I had the use of a digital projector for the evening, so Dave C. and I moved various audio and visual components around the living room until we had a not-too-shabby Digital Theater Experience projecting onto the white wall above the stairwell. Probably about a 70″ picture when it was all said and done. I could totally get used to it, except for the obligatory hand shadows and the fact that if you turned your head wrong your eyes got stabbed by the flash of 900 lumens. Maybe 9000? Anyway, it was bright. On to the movie…

We determined while watching this film that it should have been called Flowers for Algertron. Funny! (See, he’s dumb, but he takes extra doses of smart serum and virtual reality and wears a glowy computer suit and becomes a telekinetic evil genius, and…)

It’s kind of amazing to look at the state of CGI in 1992. That state was pretty bad, really. Actually, Terminator 2 was a year earlier, and the liquid metal effects were fantastic, and we’ve already talked about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, which came out just a year later. So why were the computer graphics in this so lame?

And why was the religious symbolism so blunt? A bearded Remington Steele on a virtual cross, the title character named Jobe (remember, he’s dumb, so he doesn’t know how to spell allegorically until much later in the film, when we’re all past carring or hypmotized by the goofy strobe effects).

I had a dim recollection that Stephen King was associated with this film somehow, but his name didn’t make the credit roll; turns out the producers used the title of one of his stories, but it didn’t much match the movie (or he didn’t much like the end result), and he sued to get disassociated from it.

After the movie, it was fun to watch screen savers blown up to ridiculous size on our wall. It was as virtual of an experience as I was prepared to have for the evening. That old Swiss scientist probably would approve. Oh the virtuality!