It was the end of the 20th century, but while we panicked about The Millennium Bug, cinema was warning us about the dangers to come…
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 46.
AI, tech billionaire megalomania, and the rise of the religious right. In a post-truth, conspiracy-led society, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish fact from fiction in our modern lives. Reality is bending to the will of super-intelligent computers, photorealistic imagery is now a click of a button away, and the tech giants who created it all are now telling us AI represents an existential threat to humanity, more even than climate change. Couple that with the new anti-science of the religious right, banning books and outlawing abortion rights, and you have the perfect recipe for a dystopian hellscape worthy of any Hollywood movie.
Several movies from 1999 saw it all coming – and we didn’t heed their messages…
Machine & man
Artificial intelligence was a defining characteristic in many dystopian films in this year. One in particular became a phenomenon that still influences cinema to this day. But let’s talk about Virus starring Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, and an Irish-accented Donald Sutherland. This is a bona fide cult classic that doesn’t deserve the kicking it got, even from its own star. It’s an absolute riot.
An extraterrestrial ‘intelligence’ zaps its way to Earth through the ISS, and starts causing havoc on a research vessel in the middle of the ocean, cannibalising machinery and human body parts to form a series of killer cyborg things. It’s Alien meets The Thing via Transformers meets Terminator – and did I mention that Donald Sutherland plays his salty sea-dog captain as Irish?
Its best line comes via Sherman Augustus, upon learning that the entity is not carbon-based but electrical: “you mean it’s like lightning that can think?”
Hats off to screenwriters Chuck Pfarrer and Dennis Feldman, or whoever else punched up this script.
Evil masterminds
Both Virus and The Matrix painted a future where artificial intelligence threatened to seize control of the world. The machines were taking over. What they may have got wrong was that the machines would never be as fast or as strong as we can be. What The Matrix in particular got right however was the hubris of the tech-bros who developed it in the first place. We’re all now painfully aware of billionaire IT gurus who all want to be Tony Stark. Pirates Of Silicon Valley introduced us to the OGs: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Directed by Martyn Burke, it paints Gates (Anthony Michael Hall) as a creepy sociopath, a Bond villain who sounds and acts like Richie Cunningham from Happy Days. Jobs, played by Noah Wyle, is like the Jim Morrison of nerds, a misunderstood artist with a fiery temper.
Gates recognised that it was software, not hardware, that was the pot of gold and dominated the ’80s–’90s. That’s how Microsoft won out over Apple. Steve Jobs wanted to revolutionise the work environment, including automating tasks. He wanted a world without secretaries. This steady erosion of workers replaced by technology is still being felt today. Worker burnout is now a staple of tech companies. Look at Twitter/X under Musk. Look at the VFX industry.
Possessed possessions
Online life is one thing, but when the ‘Internet of Things’ began entering our homes, the threat to our privacy grew ever more insidious. The Disney Channel’s Smart House is the real dystopian nightmare of 1999. Young Ben (Ryan Merriman) lives with his father and sister, and has taken on the role of mother after she sadly died. They win a contest to live in the ‘smart house’ of the title, brainchild of tech wizard Sara Barnes (Jessica Steen).
The first thing that happens as they’re shown around by Sara is an invitation to let ‘PAT’ (short for Personal Applied Technology) take a blood and tissue sample which analyses their DNA profile. As Sara says, “before long, she [PAT] will know more about you than you do yourselves.” This is a red flag that worries dad, but Sara smoothes over this Orwellian hiccup with ease and the family move in. This is where the real hidden warning of the film lies, maybe even to the filmmakers themselves.
What follows is a perfect example of how computer technology (including AI) inherits the bias and prejudices of its creators. Ben, having filled the role of mother, jealously guards it — to the point of controlling who his dad should and shouldn’t date. When his dad starts forming a relationship with Sara, Ben secretly breaks into the smart home’s control room and reprograms it to act more like “the perfect mother” circumventing any need for a ‘new mom’.
Naturally, things start going wrong with the smart home, which develops a personality of its own constructed around Ben’s anxieties, and the family become prisoners in the house. We’re only now beginning to wake up to the dangers of AI in the wrong hands, and the inevitable human failings we build into it (whether we mean to or not).
Moral high ground
Human frailty, in particular the fragility of men’s egos, is a lit fuse, a grenade sans pin that exploded in the 21st century. Fight Club led the crusade – despite its satirical leanings – for a generation of disillusioned angry young men. It’s what fuels Incel culture and the alt right. It’s embedded in Trumpism, and along with religious conservatism it’s become an existential threat to women’s rights from every stripe of the rainbow. Women losing autonomy over their bodies is also the subject of the much maligned The Astronaut’s Wife.
If you haven’t seen this film, then apologies but massive spoilers simply have to lie ahead. In short it’s basically Rosemary’s Baby with aliens. Charlize Theron’s all-American-hero husband Spencer (Johnny Depp) returns from a space mission and isn’t the man she remembers after a strange event happens aboard the shuttle. One major thread seems to be his determination to get her pregnant – which he succeeds in doing. It turns out that an alien race – one of whom now inhabits Depp as a parasite – has a fertility problem and is close to extinction.
This kind of argument comes up often when attacking LGBTQ+ people: that the human race is at threat of extinction through the ‘destruction’ of traditional marriage institutions and morals. To markedly make the point, at the end of the movie the entity migrates to her body, and she appears to be possessed by it. She essentially acquiesces to traditional values and bears the children, remarrying another all-American hero type. The ‘entity’ (or institution/state) wins as she gives up her bodily autonomy. But maybe I’m imbuing this rubbish with a depth it doesn’t deserve.
This movie received a collective ‘meh’ from critics, but my favourite quote is from Jonathan Foreman of the New York Post: “Could have been written by a computer programmed to cannibalise previous sci-fi films.”
False gods
Something similar could be said about the ultimate apocalyptic movie of 1999, The Omega Code, which has a plot revolving around computers decoding ancient religious texts.
This film will leave you slack-jawed with disbelief – completely defeating its entire purpose – but it holds the most pertinent warning from the last millennium than any other film here, albeit not the one the filmmakers intended. Gillen Lane, (played by the unmistakable Casper Van Dien) a motivational speaker – and crucially, an atheist, despite having inexplicable knowledge of the Torah and its “hidden codes” – gets caught up in a battle between good and evil when he takes a job with the enigmatic media mogul and European Union chairman, Stone Alexander (Michael York) alongside his minder/assassin, played by the always brilliant Michael Ironside.
To explain much more of the plot would be inviting insanity. The point is that this film – complete with its nuclear holocaust ‘happy’ ending – was produced by the Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) which has been accused of promoting ‘Christian nationalism’ in some of its programming. Founder Pat Robinson was a supporter of Donald Trump and made many anti-gay remarks over the years.
This film appears to celebrate the coming apocalypse, whenever it eventually arrives (they certainly got the dates wrong here). It’s a confusing mess because the apparent villain (York), the Antichrist if you will, has all the hallmarks of the kind of right-wing populist the religious right would support all the way to the presidency.
In the movie, he manages to unite the entire world in peace, end global hunger, and fix the climate. In fact, for an Antichrist, he does a better job than any politician or activist ever has. His fatal flaw is declaring himself a god, which immediately angers everyone (that and initiating multiple nuclear bomb strikes for reasons that escape me).
Careful what you wish for
This collective fear or desire for the sky to fall on us probably came from the fact that the ’90s were a relatively stable time (in the West at least). Maybe we were all feeling a little too comfortable and were either scared that a sudden catastrophe was inevitable, or desperate for something to happen in our safe little bubbles. People just wanted to watch the world burn, on film at least. Did we choose this hellscape? Was the apocalyptic cinema of 1999 a self-fulfilling prophecy?
In The Matrix, Neo is given a choice. Does he continue his life of mundane drudgery in his safe office job, paying his taxes and maybe getting a raise? Maybe raising a family and getting a mortgage? Or does he choose to literally flush his life down the toilet, into the sewer, so he can stick it to The Man? A binary decision. Red or blue? Yes or no? Remain or leave? Sound familiar?
We’re living through some very uncertain times right now. Brexit, Trump, and a global pandemic have destabilised our lives and the movies are full of superheroes, trying with all their might to fix everything. Ethan Hunt may be fighting AI in the latest Mission: Impossible, but he’s not the only one. Actors and writers in the real world are too.
In the year 1999, few people would have believed that by 2023, cinema itself would be under the most threat from machine learning. We were expecting killer robots or being harvested for body parts or used as power cells… you know, the usual stuff. But rather than drone strikes, we have actor strikes and writer strikes.
In Virus, the crew of the ship have to work together if they are to defeat the entity that wants to take over the planet. When crew members break this rule and look after number one, they get picked off, killed or assimilated by the intelligence. The Captain even decides to side with the entity, hoping to share its power. It doesn’t end well.
Summer 2023 has seen business booming at the box office, but should that boom come at the expense of the hundreds of people who helped make it all happen? We’ve woken up to the fact that movie casts and crew have for years been treated like nothing more than a resource. Like the cocooned human race in The Matrix, people fuel the Hollywood machine.
Uncertain reality
Technology in the workplace isn’t the only threat. We’re spending more and more of our lives online these days, and the online world is very carefully engineered to manipulate us. AI is now infiltrating this space too, and The Thirteenth Floor (dir. Josef Rusnak) saw this coming. Those who own the digital space own reality.
In this film noir, Craig Bierko unravels the mystery of his boss’s murder. He works for a giant tech company developing virtual reality, populated by artificial intelligence – some of whom are suspicious of their reality. At one point, he says: “This whole thing, this experiment, is a mistake. We are screwing with people’s lives.”
It could be a Facebook employee speaking out during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
