Around the same time as when I got my palms on the Oculus Go, Facebook’s new virtual reality standalone headset, Andrew Niccol’s Anon released in cinemas. Set in a future where there is no privacy and everything that human beings see or do, including memories, are recorded in a database, ostensibly for crime control, the film follows a grizzled cop with demons from the past (obviously) on the trail of a serial assassin who does not exist in visual records and who has the computing power to erase events. Though the film was largely poorly reviewed, I found the whole concept and Niccol’s stylish execution riveting.
Niccol has made a career of creating alternate realities or exploring different universes within the world we live in. His debut film Gattaca (1997) featured a future world governed by eugenics where only the supreme samples of humanity get to go into space. There is, of course, that one person with a dream of going into space but can’t since he was conceived outside the eugenics programme and is considered genetically inferior. Find a way he does. Like with most Niccol films, Gattaca is a triumph of production design. A lot of it is achieved by shooting in and around iconic American buildings like architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Centre, Eliot Noyes’ Otis College of Art and Design and Antoine Predock’s CLA Building.
In The Truman Show (1998), directed by Peter Weir, Niccol wrote a story where the titular character realises very late that his entire life is a television show. Niccol’s next venture as writer/director S1m0ne (2002) had a fascinating concept where a filmmaker tired of the diva ways of his leading lady replaces her with a digitally created actress. But apart from a few funny moments, the film doesn’t really work, unsure as to whether it is a satire on Hollywood or about the relationship between humans and technology.
In Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004), Niccol and his co-writer Sacha Gervasi created a world where an immigrant is in limbo, living in a terminal of JFK airport due to bureaucratic circumstances. The Lord of War (2005) was a departure for Niccol in the sense that he did not create a scenario, but rather explored an existing one, in this case the world of illegal arms dealing. He went back to his futuristic ways with In Time (2011) where humans stop ageing at 25, but are programmed to live only a year after that. His next, The Host (2013), based on Stephenie Meyer’s enormously popular novel, was about human resistance to aliens taking control of their bodies and deleting their minds.
In Good Kill (2014), Niccol looked at the hermetically sealed world of drone pilots. Niccol’s next world is not somewhere far out in space or on a futuristic Earth — it is right in our living rooms. Yes, he’s developing a film version of the board game Monopoly. Meanwhile, if you see a person next to you wearing a VR headset on a long haul flight, it’s only me. I’ll be watching a sci-fi movie sitting on a virtual reality moon.
