Hacker Cinema
The Thirteenth Floor
1999 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Josef Rusnak
ThrillerScience FictionMystery
In Los Angeles, a wealthy man, known as Mr. Fuller, discovers a shocking secret about the world he lives in. Fearing for his life, he leaves a desperate message for a friend of his in the most unexpected place.
18 positive1 mixed19 neutralfrom 38 commenters
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42 comments on Hacker News
> In the movie The Thirteenth Floor, the main character breaks out of his simulation (which also contained a simulation) into 'the real world', which changes almost exactly nothing about the presence or otherwise of an afterlife because the simulation was a simulation of the real world; the rules are the same. The boundaries of that real world are also applicable to all recursive simulations.
But this isn’t true - if universe A simulates universe B, there is no requirement that they have the same laws of physics.
If we are living in a computer simulation, then the “real” laws of physics might be radically different from the apparent ones, and we might never know what the “real” laws are
I don't know and it makes literally no difference (to me, it may make a difference to people with more patience to dig into deep unverifiable theoreticals).
In the movie The Thirteenth Floor, the main character breaks out of his simulation (which also contained a simulation) into 'the real world', which changes almost exactly nothing about the presence or otherwise of an afterlife because the simulation was a simulation of the real world; the rules are the same. The boundaries of that real world are also applicable to all recursive simulations.
If you're in a simulation maybe you get reset to a prior state. You wouldn't know, so it doesn't matter. The simulation may run on stolen time slices of a processor, and seconds or minutes may pass in between milliseconds of progress of your simulated world, but it seems continuous to you because the entirety of your experience is within the simulation.
"You" as a coherent entity cannot exist outside the bounds.
If there is an afterlife it is most likely a rebirth of a new entity.
There is no you there is only me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) fits in there, too.
As does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor which is sort of a remake of World on a Wire(coming from Simulacron III).
Add The Thirteenth Floor and eXistenZ to the initial list of movies.
Isn't that more or less the theme of the movie 'the Thirteenth floor?'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbjhr-H2nxQ
Three movies with overlapping themes came out in mid-1999: The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenZ (probably in that order of box office revenue).
Watch the movie “The Thirteenth Floor”
> It's funny how movies from the same rough period seem to be all similar underneath.
The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, eXistenZ... there was definitely something in the air at the close of the 90s.
I like The Thirteenth Floor. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
> I still don't understand how Roland Emmerich [...] somehow managed to fail to get people into theater seats for 13th Floor.
There were a lot of "are you living in a simulation?" film and television episodes that came out in 1998-2000. The Matrix was obviously the most successful, but Dark City (over a year earlier) had a similar theme. The X-Files episode "Field Trip" aired a few weeks after eXistenZ was in theatres, but a few weeks before The Thirteenth Floor was released. Etc.
I'm a fan of the genre, and I like all of the examples I've seen from that period (eXistenZ in particular), but I remember feeling at the time like it was just too much similar material in too short a period of time. I doubt Sony could have done anything to significantly change the box office numbers other than releasing it well before The Matrix.
Welt am Draht also directly inspired the Matrix also-ran The Thirteenth Floor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor). The Thirteenth Floor is not better than The Matrix as a cross-media series with a lot to say in later chapters, but I still think The Thirteenth Floor is a better whole movie than the first film called The Matrix. (Though I'm also in a weird minority that I think Matrix 2/3/4 are all individually better than the first film.)
And if you can't find this, the film "The Thirteenth Floor" with Craig Bierko is a pretty similar if more stylized remake.
But the series is worth the watch.
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
There were even two other "people stuck inside simulated reality" SciFi films released within two months of The Matrix (Existenz and The Thirteenth Floor).
Hey, The Thirteenth Floor(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/) already covered this. Just get up and spontaneously go somewhere that you have absolutely no reason or desire to go and you'll find the limits of the simulation.
Major spoilers ahoy: That sounds similar to Simulacron-3 (which spawned the movies World on a Wire and The Thirteenth Floor) and Neal Stephenson's Fall (which implies that the Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon, and REAMDE also take place in the same simulation).
Moon and The Thirteenth Floor are two of my favourite movies which have not received the success they deserved in my opinion, compared to say The Matrix (all three as good and dealing with similar subjects IMO). It's rare but nice to see them mentioned!
Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor are a few of my top sci-fi movies of all time. Both have themes that echo the Matrix, but done in a much more subtle and thought provoking way IMHO.
It's a shame The Thirteenth Floor came out the same year as the Matrix...
Re: living in simulations: The Thirteenth Floor[0][1] and eXistenz[2][3]
Great movies, but may be seem somewhat dated if you're new to them as they're late 90's fare. I still love both of them.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor
[1]: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1089671-13th_floor
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz
[3]: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/existenz
Same with -The Thirteenth Floor", one of my favourite movie, make sure you don't read any spoiler about it though.
Nexts on the list:
Moon
Ex Machina - I personally have no issue with nudity but I wish there were less of it in that movie because I know it turned a lot of people off
The Green Mile - not quite changed my view, but reinforced it
Westworld 3rd season (first 2 seasons revisit themes from above movies, they are good but not necessarily new themes)
Breaking Bad - I tend not to like series and this is a really long one, but it really does make you question things.
1998-99, there were at least 5 movies about simulations: Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Existenz, and The Thirteenth Floor.
Movies like "Brainstorm": "The Final Cut" "Strange Days" "Total Recall" "Altered States" "Lawnmower Man" "Ex Machina" "The Thirteenth Floor" "The Truman Show" "Inception" "Selfless" "Flatliners"
> In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom made an ingenious argument that we might be living in a computer simulation [...]
This part isn't novel as it was written about in Simulacron-3 (1964) and one of my fave films[0] (excuse the graphics, good story).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor (1999)
Cryptonomicon too?! Well I'll be darned.
Refactoring... wow. How many programmers have been redefined by works published that year alone?
I can't say eXistenZ was a particularly good movie in any objective way, but I enjoyed it and watched it several times.
Thirteenth Floor has been on my Netflix queue for a while... I should really get around to it.
Interesting. So we're a simulation that can simulate 15 (femto)meters of cosmos that is indistinguishable from reality. This isn't much but it's still absolutely mind-bending. Reminds me of the movie The 13th Floor [1]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
13th floor style? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
A pretty good movie based on a novel about this exact concept: 13th Floor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor
They gave one of my favorite movies, The Thirteenth Floor, a score of 29% while it's rated decently in other places and is a pretty good film, definitely not garbage...
I'm having a feeling some reviewers just don't know what to do with certain movies that do not fit a particular mold, and then keep trying to compare them to other movies when it's not appropriate, and Warcraft is also most likely being punished out of the gate for being Warcraft.
Reviews from people so far seem to be pretty good.
The movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor gives IMHO an interesting insight on the subject.
There is a rather interesting science fiction movie, called "The Thirteenth Floor", that explores this concept, in fact if I remember correctly it talks about nested simulated worlds.
This makes perfect sense to me, if the theory that we are living in a simulated universe is correct, the exact same logic would apply to the beings that are running the programs to simulate us and so on, ad infinitum.
Relevant Movie: The Thirteenth Floor.
Well it essentially grows out of the idea that the universe might be a simulation, which is not novel though obviously unproven and perhaps wrong and in either case a controversial idea for some people.
Going beyond that is the idea that maybe there's simulations in simulations. Just basic shlock-90s movie plot stuff in a way (see: The Thirteenth Floor, et al), but what if that's the basic nature of the universe(s)? And on a slight tangent, what if there's no "substrate" universe at all? (There not being one is no less weird than there being one, IMO), but if it is just purely mathematical rules based universes all the way down (and maybe around in some cases, if the idea of looped recursion is universally humorous)?
Taken all of this admittedly out-there whackiness, perhaps consciousness (the big why question) is ultimately the means by which universes reproduce. Over a long enough timeline with enough luck and fitness a universe may develop conscious creatures eventually capable of creating more "simulated" universes (or not, if that universe is unfit), a situation very unlikely to occur by randomness alone.
This thought-experiment theory takes the opposite approach from most in that it attempts to answer the why as opposed to the how.
There's a movie about that.
And, after a SPOILER ALERT, that movie is:
The Thirteenth Floor
I think that, ultimately, most viewers would rather have a movie that presents a picture of humans having a chance at triumph, rather than one where the truth of the story is that we cannot win (because the computer overlords are merely simulating our win to placate us). The latter is far, far more dystopian.
Interestingly, the Thirteenth Floor did a pretty good job of that overall premise (sims inside sims), but without the dystopian overtones.
Sweet! I'll probably like it, then. ;) It's amazing how many movies and stories are similar on some level, yet have completely different aspects that make them both enjoyable and interesting (e.g., The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor). If I never saw another romantic comedy again because it was too similar to the Princess Bride (etc), or never looked at a new programming language "because it's pretty much like lisp/python/etc" again, I'd miss out on a lot of good stuff.
this reminds me of the film The Thirteenth Floor... and the book it's based on.
This is one of my favorite kinds of movie. I've never heard a good name for the genre. Psychological thriller? Too broad.
You should add The Thirteenth Floor. A good movie, better than its low budget, that fits squarely in the category.
Glad to see someone suggested The Game. I loved that one. It's a long way down from The Game and Seven to Benjamin Button and The Social Network.
When they try to escape confinement...? (See my comment above, and the movie 'The Thirteenth Floor')
These are some movies/tv series that I deeply enjoyed and (some I) wish I had known about earlier.
9.9 Hitchhiker's guide to the universe, BBC TV series
9.9 Contact (1997) based on a novel by Carl Sagan. Very few people seem to know about this movie.
9.3 War Games
9.0 most Akiro Kurosawa movies:
Seven Samurai
High & Low
The Bad Sleep Well
Ikiru
Red Beard
9.0 Terminator 1 (watch again)
8.8 Terminator 2 (watch again)
8.7 Pirates of Silicon Valley
8.7 Matrix 1 (watch again)
8.7 The Italian Job (featuring Napster's original inventor)
8.7 Live Free or Die Hard
8.5 Track Down or Takedown (about social hacker Kevin Mitnick)
8.5 Revolution OS (2001)
8.5 Dr. Strangelove
8.5 2010 A space odyssey
8.3 Antitrust (2001)
8.3 Sneakers
8.3 COSMOS
8.2 Minority Report
8.2 2001 A space odyssey
8.2 Paycheck (2003)
8.0 The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
8.0 The Net
Your comment made me think of the film "The Thirteenth Floor"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
You think that you are being so extreme that it is ridiculous.
Well, lawyers already went there: http://www.plotpatents.com/
"A Plot or Storyline Patent application seeks to patent the underlying novel and nonobvious storyline of a fictional story. Such protection is to be contrasted from the copyright protection of one of millions of possible expressions of an underlying storyline. The field of possible applications is broad, and may tentatively be split into an entertainment-advertisement dichotomy. The epitome of an entertainment application is an original, thought-provoking, often shockingly unique movie plot. Several potentially patentable features may have been found in the plots of, Memento, The Thirteenth Floor, Being John Malkovich, Butterfly Effect, The Game, Fight Club, The Matrix, Total Recall, The Truman Show, Minority Report, The Village, Groundhog Day, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to name a few. The epitome of an advertisement application is one of the many thoughtfully hilarious Super Bowl commercials."
I'm pretty sure a movie did it.. "The Thirteenth Floor", something like that.