# Thirteenth Floor, The (1999)

### reviewed by
Edward Johnson-Ott

The Thirteenth Floor (1999) Craig Bierko, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gretchen Mol, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dennis Haysbert, Steven Schub, Jeremy Roberts. Produced by Roland Emmerich, Ute Emmerich and Marco Weber. Screenplay by Josef Rusnak, Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez, based on Daniel Galouye's novel "Simulacron 3." Directed by Josef Rusnak. 120 minutes. Rated R, 2 stars (out of five stars)

Review by Ed Johnson-Ott, NUVO Newsweekly www.nuvo-online.com Archive reviews at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Edward+Johnson-ott To receive reviews by e-mail at no charge, send subscription requests to pbbp24a@prodigy.com

In its time, "The Twilight Zone" was groundbreaking television, but watching it today often proves to be a taxing experience. Many episodes, built around ideas that felt startlingly original then, seem trite now. Too many were terribly padded, with sketchy characters chattering incessantly to kill time until the big surprise payoff at the end. And as for those surprise payoffs, some still hold up beautifully ("Don't get on that ship! That book, 'To Serve Man,' it... it's a cookbook"), but many others ("It's a planet called... Earth," "Pleased to meet you, Eve, my name is... Adam") feel so painfully obvious that it's embarrassing.

Which brings me to "The Thirteenth Floor," the latest entry in the "what is reality?" genre. Loosely based on Daniel Galouye's novel "Simulacron 3, " the idea for this story was probably hot stuff when released in the '60s, but in the post "Dark City," "Matrix," "eXistenZ" cinematic world, it has a decided "been there, done that" sensibility. While the production boasts some jazzy visuals, the characters are so generic and undeveloped that it's impossible to care what happens to them. The film is boring and, if you haven't figured out the lame "surprise payoff" by the time our hero takes his first drive into the country, then you simply weren't trying.

The set-up (don't worry, I'll keep this short) goes like this: Some computer whiz kids have cooked up a virtual reality device that allows the user to "jack-in" and play out various experiences in a sepia-toned (they're still having troubles getting the color right) 1937 Los Angeles. When one of the creators gets murdered in our world, his colleague takes a dangerous trip into the simulated past to search for clues.

If you just found yourself thinking "Wow, that reminds me of Jean-Luc Picard having a Dixon Hill adventure on the holodeck," then congratulations, you're as big a geek as I am.

Even though the whole "what is reality?" thing has been done to death lately, the film still could have worked had the screenplay been better, but the characterizations here are utterly flat. Armin Mueller-Stahl injects what life he can into his role, but has relatively little screen time to work with. The rest of the cast, particularly leads Craig Bierko and Gretchen Mol, are just plain bad.

What the film does get right are some of the visuals. 1937 Los Angeles is beautifully detailed and looks great, and a shot of one character reaching the edge of the simulation, while overly reminiscent of the aforementioned holodeck, is striking nonetheless. Other effects are less successful. Wormhole style images of characters entering the virtual world have been better realized in everything from "Contact" to "Sliders" and the buildings in the closing shot are both cheesy and illogical (I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say that the date and the architecture don't exactly gibe).

Had "The Thirteenth Floor" been cut to 22 minutes, it might have made a superior episode of "The Twilight Zone." As a feature film, though, this is a bloated trifle, with pleasures too minor to warrant the expenditure of your time and money. If you're in the mood to question reality, do it with "The Matrix" or "Dark City."

    © 1999 Ed Johnson-Ott

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews