In case you are wondering, I believe that the proper pronunciation of this film’s title, is “Simone”, like the name. This isn’t the name of the film’s main character, because the Simone character in this film isn’t real. Besides, Al Pacino is over the title, so you know he’s the main character.

Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me get to the plotline of this film. Al Pacino plays Viktor Taransky, a director who is sick of working with diva actresses. He then meets a computer programmer named Hank who claims he has created a fully-functioning computer-generating woman. At first Viktor is not interested, but Hank dies and leaves a hard drive with S1m0ne (Simulation One) on it.

Now here is the first problem I had with this film. Viktor is down on his luck dodging bill-collectors after his film won’t get produced, despite the fact Viktor lives at a beach house. A lawyer tracks Viktor down, and makes certain Viktor receives the Simulation One hard drive. Clearly a lawyer trying to give something is doing a better job tracking Viktor than people who want to take something that Viktor owes. This won’t be the first time you will need to suspend your disbelief.

Considering that Viktor is amazed that his daughter knows so much about computers, he sure masters the S1m0ne program really well. In fact, he makes this CG woman the star of his new film. Apparently, the effect is so good that no one can tell the difference between a human actress and a CG one. In all honesty, this is probably the most realistic part of the film.

If you think about it, Computer generated stuff is just getting better and better. The whole reason why it looks fake sometimes is because it looks too perfect at times. I have a friend who didn’t know whether or not Avatar was or CG in certain places, and he saw the entire film. I remember seeing the preview for that terrible Beowulf film they made a while ago, and it took the second watch before I realized the film was CG. I have heard that princess Fiona from the Shrek films looked very real, and they actually altered the design so she would fit into Shrek’s imaginary CG world, which was a pretty new field in 2001.

S1m0ne came out in 2002, and it was directed by Andrew Niccol, who directed The Truman Show. The Truman Show is a film I should review some other time, but S1m0ne is similar because it questions the intelligence and morality of audiences. While The Truman Show questioned whether or not audiences would accept a man under constant surveillance for entertainment purposes, S1m0ne questions how easily duped they can be.

The film makes a predictable plot twist when Simone the CG woman becomes a huge star. Of course, since no one has ever seen Simone off the camera, this somehow makes her/it incredibly popular. So much so, that there is a scene where reporters and producers think they see her at a party and run up to her. Of course, it isn’t her, but that doesn’t stop them from knocking this poor woman into a fountain.

In all honesty, I don’t know how Viktor keeps this secret. His explanation is: “because she doesn’t want publicity, it just makes her more popular”. Does this work in Hollywood?

Yeah, what happens is pretty ridiculous. Assuming that you could do what Viktor does with the technology, I can’t help but wonder if the public would really fall for this. I mean, we did apparently believe in Milli Vanilli. I think the point of Niccol’s film is that we do deify celebrities, but what we worship is a false idol at best.

I suppose that is probably the most takeaway value I can put on such a film as S1m0ne, which I really hate typing with all its capital letters and numbers and such. It isn’t much, but I can recommend films for less. I recommend giving it a watch as it does have some grain of intelligence. You might want to check it out for yourself to see if its point is well-made.