Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Glitch in the Matrix’ on Hulu, a Ludicrous Excursion Into the Annals of Simulation Theory

Now on Hulu, A Glitch in the Matrix is from Room 237 director Rodney Ascher, who’s now made two documentaries about “Whoa, dude!” theories inspired by classic movies. Well, mostly anyway. The main through line in Glitch is a 1977 speech by sci-fi author Philip K. Dick in which he speaks in depth about simulation theory, and it provides Ascher a springboard to explore the idea that we’re all plugged into an artificial computerized reality, an idea popularized by The Matrix. So does this doc make us stop and say “Whoa,” or roll our eyes and say “Dude”?

A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It begins with a Skype interview with a digital avatar that looks like Lion-O from Thundercats crossed with Ronald McDonald atop a real person in a slightly disheveled room with cardboard boxes and laundry piled in the corner. Are we supposed to take this seriously? Or is it supposed to be ridiculous? I don’t know! Somebody call Room Rater, please! Anyway, this guy is one of Ascher’s “eyewitnesses” to the title things, one of the people who believe we’re living in a vast, complex computer simulation, an idea first given traction by Dick, the author of numerous high-concept and philosophical sci-fi stories, and who’s our own real-life Kilgore Trout.

We see grainy footage of Dick giving a somewhat awkward reading to a French audience about the strange, formative experiences of his life that led him to postulate this theory. It wasn’t until The Matrix became a major international smash in 1999 that simulation theory made its way into wider discourse and into the brains of people like Lion-O Ronald, and a guy who’s covered with a cartoon robot jackal in a tuxedo, and another guy depicted as a creature in a spacesuit who frequently scratches his glass helmet like it’s a head full of hair. Should we try to get past this silliness and listen to what they have to say? Maybe, but it ain’t easy. It’s ever so slightly easier when Ascher feeds us a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson saying it’s hard to argue against simulation theory, then back to being less easy when Elon Musk touts the theory.

The avatar-guys share all kinds of kooky anecdotes about “synchronicities” and improbable occurrences that made them believe we’re all complex programs plugged into a machine. Their stories are recreated using digital animation. We bounce around among popular movie clips (lotsa Dick adaptations, e.g., Minority Report, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly), Skype calls with Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom (who wrote a definitive text on simulation theory), eerie meanderings through Google Earth landscapes, screenshots of Subreddits and other bric-a-brac. Eventually, we get to a harrowing audio interview with Joshua Cooke, the guy who murdered his parents with a shotgun in 2003 and used “the Matrix defense” as an insanity plea, claiming that he believed he lived in a simulation and couldn’t differentiate reality from virtual reality. In other words, this doc covers a lot, lot, lot of ground — but who knows if the ground is actually real or just a bunch of ones and zeroes, man?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is where we’ll compare Glitch to Room 237, where folks on the wackiness spectrum espouse their heavily overanalytical theories about secret meanings in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Let’s just say that Ascher giving a platform to crazy interpretations of a work of art — even when they tie into popular moronic conspiracy theories about the Apollo moon landing — is far more tenable and palatable than his giving a platform to crazy interpretations of actual existence.

Performance Worth Watching: Of the film’s many talking heads, real or avatar’d but all Skyped, Emily Pothast (real talking head) describes how Plato’s allegory of the cave fits into the conversation — just one example of how she gives the most coherent and reasonable big-picture commentary on the subject matter.

Memorable Dialogue: “I’m thinking of an orange fish. I would like to see an orange fish in the next 10 minutes. And 10 minutes later in the walk, I turn down the street and there’s a restaurant with an orange fish on it that I’ve never seen before.” — cartoon robot jackal in a tux guy

Sex and Skin: None. Does anybody who goes on and on about simulation theory (who’s not named Neo) ever get some? Just posing the question!

Our Take: Ascher shot A Glitch in the Matrix pre-pandemic, but his decision to interview his subjects remotely — no doubt to assert the increasingly hyper-virtual sensibilities of life in the 21st century — sure feels like our current times, all addled with Zoom calls and hampered by a significant dearth of physical interaction. Is this a coincidence? Or are there no coincidences in simulation theory? REALLY MAKES YOU THINK. And I’m sure someone out there has an interesting take on how COVID fits into simulation theory, and will be wholly anecdotal and cite no science whatsoever in doing so, while sounding like they maybe smoke too much weed, and really need to move their damn laundry out of the shot, and be both boring and annoying and probably full of shit. And Ascher will give them all kinds of screen time in his movie, at the expense of thoughtfully analytic people like Pothast and Bostram.

Oh, and then we clench our teeth through the sequence with the guy who step-by-step narrates how he murdered his parents in a weirdly detached tone, the scene illustrated like a first-person-shooter video game. This true-crime sequence feels wedged into the goofy, deeply annoying uncanny-valley visual hodgepodge comprising the bulk of the doc; it’s an all-too-real grounding element meant to drive home the no-shit-sherlock assertion that progressing from simulation theory to nihilism is not good.

Problematic and tonally disparate as the sequence is, it’s the rare instance where the film digs deeper than a four-inch rabbit hole. Because Dick is a public figure whose biography is well-known, we can appreciate his theories better within the context of his personal struggles with mental illness (suicide attempts, violent incidents, etc.). We don’t know a thing about Ascher’s “eyewitnesses,” including what they look like, but their commentary gives us a general sense of paranoia and narcissism. They seem like nice enough guys who maybe think too much and probably wouldn’t cross any moral boundaries, but is Ascher implying that their next steps may be like Cooke’s? Who knows. The film is too tonally and visually scattered to glean any coherent assertions from it. Frustratingly, Ascher is content to merely flirt with compelling ideas about religion, science and technology while indulging massive amounts of woo-woo horse puckey.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Yes, I’m being petty about the laundry. But A Glitch in the Matrix is flimsy blather that skirts the fringe of outright incoherence. It doesn’t blow minds as much as it feels like a blown opportunity.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch A Glitch in the Matrix on Hulu