Director-essayist Rodney Ascher loves to be obsessed with his subject matter. His documentaries don’t veer towards the conspiratorial, they are conspiratorial. It can be an infectious experience, as you can easily join him down the rabbit hole while taking in his endless theories.
Take for example Ascher’s first feature, “Room 237,” the absorbing cult essay on “The Shining,” which tackled every possible conspiracy surrounding Kubrick’s horror masterpiece, including how Kubrick tried to sprinkle his film with clues regarding the NASA moon landing being a stunt and that he had shot the fake footage of Neil Armstrong planting the American flag.
Ascher’s new movie, “A Glitch In The Matrix,” focuses on a conspiracy theory that has grown exponentially in popularity ever since “The Matrix” was released more than 20 years ago. The belief that we’re all living not in a physical world but in a computer simulation. Ascher’s primary intellectual source to drive this theory home is sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, whom in 1977 stepped to a podium at a convention in France to reveal his conviction that reality, as we perceive it, may not be reality at all.
The sci-fi legend, who inspired the likes of “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report,” and “Total Recall,” wasn’t the only prominent figure to tout this theory, even Plato floated much of the fundamentals of what we now call “simulation theory” and, as Ascher shows us, it has seeped into the heads and inspired 21st century “geniuses” such as Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson to go along with it.
The doc itself amounts to a sometimes-fascinating thought experiment; a mix of philosophy, sci-fi, and religion. This is a a very busy film, messily rendering its evidence via garish commercialism, virtual reality footage, film excerpts, and video game footage. It is a lot to take in, there isn’t one primordial evidentiary conclusion to make us believe in the outrageous, but it’s amusing just pondering Ascher’s ambitious way of thinking, even when he tends to lose our attention with hyperbolism from time to time. He means to lead us into a rabbit hole and that, for the most part, he does do.
SCORE: B-