Hollywood's Coming!
Films About the Internet

3. VIRTUOSITY

Studio: Paramount
Director: Brett Leonard
Screenplay: Eric Bernt
Stars: Denzel Washington, Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves
Release Date: Aug 4
Gross: 20.1 million - 3 weeks (8/20)

Storyline:

Responding to a personals ad which begins: "Former IBM employee -- into submission...," a bi-sexual, MIT anthropology post-doc (Bullock) stumbles onto an international plot to implant DEC Alpha processors in the brains of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies.

Teaming up with ex-cops Jack Kerouac (Washington) and Dean Moriarity (Crispin Glover), she goes on the road to track down the plot's mastermind, a computer-generated persona made up of the personalities of 183 dead serial killers (Meg Ryan), who's recently escaped from a maximum-security virtual penal colony, deep in the Internet.

Along the way, Bullock meets and falls in love with a crack-addicted, neuro-astronomy grad student, still hard at work finishing her Ph.d. thesis in a field that doesn't even exist.

This effectively ends the hunt for Ryan and -- just when it looks like her computer-generated persona from cyberspace will take over the world -- Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise show up at the last minute with an advance copy of Netscape 1.7 -- and civilization is saved!

Production snafus:

An apparent flaw in the Alpha processor caused all 500 CEOs to march directly into the sea whenever a floating-point operation was executed. More than a day was wasted rounding up new actors to play these parts and then another 3 days to implant (this time) non-functioning mock-ups of Alpha processors in their brains.

---

Next Film: EXIT ZERO

Back to: INDEX

Next Novel: MFU