A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX

28347568 CONTAINS 826589002 SOME 8976598765 SPOILERS

Are we living in a giant computer simulation? Are we all just incredibly advanced aliens who've jacked into a sandbox videogame so we can spend seventy Earth years pretending we're living in Stevenage? Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? Are we all stuck in the Matrix? Er, no. No, we're not and it isn't. Director Rodney Ascher seems to specialise in movies asking Questions To Which The Answer Is No - from Room 237 (does The Shining contain proof that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings? No, it doesn't) to The Nightmare (are the figures seen by sleep paralysis sufferers something more sinister than too much cheese and bondage porn before bed? No, they're not). Now: is the entirety of what we call Earth just another multiplayer day in Grand Theft Auto XII? Actually: no, it isn't. Wow, that was easy.

This absolute hogwash of a pretend documentary seeks to explore the possibility that we're all Sims. To this end there's a vast number of film clips from The Matrix (obviously), The Truman Show, They Live and The Wizard Of Oz, along with Blade Runner, Total Recall and Starship Troopers because one of the experts making the case is Philip K Dick via a 1970s videotaped lecture. The other experts on view aren't actually on view: they're hidden behind CGI costumes of a robot, a space alien and some kind of lion, blathering nonsensically.

A Glitch In The Matrix is named after the phenomenon that you occasionally see, where two people in identical clothing are sat next to each other on the tube, or three green Nissan Micras are parked together outside Tesco: seen not as a mere chance coincidence but a coding error in the randomness generator that suggests a deeper hidden layer of reality. Oddly, this glitch is something the film doesn't mention, being more concerned with utter, utter dribble at the expense of any actual evidence beyond anecdotal what-if from people wearing CGI spacesuits and animal avatars. And when your main spokesmen are those guys in their bedrooms, Elon Musk and a guy who watched The Matrix hundreds of times and then casually killed his parents with a shotgun, I'm thinking it's fair to say the case is pretty weak.

Essentially it's nothing more than another version of what an afterlife might bring - Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, or just Level Two. The fact that you can build things in Minecraft doesn't mean we're in a gigantic Minecraft ourselves: you can build things in Lego as well but that (and The Lego Movie, oddly) never gets mentioned either. There's a certain measure of Terror In The Aisles fun to be had from naming the film snippets as they come up (bonus points if you spot The Thirteenth Floor), but the idea behind it is tinfoil hat silly and the eyewitnesses entirely unconvincing. (But then I'm really the Zargon Overlord Xarqak who invented the game, so I would say that.)

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