Review: The Thirteenth Floor
As we shed this century and welcome the millennium, the trend du jour in the cinema appears to be this: what is this thing we call life? Are we living it, dreaming it, creating it or merely imagining it? Is there such a thing as free will or is everything we do predestined? Is there such a thing as a past life? What about an alternate universe? What is it about a person that makes you fall in love with them? Is it because they are the lost half of your soul or perhaps it is just the same people repeating the romance through their many reincarnations. Or perhaps it's just electricity. These are questions raised and pondered in The Thirteenth Floor, which has the misfortune of being released on the heels of the similarly themed hit The Matrix.
The Thirteenth Floor is not a wholly original film. It is an adaptation of Daniel Galouye's Simulacron 3, a novel which seems to have inadvertently found inspiration from films such as Dark City, Total Recall, eXistenZ, Gattaca and The Truman Show. It begins in Los Angeles, circa 1937, and ends in the same city in the year 2024. In between, there is the present set in the future.
Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl) has been stabbed. He knows the truth. About what? Whatever it is, he has left it in a letter while he was in 1937. Let me clear up the confusion: Fuller and Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko) have spent six years developing a simulation system which allows the user to transfer his consciousness into a unit he will inhabit. The units do not need a user to function in this simulated reality. They are modeled after humans and, as such, live lives albeit unreal ones. They are not meant to know that they are part of a program.
The letter Fuller wrote was meant for Douglas but all signs of Fuller's murder point to Douglas. What makes him an even more viable suspect to Detective McBain (Dennis Haysbert) is the fact that Douglas doesn't even remember what happened that night. All he knows is he woke up the next day and discovered a bloody shirt in his bathroom wastebasket. The only way to find out if he is the killer or if someone is framing him is to jack into the system despite the warnings of computer technician Whitney (Vincent D'Onofrio), who also appears in the simulated reality as a dangerous bartender named Ashton who has read the unbelievable contents of Fuller's letter.
Though devoid of the Hong Kong style action sequences and gnarly special effects that every so often energized the enervating The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor does boast an equally impressive production design. Production designer Kirk M. Petrucelli and cinematographer Wedigo von Schultzendorff conspire to deliver realities so perfect that they're unreal. You certainly get that feeling in the Thirties sequences which strike one as meticulously constructed right down to the underwhelmed color scheme. Particularly outstanding is Petrucelli's design for Douglas' home, which merges technologically sleek surfaces with columns that recall the glory days of Egypt.
The actors keep up admirably with their various personages. Bierko fares better during his character's darkest moments. Gretchen Mol, as the enigmatic woman who purports to be Fuller's daughter, has the requisite looks of a Thirties star but lacks the allure and substance to support her kittenish femininity. The romance between Douglas and Jane Fuller is the film's melancholy axis.
Strangely enough, movies such as The Matrix and eXistenZ don't feature sturdy love stories. Yet not so strange as they are set in worlds overrun by machines. But if the protagonists are raging against the machines to reclaim humankind and humanity as the ruling class, what is more human than emotions and is not love the most noble of emotions?
"We looked at each other in the same way then but I can't remember where or when" is how a song named "Where or When" goes. At its best moments, the romance between Jane and Douglas captures that dreamy, melancholic romanticism. The first time they meet, they profess to feeling as if they've known each other before and when Douglas meets her again as Natasha, she admits to having that same feeling. "Deja vu," Jane says, "is a sign of love at first sight." As their love story becomes more complicated, it becomes ever more clear that these are two people struggling to regain a paradise lost and only through these imagined realities can it be regained.
The Thirteenth Floor
Directed by: Josef Rusnak
Written by: Jose Rusnak, Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez; based on the book Simulacron 3 by Daniel Galouye
Starring: Craig Bierko, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gretchen Mol, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dennis Haysbert
