Virtual horrors of today's cybercinema.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

The computer has become the principal demon of the cinema, the villain that has replaced the Soviets, and even the usual array of ethnic types often favored by the movies for their Otherness. At the same time, however, the cybernetic landscape is being used to chart a territory that the movies seem to take for granted, and the new techno dystopia often is intended to be not dissimilar to the world we now inhabit.

The past several seasons have been rife with movies about the terrible potentials of the computer, and the association of the technology itself with approaching Armageddon. In the "Die Hard" series, access to the right codes, often effectuated by post-teen whiz kids, allows the mayhem to get under way. In "Under Siege 2: Dark Territory," a CD-ROM is all the omniscient lunatic genius needs to unleash doomsday. The centrality of the computer to a film's action has become rather passC, taking a back seat to motion pictures' larger preoccupation with virtual reality and the all-encompassing aspect of cyberscape. In many respects, this theme is directly adjacent to the portrayal of the city as corporate citadel surrounded by slums and miles of blighted wasteland, saturated with a media circus that blends fact and fantasy into a phantasmagorical sandwich. That all this very recognizable truth is taken for granted is perhaps what makes some of these films so disturbing.

"Virtuosity" contains just such a set of images and even appears to contain citations from academic literature on the nature of the postmodern scene. We see in the teaser opening a Los Angeles filled with cookie-cutter Organization Men, in gray sack suits and sunglasses, attache cases at the ready. The joke of the opening virtual sequence is a device that introduces the nothing-is-what-it-appears-to-be-anymore conceit of the film. Much of it already seems cliched: a fallen cop must relive his past failures and, in the process, confront his old demons in the form of a new supercriminal. The formula goes back to film noir, but the fact that it was repeated so recently in "Demolition Man" emphasizes the impoverishment of current Hollywood productions.

Yet, such formulas are not at the heart of the cybercinema. Rather, this type of picture proceeds along a rather duplicitous axis. On the one hand, it is about the dehumanizing effects of the current landscape and the anxiety concerning the human soul's ability to survive the new technoculture. On the other, the portrayal of...