'The Thirteenth Floor', a puzzling sci-fi murder mystery

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): It's the one floor that doesn't exist in many buildings, the one floor often substituted by "12A," the one floor most architects avoid having.

But in the film The Thirteenth Floor, that floor exists. And it's virtually the doorway to another dimension, another place in time. On this floor is a set of computers that hold a parallel universe created by a group of scientists and computer programmers, which would enable a user to jump into another world, another era not of his own.

Science-fiction enthusiasts should cherish this movie, coproduced by Roland Emmerich, that German sci-fi master responsible for Stargate, Independence Day and the 1998 Hollywood behemoth Godzilla. This film, yet another apparent reworking of that H.G. Wells' timeless classic The Time Machine, introduces us first to Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a balding, gray- haired, middle-aged man walking the streets of 1937 Los Angeles.

After leaving an ostensibly crucial letter to a bartender at a chic club, Fuller returns home. Flashes, laser beams, and next we see him in a very modern-looking computer lab. He is back in the present time. But as he goes out to a pub looking for a certain "Douglas Hall" he is suddenly stabbed by an unidentifiable person.

We then meet Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko), the man Fuller was supposed to meet. As we find him waking up puzzled to discover a bloodied shirt in his laundry, Douglas is summoned by the police to identify the corpse of his friend Fuller. Pressured by the persistent detective McBain (Dennis Haysbert), he is forced to reveal the truth about the project he and Fuller had been working on. They had created a computer-generated "simulation", consisting of a world looking very much like ours, with people and places and everything else, but set in L.A. in 1937, Fuller's birth year. Fuller, himself an accomplished scientist who invented and designed the simulation, had gone in and out of it several times already.

If at this point you say, The Matrix, you are only half right. The Thirteenth Floor steps into film noir territory with the appearance of Jane (Gretchen Mol), the mysterious blonde who is the self-proclaimed daughter Fuller never said he had. Jane comes as a kind of a threat, because she is about to execute what she claims was her father's last wish: shut down the entire simulation project.

At about the same time, Douglas discovers Fuller's last message to him on his answering machine, explaining that the key to the entire mystery lies in the simulation. Assisted by nerdy programmer Whitney (Vincent D'Onofrio), Douglas steps into the simulation chamber and is transported into the created universe for the first time.

The film becomes a mix of time-travel fantasy and a detective story as Douglas jumps around between the two worlds to find the answer to his friend's murder and the mysterious existence of Jane Fuller.

Along the way he also discovers that the simulated 1937 L.A. is a kind of a mirror to his own world, in that he finds his friends Fuller and Whitney within the simulation, but as wholly different people.

Douglas himself assumes the identity of John Ferguson, a mustachioed, well-coiffed bank teller when he walks around in the simulation. But the movie becomes most perplexing as Douglas learns that his world, including himself and everybody else in it, may be an artificial construction itself.

Writer-director Joseph Rusnak, who adapted Daniel Galouye's book Simulacron 3 with cowriter Ravel Cantero-Rodriguez, intends to puzzle the minds of the audience with this stylistic sci-fi mystery.

The 41-year-old German, who made some TV and big-screen films back home and served as the second unit director of Godzilla before landing this first Hollywood directing gig, did not really come up with something fresh.

The Thirteenth Floor has elements and atmospheric qualities of sci-fi classics such as Blade Runner and Gattaca (not to mention the aforementioned HG Wells masterpiece). Even the eerie scene where Douglas reaches "the end of the world" somewhat reminds us of Jim Carrey's boat bumping into the studio walls in The Truman Show.

But what is really the chance of any movie made at the end of this century not being derivative? The Thirteenth Floor at least still manages to posit questions about God, about His creation, and what we generally take for granted as "reality". It's a mind- boggling, rather disturbing reflection shrouded in this hybrid of a sci-fi/murder mystery.

With such a heavy, intriguing theme, it's alright if the performances aren't too spectacular, even if they all play dual roles. Bierko (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and Mol (Rounders) are not exciting leads, and the usually charismatic Mueller-Stahl (The Peacemaker, The X-Files) makes us yawn with his monotonous, heavily accented delivery of lines. But D'onofrio, last seen as the demonic antagonist of Men in Black, displays his chameleonic qualities as both the wimpy Whitney and his murderous simulated alter ego Ashton, two distinct personae delivered by one impressive, cerebral performance.