I fell asleep during The Matrix. Its themes seemed to me, at the time of its release, more or less just trite ideas that I had already read about in various intro philosophy texts and whatnot, and the areas it touched on were never my areas of interest in philosophy anyway. It muddled its religious undertones, and the ethical questions were given short shrift. Fifteen years later, I watched a movie nearly twice as long, which eschews action in favor of psychological intensity, and tackles many--but not all--of the same questions.

It was much better this time around.

The first and best difference is aesthetic. Fassbinder has created a science fiction world that looks schlubby. It's populated by suits and…

Absolute top-tier proto-cyberpunk seventies science fiction. Existence is simulations all the way down and there’s only one master programmer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Reflections and affectations and permutations and the director’s world-class blocking all lean into the idea of an artificial world that’s, in turn, imagining an artificial world.

It’s the neurotic, surveillance obsessed, Eastern Bloc science fiction masterpiece that could only have been made in the West... and for television too (the real medium of the future).

Fortunately for us, Fassbinder is settling our own real world debate over whether we live in a simulation or not. Here he suggests that our world is not a simulation, for if it were, we would’ve created technology to build a simulated world…

Some obvious inspiration for The Matrix but I wanna give a special shout out to the Wachowski Sisters for expanding those two blonde guys into the albino twins in The Matrix Reloaded. And then for coming back to this well years later to use Stiller’s car as the inspiration for Speed Racer.

Speaking of which, I had the damndest time trying to figure out if this inspired Blade Runner or not. Possible that this movie was simply inspired by Philip K. Dick. But the main guy sort of looked like a German Harrison Ford, you see. So you can understand why I’m over here like “uhhhh okay??”

The movie kept a really smart narrative distance from Stiller and his troubles.…

I’d never heard of World on a Wire before Criterion’s announcement of its re-mastering and subsequent theatrical re-release in 2010. The trailer they’d put together hooked me immediately, based mostly on the retro-future set design and the promise of a strange, hard sci-fi thriller full of intrigue and mystery. The picture did not disappoint. With the recent blu ray release, I was thankful to be able to sit down with this epic film once again and try and make sense of any details I’d missed the first time around.

In the not-too-distant future, a supercomputer called ‘Simulacron’ provides scientists with the ability to simulate and study a virtual society comprised of 10,000 ‘identity units’. When the technical director of the…

Fassbinder gets the jump on decades of philosophical sci-fi with this miniseries. His penchant for reflective surfaces and obscuring glass is taken to an early extreme here, with countless shots incorporating reflections into blocking or framing characters through glass that often warps dimensions and even at its least intrusive makes it clear that everyone is being watched. (The adjective "cinematic" is used freely and almost always emptily in current discussions of TV, but Fassbinder, like the other European auteurs who experimented on the small-screen, comes closest to cinema by expressly foregrounding the format of their television productions with an aesthetic that shows them adapting to its different demands and even the implications of its alternate screen.)

There's way too much…

Reflections, distortions, refractions, obstructions... Reality is seldom clear-cut, and World on a Wire takes that notion to the extreme. One of the most impressive made-for-TV movies I have ever seen, Fassbinder takes us on a twisted tour of technology, our minds, and reality. Heavy on psychology, philosophy, and gleefully 70s-style zoom-ins, Fassbinder's flair for visually arresting cinematography take this sci-fi tale from dated to exemplary.

The use of mirrors, while seeming almost heavy-handed at times (nearly every other shot seems to have a reflection of one of the speaking actors), hammers home the underlying theme of paranoia - both of the invisible limits of our own perception and our minds' attempts to enlarge our world beyond those limits. In browsing…

I think, therefore, I am.

Imagine reflecting a mirror on a mirror, thousands of Tiny-Mes unaware of the existential crisis that looms. A world built on wires, stretching towards infinity. Combining Tarkovsky's elegance and the alienating effect of Kubrickian aesthetics, this 3-hour german science fiction epic definitely belongs up there among the genre-defining ranks. But unlike Blade Runner or 2001 which convey large, complicated ideas through ethereal and mindbending visuals, World on a Wire actually thrives on simplicity.

The film is especially alive during the second part when it turns into a paranoid thriller where everything screams plot. The uncertainty, fear seeps into the air, the walls, even the camera, like in Coppola's Conversation, constantly checking around, looking into mirrors,…

"i just want it to end... this horrible nightmare"

my first rainer werner fassbinder and this was a lot to process. first of all, i love how he framed the shots. he creatively used mirrors and blockings to create interesting and astonishing visuals. his colors pop, making the cinematography inviting to watch. its lengthy runtime daunted me for a long time but it also intrigued me. how much story there is that it needed almost 4 hours of my time. interestingly enough, it has so much to tell and fassbinder successfully fleshed out the story and made a mindfuck of an adaptation.

world on a wire's paranoia infects us as we also don't know who to trust, what is true…