World on a Wire [1973]

 Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2-part 206-minutes-long television miniseries World On A Wire – the German wunderkind’s sole foray into science-fiction, adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3, and recently restored after years of obscurity – was a gloriously trippy, luscious, paranoid and prescient work where the dystopian future is here and now. Flamboyantly blending the sci-fi genre with noir, melodrama, conspiracy, philosophical meditations, existential anxieties, and distinctive Euro-arthouse sensibilities, and with cold, sleek, metallic and modernist décor complemented with disco-tinged sensuality, it recalled Godard’s magnificent Alphaville in its evocation of one non-compliant individual’s battle against a supra-national techno-totalitarian society, and presaged the Wachowskis’ The Matrix in positing that we might be trapped inside a simulated, hyper-real, virtual reality environment. The film’s protagonist, cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), succeeds as the technical director of a powerful government-corporate mainframe program called Simulacron which has created an artificial world with thousands of “identity units” and has the ability to predict industry trends well into the future, when his boss, Professor Vollmer, dies under mysterious circumstances. He goes on to sense and uncover a massive corporate conspiracy with monomaniac zeal, and before long becomes a hunted fugitive as he gets into loggerheads with the institute’s malicious CEO Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau). Along the way he gets close to two duplicitous women – Stiller’s personal assistant Gloria (Barbara Valentin) who’s essentially been plugged in to spy on him, and the deceased super-scientist’s sultry daughter Eva (Mascha Rabben) who Stiller becomes enamoured with. Co-written by Fassbinder, this deliciously ominous and tantalizingly foxy film – photographed in lush, grainy 16-mm by Michael Ballhaus, and featuring a rich soundtrack, including Fleetwood Mac’s hypnotic ‘Albatross’ – was populated with RWF’s regular gang of actors.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Romance

Language: German

Country: Germany