Brett Leonard – Christian Sauvé

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-06-282023-03-18 Movie Review

(Second Viewing, On Cable TV, June 2019) Growing up geek in the early 1990s, The Lawnmower Man ended up becoming a reference to my group of mid-nineties Computer Science student friends even despite being the farthest thing from a good movie. Watching it again today, I can offer no defence of the result: The plot is pure unprocessed cliché, while its main claim to fame—the digital special effects—have aged terribly and are only impressive as a snapshot of what was then state-of-the-art. The premise borrows liberally from Frankenstein, Flowers to Algernon and Tron, what with a cognitive scientist boosting the intelligence of a dim-witted manual labourer, and said super-intelligent antagonist turning irremediably evil. A murder spree predictably ensues. The only twist here is that this is all taking place thanks to virtual reality, with early-era CGI portraying now-grotesque chunks of the plot. (I’m such an early-nineties geek that I still remembered that some of the CGI sequences were repeated from the video compilation The Mind’s Eye.) The obsession about Virtual Reality is also pure early-1990s stuff, ridiculous except for the fact that I lived through it at the time. My nostalgic feeling should not be confused for any kind of appreciation for the result, which is alternately dull or actively irritating depending on how often that exact same cheap take on technology has been repeated before or since. Behind the camera, I have to acknowledge the work of writer-director Brett Leonard, grafting minimal elements from a Stephen King story onto a statement about VR as it was perceived then—not only would he also write and direct the slightly-better VR thriller Virtuosity three years later, but he would remain active at the cutting edge of movies and technology until now. Those who like actors rather than technology will be amused to see Pierce Brosnan is the leading role as an obsessive scientist and a few scenes with Dean Norris as a menacing figure. Still, much of the appeal of The Lawnmower Man today is as a snapshot of the wild expectations and easy plot possibilities of virtual reality at the earliest possible moment when it became possible to think of it. It’s irremediably dated, and that’s part of the point.

Movie Review

Virtuosity (1995)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-06-092023-03-09 Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) I suspect that both Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe would consider Virtuosity to be one of their early shames. At times, the film does stink of mid-1990s funk and silliness, what with its then-spectacular-now-terrible computer graphics, fascination for virtual reality and careless overuse of such SF tropes as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. At its heart, it’s nothing more than a cop-versus-criminal-nemesis chase dressed up in near-future plot refinements—it should work better as a crime thriller than a serious extrapolative work, except that what keeps it interesting are the SF plot devices, as half-heartedly developed as they are. (Circa-2019 viewers will be struck as how many of Virtuosity’s plot devices would also be covered in Westworld’s first two seasons, including a solid-state storage device for artificial intelligences and recreating virtual simulation to interrogate said AIs.) Of course, what was gosh-wow for mainstream viewers back in 1995 is old hat to a far more technologically savvy 2010s audience. Still, there’s a certain inadvertent charm to see how the era then portrayed the future—shared with such Virtuosity contemporaries at The Net and Hackers, or to director Brett Leonard’s own The Lawnmower Man. Extrapolation aside, the film itself is an uneven suspense thriller—director Leonard occasionally finds ways to keep his action sequences moving, most notably through the use of helicopters in the rooftop finale. Still, perhaps the thing that most will remember from the film is the acting—Washington’s stoicism returns full force after a bit of an unusual prologue, while Crowe snacks on the scenery as an exuberant villain-of-villains with superpowers—and a (badly executed) musical fixation that partially explains the film’s title. In the background, William Fichtner is instantly recognizable, whereas only committed Kaley Cuoco fans will identify her in a child role performance. The ending has the unfortunate distinction of dragging on for an added ten minutes after the climax between the two protagonists—a more skillful screenwriter (or a film more resistant to the lead actor’s script tampering, as documented in an interview with Kelly Lynch) would have restructured that last half-hour to end on a higher note and effectively rearrange its best ideas. Virtuosity is not really a good movie, but let’s not try to pretend that it’s now without some interest even in the ways it now looks ridiculous. (After all: you needed to explain emoticons in 1995 because it was still obscure to older people. You still need to explain it in 2019 is because it’s obscure to younger people raised on emojis.)