REALITY BYTES
New drama and documentary explore whether we're all part of a program
Are we — right now — living inside a computer simulation of reality? If the question doesn't intrigue you in the least, you may not have time for either Mike Cahill's fictional take on the subject, nor Rodney Ascher's documentary wade through the topic. And if you're very keen on the idea, then you may find both come up a little short.
Cahill's movie, Bliss, is the more disappointing of the two. The writer-director has an unfortunate history of crafting high-concept ideas into films that fail to soar. His first feature, 2011's Another Earth, imagined a duplicate of our planet looming as large in the sky as the moon, yet somehow unable to communicate with us. Next was 2014's oddly named I Origins, which suggested (among other things) that eyes were actual windows to the reincarnated soul.
Now comes Bliss, which stars Owen Wilson at his most laidback as Greg, a corporate drone working for a company called, I kid you not, Technical Difficulties. I think he's manager of overstated metaphors. When Greg accidentally kills his boss while being fired (to be clear, it really is an accident) he panics and runs — all the way to the bar across the street, where he meets a sexy homeless lady named Isabel, played by Salma Hayek. Isabel tells Greg that the two of them are among the few real people on Earth, which is itself a computer simulation she's running in what I guess is the real world. When she demonstrates her telekinetic powers and shows him how to do likewise, he's convinced.
Then she takes him to said world, which she explains is rich and peaceful thanks to automation, synthetic biology and asteroid mining — an oddly specific line that sounds like the director pitching a science-fiction trilogy from inside the movie. The “ugly” simulation that we call home is created by a machine called a brain box, which is a box full of brains. You were expecting Plato's Cave?
If you don't get that reference, turn to A Glitch in the Matrix, directed by the same man who brought us the wonderfully trippy documentary Room 237, about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
Ascher has a lot of ground to cover in 108 minutes, but the main thread is the simulation hypothesis, popularized in its current form by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in the 2003 article Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
His answer: Almost certainly yes. Since our world is already full of sims, mostly in the form of video games — The Sims, Grand
Theft Auto, Minecraft, even duds like Cyberpunk 2077 — then it follows that most realities are sims, and hence our reality is likely just a very complicated one.
There's no way to disprove it, but glitches like the fact that you think Kit Kat should have a hyphen (it doesn't) suggest it's true, at least for believers.
A Glitch in the Matrix is at its best when demonstrating the fuzzy line between science and religion, especially when you start wondering whether God might just be a computer programmer. One interview subject (now dead) is Philip K. Dick, who spent a lot of time thinking about reality and alternate realities. The tone gets very dark when we also meet a man who shot his parents while in the grip of the idea — seen in The Matrix, his favourite film — that nothing we see is real.
Bliss also gets — I was going to say dark, but it's more precise to say it gets muddy. As Greg becomes more confused about what's real, so does the viewer, but the film insists on steering us to a place that is neither refreshingly certain nor mind-bendingly indeterminate. Instead, the story just kind of ends. If Bliss were a computer simulation, it's one that someone unplugged in the middle of its run. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm