Virtuosity's generous compression represents the beginning of a trend that Warner will continue.
Virtuosity's 5.1 track, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, gets off to a great start in the opening VR sequence as Parker and Donovan dash through a simulation, and we experience it from their perspective, with voices of the crowd surrounding and passing by them. The ensuing shootout with SID 6.7 is a sonically active affair, with bullets flying, dishes breaking and Japanese-style paper walls ripping apart. Subsequent encounters between SID and his pursuers are just as aggressively mixed, as are Parker's various struggles with the many adversaries he must face, both in and out of prison. (A showdown with a white supremacist while prisoners cheer all around is memorably immersive.) The sound designers have created an interesting and distinctive combination of electrical and organic noise for SID's regenerative process, which is impressively conveyed by the Blu-ray's track. Dialogue is always clear, and the score by the versatile Christopher Young (Drag Me to Hell) covers a broad range from standard action movie beats to a kind of parody of early video game music.
No extras are included. Paramount's 1999 DVD of Virtuosity included a trailer, but the studio did not provide Warner with even that minimal extra.
As critical as I am of Virtuosity, I still find it a guilty pleasure, partly for Russell Crowe's no-holds-barred performance as SID and partly because it's fascinating to observe such a wrongheaded conception of the digital future. Compared to the tiny devices by which millions of individuals now connect to massive computing and information resources during every hour of the day, the huge consoles of LETAC look as clunky and outdated as a room-size IBM mainframe spinning reels of tape. Virtuosity's focus on the externalization of SID 6.7 missed what was most interesting about him. "I'm a fifty terrabyte, self-evolving, neural network, double backflip off the high platform", he tells his creator. The single biggest laugh in the theater occurred when Commissioner Deane asked just what SID was evolving into, followed by a cut to a famous pop culture reference. If director Leonard and writer Bernt had kept asking themselves the same question, and pushing themselves to find more imaginative answers, Virtuosity would have been a better film. As a bare-bones Blu-ray presentation, Warner's disc is fine. The film is intermittently amusing but otherwise forgettable.
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