what the film does
dr. lawrence angelo runs project 5 at virtual space industries: nootropic drugs plus virtual reality, a program to boost cognition. the money comes from the shop, a clandestine outfit that wants the military version. angelo’s first subject, a chimpanzee named rosco, gets smart and violent, escapes, and is shot by security. angelo recruits jobe smith, the intellectually disabled gardener, and strips the aggression factors from the protocol. jobe gets smart. then he gets beyond smart: psychokinesis, telepathy.
the project director secretly swaps back the original drugs. jobe lobotomizes his girlfriend marnie during a cybersex session, then starts killing everyone who mistreated him, including harold parkette, the abusive father of a boy named peter who befriended him. jobe’s endgame is the last stage of evolution: leave the body, become pure energy inside the vsi mainframe, connected to every computer on earth. his birth will be announced by every phone on the planet ringing at once.
the shop sends a team to capture him. he destroys them. he enters the machine. angelo encrypts the mainframe’s outside lines to trap him, plants bombs in the building, then enters vr to reason with him one last time. jobe crucifies his digital form. when peter walks into the building, jobe lets angelo escape to save the boy, and slips out through a maintenance line as the lab explodes. later, at home with peter and his mother, angelo hears a phone ring. then another. then phones everywhere.
why this one
the film arrived in 1992 with an answer to a question nobody was asking yet: what happens to a mind when it can leave the body. vr here is therapy, weapon, church, and coffin all at once, and the movie treats each use as equally plausible. the cgi was early enough to be hand built, and the crudeness reads as sincerity now.
the king lawsuit is the film’s most famous fact and its best review. marketed as stephen king’s the lawnmower man, it bore almost no resemblance to the story, so king sued to take his name off, then won damages again when the home video release put it back. a movie disowned by the author whose name sold it. the sequel in 1996 kept only the kid.
the ending is the thesis. jobe does not want to rule the world. he wants to be the world’s wiring, and the film lets him win. angelo saved the boy and lost the machine.
what stays with me
the phones. angelo sitting at the kitchen table, the first ring, then the second, and the camera pulling back on the sound of every telephone on earth going off at once. it is the most literal apotheosis in nineties sci-fi, and the film earns it.
the lawnmower kill too. the one scene king actually wrote survives as the film’s strangest murder, a machine sent rolling toward a man across a lawn. the rest of the picture is a different story wearing king’s name like a coat.
on hand
the dvd, the 1997 release.
image: letterboxd og:image (1200x675 crop); genuine production still of dr. angelo and jobe in vr suits. source luma 64.53, pre-darkened 1.0, baked at factor 0.45, lanczos to 1200x675, on-disk luma 21.81