The Thirteenth Floor



The Thirteenth Floor (1999) was part of the mini-trend virtual reality projects that came around the same time as The Matrix (1999) and were completely overshadowed by that movie. It’s easy to see why.


Oh no! Lasik malfunction!

The main character in The Thirteenth Floor is Douglas, a computer scientist in modern day Los Angeles. He wakes up one morning and finds blood on his hands, and is greeted by the news that one of his colleagues has been murdered. Douglas suspects the murder has something to do with the experimental project they are working on, a computer simulated reality complete with an entire city of artificially intelligent being living in a virtual replica 1930’s Los Angeles.

Spotted the problem here? If you had the ability to create any world you wanted in a computer simulation, why would you recreate 1930s Los Angeles? There must be something more interesting than that. In The Matrix being in a computer simulation meant that you could do super powered kung fu, but being in The Thirteenth Floor’s virtual reality means you can… watch fully clothed dancing girls and wear a hat. (The aborted TV series Harsh Realm suffered from this problem too.)  It’s the general lack of imagination that I found dismaying. The movie is also really bad about establishing the rules by which the virtual reality works. For some reason entering the virtual world is a complicated and danger process whereby you apparently switch brains with one of the virtual inhabitants, and there’s an unexplained time limit. Also, it seems like real people download only into virtual people who look just like them, which doesn’t really make sense other than as a way to keep the audience from getting too confused.


"God, I hate the suburbs."

Perhaps another reason that The Thirteenth Floor was such a dud when it came out is that the theatrical trailer completely spoiled the one interesting twist the movie has. I’ll do the same right now. It turns out that modern day Los Angeles is a computer simulation being run in 2024. Douglas technically did kill his colleague, but someone from the real world was downloaded into his body at the time. The trailer included dialogue to the effect that the modern day is a simulation, and included an image that reinforces that notion, and once you know that you may as well skip the movie. Beyond the twist, the movie is a lame detective story most of the way through and devolves into a bad stalker movie for the climatic scenes.

Posted: Thu - November 25, 2004 at      

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