Ghost in the Shell is an adaptation of the Manga of the same name which focuses on Public Security Section 9, the information security and intelligence department of a police department in a future Japan. Major Motoko Kusanagi is the leader of its assault team.
The plot centers around the Puppet Master, a hacker who uses phone calls to assume control of the minds of people and force them to do his bidding. The film explores questions surrounding the nature of consciousness, the value of artificial life, and what exactly constitutes a soul.
It would eventually like to be able to beam ads into your brain, but it is not interested in any of these questions.
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The metaverse is something that Mark Zuckerberg is interested in. A future version of the internet that uses technology like virtual reality and augmented reality is called a metaverse. The internet already functions as a weird parallel reality, but Facebook has decided to change its name to Meta because it believes in the future of the internet.
The concept was ripped off from decades of sci-fi by the man. The name was first used by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, which was a sequel to the 1984 novel Neuromancer. Sometimes it is taken over by a serial killer.
The nine old movies are a warning sign to steer clear of Facebook. Otherwise, you could make out with a TV, get melted by a microwave, kill your spouse in virtual reality, or awaken a digital god who will consume us all.
The technological invention that blurs the boundaries of physical reality and consciousness beyond recognition is plain old broadcast TV, which David Cronenberg explored in his Videodrome back in 1983. Max Renn is a sleazy Toronto-based executive of a UHF station that focuses on extreme programs, and his satellite dish picks up a show from Malaysia that shows anonymous victims being brutally tortured and murdered in a cell. Max decided to rebroadcast the show to his audience without a license because the Canadian equivalent of the FCC regulations were not existing in this universe.
Max discovers there is more to Videodrome than murder for profit and things could go downhill from there. Nightmarish imagery in the film includes a video cassette being shoved into a man's torso, and television screens made out of human skin. Max might have applied for a job at Facebook as a metaverse moderator.
The 1966 short story by Philip K. Dick was the basis for Total Recall, a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is a substitute for a vacation in the year 2140. Quaid realized in the middle of the procedure that he is a secret agent. He discovers his best friend and wife are actually operatives of a Martian regime that runs a mining colony with a totalitarian fist before deciding to go to Mars and team up with the rebellion to fight for worker's rights.
At the end of the movie, Quaid ponders if he is actually living out his virtual vacation. He decided he was better off ignoring the question and just living. The alternative explanation brings a lot of uncomfortable questions, such as what kind of status updates Rekall used to determine his ideal virtual vacation involves murdering his wife.
The 1992 science fiction horror film The Lawnmower Man is best known for not having anything to do with Stephen King's 1975 short story, The Lawnmower Man. In the original King story, a man hires a new grounds-keeping company to mow his lawn, and he discovers that his new gardener is a cultist to the trickster god Pan, who also happens to mow the lawn buck naked with a sentient lawnmower. The cultist murdered the hapless hero after he refused to abide by the new terms of service.
The movie version is closer to Of Mice and Men. A scientist with ties to the military-industrial complex gives a simple-minded gardener intelligence-enhance treatments, which makes the subject so smart, he goes on a murder spree, and eventually declares his intention to become a god made of pure energy. He will escape into the computer. If you squint your eyes, you can see that the new deity makes all the phones on the planet ring at the same time.
Ghost in the Machine is a 1993 film about a serial killer who gets in a car crash and is put into an MRI machine, and what happens when he is caught. He dies but his brain scans is uploaded into the power grid and he can kill people with appliances. He is also in the computer.
The movie is notable for three things. It has a kill scene involving a microwave oven and flesh that is bursting. There is a scene involving a babysitter's breasts, a $20 bribe, and children that have aged more poorly than the rest of the movie. At the end of the movie, the Address Book Killer becomes a being made of pure voxels. A chef kisses another chef.
The 1995 cyberpunk film, based on a story by William Gibson, depicts a society ravaged by a digital plague caused by a virtual internet. Johnny is a maniacic courier who has replaced his childhood memories with a digital storage box he uses to transport sensitive data for mega-corporations, driven by the desire to have this implant removed, he accepts a job involving a risky amount of data. The intrepid hero is pursued by both the Yakuza and the Pharmakom corporation. Johnny had to hack his own mind in order to get the data that was the cure to the plague.
This is a stark warning to the public that if they connect their minds to a bad movie, they may be nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award.
Ghost in the Shell is an adaptation of the Manga of the same name which focuses on Public Security Section 9, the information security and intelligence department of a police department in a future Japan. Major Motoko Kusanagi is the leader of its assault team.
The plot centers around the Puppet Master, a hacker who uses phone calls to assume control of the minds of people and force them to do his bidding. The film explores questions surrounding the nature of consciousness, the value of artificial life, and what exactly constitutes a soul.
It would eventually like to be able to beam ads into your brain, but it is not interested in any of these questions.
There were a lot of weird movies about cyberspace in 1995. We will leave it to io9 colleague Cheryl Eddy to explain the pitch of the movie, which starred both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington.
The LAPD is developing a virtual reality program to train its officers. Washington plays an ex-cop who is doing time for killing a terrorist who killed his wife and daughter, who becomes one of the test subjects. There are some obvious flaws with this plan and it seems impractical. The game was designed by a mad scientist who modeled its antagonist after Hitler, Manson, and the guy who killed the family.
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SID 6.7 stands for "Sadistic, Intelligent, Dangerous." It takes 30 minutes to emerge from virtual reality and wreak havoc in the real world. Just like in the game, he is dispatched to bring him in, only this time he has a Snake Plissken-style implant under his skin.
The movie raises a chilling idea of Mark Zuckerberg abusing the metaverse to transfer his consciousness into a body.
Cronenberg's 1999 film, eXistenZ, is a virtual reality film that uses biotechnological implants to connect directly to the virtual world. Ted Pikul, Allegra's publicist, agrees to get his own bio-port to help her test the safety of her latest game after Allegra is shot and wounded by a pro-reality extremists. They encounter a plot to destroy the game with diseased game Pods, but as they dive deeper into layers of virtual reality they lose the ability to distinguish what is part of the game and what is reality.
This is basically about what will happen when QAnon gets a headset.
1999's The Matrix is the king of metaverse films. This is about a hacker who discovers that the world is actually a simulation run to distract the human captives of a world-spanning supercomputer, which uses human bodies as bio-batteries. He is part of a resistance movement of Matrix escapees who live in the real world, which is revealed to be a ravaged hell. Neo finds himself to be a chosen one with fantastical powers within the Matrix, leading to a lot of kung-fu fight scenes and slow-motion gun battles as he is chased down by villainous programs called Agents that enforce human subservience to the Matrix's will.
This is Facebook's metaverse with extra steps.
