Virtual Reality
themeSimulated worlds and the blurring line between real and digital.
TRON
Video game programmer Kevin Flynn breaks into his former employer's mainframe to find evidence a rival executive stole his game designs — and is instead digitized by an experimental laser, pulled physically inside the computer system itself. Trapped in a neon-lit digital world where programs are living beings forced to compete in gladiatorial games by a tyrannical AI called the Master Control Program, Flynn allies with the security program Tron to fight his way back to the real world.
Total Recall
Construction worker Doug Quaid can't stop dreaming of Mars, so he buys the memory of a trip from Rekall Inc. — and the implant chair wakes something already buried in his head. Soon he's killing trained agents by reflex, and the only certainty is a message from his own face: get your ass to Mars.
Johnny Mnemonic
2021: half the world suffers from a technology-induced plague, and the most valuable data travels not on networks — too easily hacked — but inside the heads of mnemonic couriers. Johnny is one of them, and his latest job stuffs his implanted memory far beyond safe capacity with data the Yakuza and a pharmaceutical giant will kill for. He has roughly a day to make delivery before the payload literally destroys his brain — the same brain he emptied of his own childhood to make room for cargo.
Strange Days
Los Angeles, the last two days of 1999. Lenny Nero, ex-cop turned black-market dealer, sells SQUID recordings — full sensory captures of other people's experiences, straight from their cerebral cortex to yours. Addicted to replaying tapes of his own lost relationship, Lenny is dragged out of his loop when a snuff recording lands in his hands: evidence of a murder that connects to his ex, a music-industry conspiracy, and a police killing that could set the burning city off entirely.
The Matrix
By day, Thomas Anderson writes software; by night, as the hacker Neo, he chases a phrase that haunts the net: the Matrix. The answer — that reality is a simulation run by machines farming humanity for power, and that he may be the anomaly foretold to end it — arrives with sunglasses, a red pill, and the best action cinema of the decade.