Review of Brainstorm (1983) by Kate J — 09 Mar 2011

No doubt, Brainstorm has a few faults, particularly its blissfully utopian ending, but even that final moment, which is actually powerful, doesn't detract from the film's daring, experimental form, brilliant direction, and provocative ideas.

The film concerns a kind of virtual reality machine that allows an individual to record their experiences. Transferred onto disks, these experiences can then be relived by other individuals via a kind of virtual reality helmet.

The film's plot seems basic and unremarkable, but it develops it in truly astonishing ways, particularly with its change in film. The bulk of the film appears in cropped, standard 35 mm fare, but the virtual reality scenes appear in super-widescreen format with such wide-angle lens that reality bends at the edges.

This virtual reality is actually the hyperreal, as Jean Baudrillard would term it--it is more real than reality. It crams so much reality into the frame that it is literally bursting at the seams of the rectangular image.

Brainstorm eventually becomes a kind of postmodern version of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" as it depicts the capture of a person's perceptions as they are dying.

Again, Brainstorm has its faults, but it remains a daringly original film from special effects expert Douglas Trumball who did the effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey and also directed the sci-fi classic Silent Running.