They may be widely dismissed as retro-kitsch relics today, but did early cyber-pulp thrillers like Tron (1982), War Games (1985) and The Lawnmower Man (1992) predict our current digital dark age of apocalyptic AI anxiety and deep-fake paranoia? This is the question that film-maker Amanda Kramer poses, but never quite answers, in her debut documentary So Unreal. Seamlessly interweaving clips from dozens of movies, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, Kramer and her team invoke the period in question with a sensory feast of neon-bright visuals and pulsing synthesizer music. The result is a richly layered collage-style essay-film journey through vintage future-shock cinema, a little incoherent and strained in places, but generally stimulating and engaging.
A punky art-house auteur with a keen eye, experimental edge and emphatically queer aesthetic, Kramer screened a season of her films in Rotterdam last year, including two world premieres. She returns to the Dutch festival this week for the European premiere of So Unreal, accompanied by New York music legend Debbie Harry, who serves as unseen narrator in the film. Harry’s enduring star power, coupled to a fan-friendly mixtape of cultish sci-fi and genre movies, should give this unorthodox documentary plenty of potential hooks for festival programmers, streamers and niche distributors.
Harry is an inspired casting choice to anchor So Unreal. The Blondie singer delivers her narration in a hypnotic, sleepy-numb tone that is both soothing and sinister, like Hal 9000 updated for the age of Siri. A younger version of Harry also appears on-screen in clips from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), a key early thriller about the mind-bending horrors unleashed by the digital age. A later Cronenberg classic, the hallucinatory virtual-reality fable ExistenZ (1999), also figures prominently alongside nods to Michael Crichton, William Gibson and other pioneering explorers of cyberspace on page and screen.
A core pleasure of So Unreal is how it blithely disregards conventional wisdom among film critics and academics, according the same cultural weight to lurid straight-to-video B-movies and fringe grindcore oddities as it does to canonical classics. Kramer uses The Matrix (1999) as a main framing device, with obligatory homages to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). But she also gives ample screen time to trashy Hollywood fare including Weird Science (1985) and Virtuosity (1995), plus cult obscurities like Jürgen “Muscha” Muschalek’s proto-cyberpunk thriller Decoder (1984), Rachel Talalaly’s goofy digital-slasher bloodbath Ghost in the Machine (1993), and Gabriel Salvatores’ frankly deranged quasi-mystical sentient-computer fantasy Nirvana (1997).
Kramer divides So Unreal into chapters, each loosely exploring a single thematic area. One of the strongest examines how computer hackers entered mainstream Hollywood anti-hero folklore in the 1990s, notably in techno-thrillers like Phil Alden Robinson’s Sneakers (1992), Irwin Winkler’s The Net (1995) and Iain Softley’s Hackers (1995), cautionary tales that sometimes proved accidentality prophetic despite being comically ill-informed about emerging technology. The weakest section concentrates on the rampaging killer cyborgs in James Cameron’s Terminator franchise and Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto’s techno-fetishist Tetsuo trilogy. Both are worthy of weighty consideration, but off-topic for an essay-film chiefly concerned with cinematic depictions of VR and AI.
Taken as a definitive documentary about the psychological and sociopolitical impact of popular culture, So Unreal is scattershot and flimsy. Its apparent conclusion, that humankind has chosen escapism over engagement, turning a blind eye to the thinly veiled doom prophecies of sci-fi cinema, feels sweeping and simplistic. A more serious film might have drilled deeper into live debates about AI image capture and computer-generated screenwriting, both at the heart of the recent SAG-AFTRA strike, plus wider issues like deep-fake simulations, online surveillance, identity theft and facial recognition software.
But enjoyed as a primarily aesthetic experience, Kramer’s psychedelic love letter to pulp cinema is consistently entertaining, rightly illuminating what these early cyber-panic movies got wrong as well as right. Replicating the vivid colours, boxy VR graphics and LED typefaces of vintage arcade games, the film also has a strong look and knowingly nostalgic soundtrack of gleaming, trance-like electronica. Tucked away in the end credits, rendered in glowing green type, is a quote from The Hacker’s Manifesto, as outlined in Hackers: “This is our world now. The world of the electron and the switch; the beauty of the baud.” Like much of So Unreal, this line now hovers uneasily between retro-kitsch joke and stern warning from history.
Director: Amanda Kramer
Cast: Debbie Harry
Screenwriters: Britt Brown, Amanda Kramer
Producers: Amanda Kramer, Benjamin Shearn, Joe Yanick
Editing: Benjamin Shearn
Sound Design: Josh Ascalon
Production company, world sales: Yellow Veil Pictures (US)
Venue: Rotterdam Film Festival (Harbour)
In English
101 minutes
