The State of the Virtual Reality Movie in 2021
In Rodney Ascher’s latest documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix, the filmmaker explores the increasingly widespread belief that what we perceive to be the real world is, in fact, some type of complex simulation.
The scarier implications of simulation theory’s desensitizing effects are also examined through one of the documentary’s interviewees, Joshua Cooke, who chillingly recounts how he murdered his parents in 2003 because he thought he was living in The Matrix.
In Mike Cahill’s Bliss—which, in what is either a strange coincidence or a minor hiccup in the simulation we call life, was released the same day as A Glitch in the Matrix—Owen Wilson plays Greg, a sad-sack divorcée who’s having the worst day of his life. Greg is called into his boss’s office and promptly fired, and then he accidentally (and somewhat comically) kills his boss. After hiding the body, Greg goes to the bar across the street where he meets Isabel (Salma Hayek), an eccentric homeless woman who tells him they’re living in a virtual world and almost everybody around them is, in video game parlance, a non-player character—including Greg’s children.
It’s easier to buy Isabel’s story once she uses telekinetic powers to shape their reality; Greg is able to do the same after he takes these mysterious orange crystals.
Read the full story here: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/2/5/22264715/virtual-reality-movies-tv-glitch-in-the-matrix-bliss