Trigger Happy
paranoia Wargames features a young geek hero who hacks into the Pentagon’s military computer system because he thinks he’s going to get to play some cool videogames; in fact, he nearly starts a global nuclear war. Generally, if a movie shows a child playing videogames in his bedroom, the message is that this antisocial kid needs to get out more.
Other films extrapolate some hypothetical videogame future in order to make more or less successful points about man’s increasingly intimate relationship with technology. The abomination that is The Lawnmower Man typifies Hollywood’s prurient fascination with the oxymoronic and irremediably adolescent concept of “virtual sex.” More thoughtful is David Cronenberg’s orthographically eccentric eXistenZ, which pictures a biomechanical future whose characters jack into an animal game “pod” via a slimy spinal socket, and toys in a rather facile but entertaining way with the problems of competing realities.
But preeminent in this filmic tradition is The Matrix, which, despite competition from The Phantom Menace, was most people’s choice for science fiction film of 1999. With a cunning script incorporating a kaleidoscope of Homeric, Christian and Gibsonian
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