Review of Virtual Revolution (2016) by Mauro L — 01 Aug 2018

Duvert's debut steals locations, costumes and photography from the 1st "Blade Runner" as if Ridley Scott had shot his whole film in the final bucolic landscape taken from the set of "Shining" by Kubrick, and he is an amateur in almost all the technical areas. But he introduces an original theme that sparkles in the gloomy neo-noir dialogues: he eliminates replicants, clones, surrogates, artificial intelligences, androids, synthetics, precogs, technological singularities, etc. to devote himself only to addiction from virtual reality. He does this with 2 years in advance of Spielbergh's "Ready Player One" and without the tricksies of the director of Cincinnati, his Disney tones and his ambiguity in denouncing something while he is exalting it. "Virtual Revolution" isn't dystopian and doesn't stimulate any debate: it describes merciless the reality that has already come true, that in which rulers and governed want the immobilism seen the ineffectiveness of any attempt at improvement so far proposed. We aren't at the abysmal pessimism of "Matrix", where humans have shown themselves refractory to every form of utopia, but Duvert wanders around it, and it will be right to remind us of him for this.

(Mauro Lanari).