S1m0ne (2002)

This interesting movie got very little attention in The Netherlands when it came out. Usually, that’s not a very good sign. But this movie has Al Pacino in it, and it’s sci-fi-ish. More then enough reason to rent the DVD and see for myself whether this is an undiscovered treasure or best left on the bottom shelf at the video place.

S1m0ne (pronounced “simone”, but it looks much cooler like this) is about idealist movie director Viktor Taransky (Pacino) who’s trying to make creative films in Hollywood. When the star of his current project walks away it looks like his career is over. This is when he meets Hank Aleno, a computer programmer who’s developed the perfect digital actress. Hank wants Pacino’s character to “use” her in his film, and before long she becomes a big Hollywood star. This is when the trouble starts. Nobody knows that Simone isn’t real, and keep expecting her to make public appearances. Which is kind of hard to do for a CGI character.

The biggest part of the movie is filled with Pacino trying to cover up the fact that his new star is nothing but pixels. At the same time he’s trying to get back with his ex-wife, who runs the studio. Furthermore, the movie tries to do a little satire about the way Hollywood works. It has everybody driving golf carts all the time, and shows these desolate pictures of the bigger-than-life studio complexes. The scene where Wynona Ryder’s character quits his film over the fact that her trailer isn’t the biggest on the lot is brilliant in this respect. On top of this all it get really philosophical at times. It tries to deal with the real-unreal dillema in true Truman Show style.

There were a few things about this movie that I really didn’t like. First of all there’s the computer thing. How come no Hollywood picture ever shows computers the way they actually work. Pacino is seen sliding a harddrive into a cd-rom like drive bay in his computer. My computer doesn’t have a slot like that, and I’m sure yours doesn’t either. And it gets worse. Towards the end he even insert a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. You might remember those if your really really old Nevertheless, it’s inserted into the same machine that’s able to generate a real time CGI character. It would have been so much cooler if Aleno would have been a Hollywood CGI specialist instead of a crazy lonely scientist. And it would have been great if the computer that Simone lived in had been some super-duper SGI workstation actually able to do things like that. With DVD+RW

Secondly, the fact that Simone makes no public appearances at all and everybody keeps buying it is taken a bit too far, to the point where it’s completely unbelievable. All the fuss about this distracts from the philosophical storyline which stays underexposed.

Last but not least, the storyline about Pacino, his daughter and ex-wife takes up too much time and distracts from the main story. The acting on the other hand is quite good. Pacino is brilliant as always. As far as cinematography goes, the movie has a pretentious feel to it with long, empty shots that reminded me (again) of “The Truman Show”.

All in all, I think this movies has a few more flaws than it does merits. I’ll rate it **3/4 (out of 5) because at least it’s new and is has some decent acting.

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