FBMR - The Thirteenth Floor
Film-Buff Movie Reviews


THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR (1999) ***

I suppose 1999 was the year of virtual reality movies. This movie is part eXistenZ , but not nearly as gooey, and part THE MATRIX, but not nearly as cool and action-packed, with it’s own spin on the concept. Mysterious at first, this drama gets progressively predictable as it moves along. At first, I was very perplexed, but once a couple of clues came along, the rest of the movie pretty much figured itself out.

Dan Hall (Craig Bierko) is one of the creators of a virtual reality game where players can be downloaded into a world that is as real as the one from which they came. Each character in the game has a life of its own. They eat, drink, grow, and die, just like we do. Yet when a player jacks into the game their personality it set aside for the players to override. John Ferguson’s virtual life gets taken over by Dan Hall when he downloads himself into the game. After his boss, Mr. Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is brutally murdered, Hall is led to believe that Fuller has left him a message inside the game for him to retrieve. Complications abound inside and outside the game making it harder for Hall to put the pieces together.

The pace is a little slow, the first half of the movie was quite intriguing, but once I figured it out, it was just a matter of letting the movie run its course and watch how close I was. I found it interesting and recommend it if you enjoyed eXistenZ and THE MATRIX, as another example that begs the question of whether we, ourselves, are really living.

IMDb - The Thirtenth Floor