My recent viewing of “The Thirteenth Floor” was actually a rewatch for me; I first saw it when it came out back in 1999.
The film, about a virtual reality populated by sentient AI (that’s not the terminology used, but what would you call it today) was somewhat overshadowed at the time. The Matrix, the big kahuna of virtual reality films, had come out a few months previously and was still very much in the cultural ether.
But I remember thinking “The Thirteenth Floor“ had something special.
Was that magic mojo still there on my rewatch in the dystopian year of 2025?
I’ll address that, but first, let me give you the general setup. Our protagonist, Douglas Hall, is a computer programmer whose boss was recently murdered. Both men were working with a computer jockey played by Vincent Donofrio to construct an elaborate, hyper-realistic, video game-like world that was a duplicate of 1930s Los Angeles. Via technology that’s never really explained, each man is able to beam their consciousness into this world, trading places with existing AI personas that inhabit it.
Are these AI personas conscious or even meaningfully alive in someway? Well, that’s one of the questions Hall ponders, while also getting to the bottom of the murder. Things get more intriguing when the boss’s daughter, played by gorgeous Gretchen Mol, drops in.
Years later, much of the film holds up. The mystery is engaging enough, and the Art déco/film noir visuals are the cat’s pajamas.
However, there is an undeniable hokiness to elements of the story. I think we’ve all gotten more sophisticated in our conceptions of, and philosophizing on, the topic of artificial intelligence. And one of the twists is pretty easy to see coming.
That said, the movie deserves more attention than it’s gotten. In some ways, it is quite prescient. Give it a watch.
