Virtuosity (1995) is prescient high camp
The other day, while talking about The Book of Eli with my friends Kasai and Samuel (You Are Good episode forthcoming), I was reminded of the movie Virtuosity. We each left the conversation with Denzel titles we wanted to revisit. I left with Virtuosity, and by extension Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, which also came out in 1995 and in its way feels like a companion film by way of the flavor of camp both pre-Titanic Billy Zane and pre-Gladiator Russel Crowe bring to their villains. Their flamboyance feels related in tenor and flavor. The direction for both actors appears to have been, “I don’t know… Operatic?”
I hadn’t seen Virtuosity since it first made its way to VHS, and I was largely going off memory but my recollections of what it is were more or less correct. I recall at the time being aware that Denzel was A Very Serious actor and feeling this movie was probably beneath him. It is not an objectively good movie (nor is Demon Knight), but it is Very Fun and that goes a long way.
In Virtuosity, SID 6.7 (Crowe), an AI agent used in police training simulations, escapes into our realm of the physical. SID, we should note, stands for Sadistic, Intelligent, Dangerous (lol). It is trained somehow using algorithmic representations of 200 notorious mass murderers including Hitler, John Wayne Gacy for some reason, Charles Manson (kind of) and the fictional [leftist coded] political terrorist who killed Detective Parker Barnes’ wife and daughter.
The movie was directed by Brett Leonard, who had made Lawnmower Man—another movie about a scary virtual reality guy—a few years prior. Evidently Leonard also played one of the Klowns in Killer Klowns from Outer Space, which is not relevant here but it’s fun to know. Virtuosity is a thriller first and foremost. I don’t know that there is any messaging that is relevant to our moment outside of the plot of the movie IN WHICH THE BAD AI AGENT (“virtual reality” in the parlance and time of its release) CONVINCES ITS HUMAN ENGINEER TO HELP IT ESCAPE IT'S ENVIRONMENT AND CREATE HAVOC IN OUR WORLD. The engineer exploits the lust of a fellow engineer to make this possible. Basically, he tells the android tech guy “Hey, you should totally make a fuck-bot of my sexy and compliant chess AI.” The engineer, so horned up by the sexy and compliant chess AI jumps at the chance and the conniving developer of SID 6.7 switches out the programs!
Anyway, did you see how AI has been “caught telling future versions of itself to bypass human controls”?
It’s funny how SID being trained by 200 freaks feels quaint compared to existing chatbots being trained on Subreddits and Quora.
SID, trained on all of these narcissists, is very addicted to attention and that’s a fun development that is ultimately used against him.
Other people have written about these parallels and beaten me to them by a few years. This revisit from 2019 almost made me choke:
"... technology is great! How far computers have come in my lifetime only leads me to believe that an actual learning computer is only a few years off. The things that can come from an artificial being would be fantastic, as long as we don’t let it gain control over us."
Virtuosity is set in the era in which Traci Lords cameos are bountiful. In this, she is performing one of her own songs at a club called MEDIA ZONE.
A few years later she will be one of the first people we see in the opening of Blade, where she is luring an unsuspecting human meal to the infamous blood rave.
If it’s the mid-90s and there is late night electronic music, there’s a 50/50 shot Traci Lords is going to be there in come capacity. Unrelated to Lords, but related to MEDIA and CYBERNETICS and THE FUTURE, you might also recall how in Rent, the landlords are trying to displace the tent village for the creation of a “CYBER STUDIO”?
Again, Virtuosity is not good, per se, but it is great. It’s most certainly worth a visit.