Virtuosity (1995)
1995 was sort of a banner year for weird movies about cyberspace. We’ll leave it to io9 colleague Cheryl Eddy to summarize the pitch of Virtuosity, yet another movie released that year involving metaverse-like concepts and starring both Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe:
So, the LAPD is developing a VR program to train its officers, with convicts serving as guinea pigs. Washington plays Parker, an ex-cop who’s doing time for killing the terrorist who murdered his wife and daughter, who becomes one of the test subjects. There are already some obvious flaws with this plan; it seems a wee bit impractical, not to mention majorly cost-prohibitive. But the worst part is that the “game” was designed by a mad scientist who modeled its constantly evolving antagonist after history’s worst criminals, including Hitler, Manson, and (of course) the dude who killed Parker’s family.
This villain (played by Crowe) is named SID 6.7, which stands for “Sadistic, Intelligent, Dangerous.” It takes, oh, 30 minutes into Virtuosity for SID 6.7 to emerge buck naked from VR-land and begin terrorizing the real world. Just like in the game, Parker is dispatched to bring him in, only this time he has a Snake Plissken-style “do or die” implant under his skin.
This movie raises the chilling concept of Mark Zuckerberg eventually abusing the metaverse to transfer his consciousness into a body, any body at all.
