Welt am Draht

Is it possible that the Wachowski brothers knew "Welt am Draht"? That they took the concept of a 'puppet inside a puppet' for "The Matrix" too? The end of "Matrix Reloaded" (2nd Movie, the third is still not out while I am writing this) tells us what the "real world" in Matrix will be: another Matrix :-)

My first impression when watching 'Welt am Draht' was that this was a clear case of style trumping substance. How wrong I was. The film really is incredibly stylish, with the interiors being pure 1970s elegance. Designer pieces that have become classics are scattered right, left and centre. But there is plenty of substance, too. In fact, this is probably the most complex and multi-layered sci-fi I have watched so far - it is a film that asks questions (and suggests answers) about our identity, free will, political manipulation and economic power, to list only a few issues that it addresses. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), the new acting director of a government-sponsored research project that uses a computer to simulate real life, begins to notice strange discrepancies and to wonder whether the world he inhabits is a simulation similar to the one his project has developed. The plot is excellent, and the acting is good throughout, though I found the dialogues sometimes a little stilted and unnatural. The one downside of 'Welt am Draht' is the pacing, which is slower than necessary, and slower than in other German films of the 1970s. Other than that, this is a highly impressive sci-fi.

In these days of ultra-fast processors and the Internet, coming up with a movie like "The Matrix" may seem merely the next step from coining the term 'cyberspace', but do you remember what computers were like in 1974? Right. To come up with the notion of virtual reality back then is truly an amazing feat of the imagination. Fassbinder's movie, of course, has none of the massive gunslinging and pyrotechnics, and a lot of 'artsy' elements instead, but the atmosphere it creates is intense and poses the question how we can know what is real in a dark and gripping manner, making this a chiller and a thriller for the mind. It also takes it up a notch on more recent VR stories: if you get out of one cyberspace, can you be sure you didn't just emerge into another level of virtual reality?

You've created a new simulated world, inside computer chips reality unfolds, or at least to those downloaded, executed, machine coded, but you can navigate within binary folds. A sudden loss, leaves you in charge of the machine, things start to happen that could never have been seen, people come and people go, upload, download, no one knows, it's all gone crazy as you byte into what's been.

Poor Fred Stiller starts to lose his marbles as reality confuses and he starts to question who or what he is. Fantastic performances, great story, only let down by the fact that over fifty years later simulation still has some thousands of years to go before it could be achievable - but it will be and Nick Bostrom's Simulation Hypotheses may well explain why.

This movie, made for TV in 1973 and consisting of two parts with a total length of more than three hours, certainly can seem a bit slow-going at times. However, there's so much internal tension in the slowly unfolding story that at the end, it doesn't feel too long or drawn-out at all. This is also thanks to the splendid performance by Klaus Löwitsch who convincingly plays the main character as a man who almost frantically tries to keep his guarded, restrained demeanour as his environment gets more and more puzzling and threatening. If we compare "World on a Wire" with the later adaptation "The Thirteenth Floor" which is based on the same book, the earlier film is a much more interesting experience - more layers, more depth, more interesting actors. Craig Bierko's interpretation of the main character in "The Thirteenth Floor" is not a tenth as interesting as Löwitsch's performance - I can't find the emotion in Bierko's "Douglas Hall" character, the self-doubt, the despair... it's all there in Löwitsch's "Fred Stiller". And "World on a Wire" isn't just a pioneering movie, it's also strangely timeless despite the prevalent seventies design. With the very clear, fine picture of the current DVD restoration it doesn't feel dated. It's a strange, half frozen world seemingly not entirely connected to reality - which of course fits the theme very well.