Nirvana (1997)
You know, I like to think I have a fairly decent grasp on world cinema so I feel fairly qualified to say: of all the cinematic traditions around the world, Italy has got to have one of the weirdest. Between their strange habit of casting foreign actors and dubbing them over and their very ambivalent approach to genre, tone and narrative coherence they feel way more foreign to me than the Japanese.
So, Nirvana is an Existential 90's Cyberpunk psychological horror buddy comedy christmas movie starring Highlander's Christopher Lambert.
... You get where I'm coming from, right? So, Nirvana stars Lambert as video game programmer Jimi in future cyberpunk Marrakesh. After the protagonist of his game somehow achieved sentience he, along with shady hackers Joystick and Niama goes on an adventure around the world find his missing girlfriend and hack into the companies server to delete the game and liberate the character from his sentience.
There is a lot of stuff going on in this. This is already a very dense plot for a movie that's just under 2 hours long and it's weirdly elaborate worldbuilding doesn't help. There are automatic security systems that verbally abuse burglars and gas stations that fill your tank with poison if you try to go off without paying them and smarthouses reminding you to take a bath in a rather pushy fashion along with technoshamanistic Hindu Yogi's and a cyberspace that feels right out of Silent Hill or Jacob's Ladder including a digital succubus trying to seduce the protagonist.
This movie is rather silly. And I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, I had a good time watching. It underlines its zany worldbuilding with surprisingly high quality costumes and sets and props. There is a scene where a character gets surgery on his cybernetic eye implants that looks almost like something out of a Cronenberg movie. The banter between the protagonist and Joystick, his comic relief sidekick is pretty consistently entertaining and so are some of the visual jokes. It has a surprisingly memorable supporting cast, including an unfailingly polite Japanese corporate agent and a hacker who rather resembles Judy from Cyberpunk 2077.
This movie is quite fun. It's probably the closest there has ever been to a good William S. Gibson adaptation, even though it technically isn't one. I mean, I prefer it over Johnny Mnemonic. It's a movie that has a lot of ideas. I think that's something you ought to give it a lot of credit for. I'm not sure if very much of it makes a whole lot of sense but there's definitely a creative vision in there that I can respect. For better or for worse, it feels like a movie only a very weird person could have ever come up with and I respect.
In other words, if you want to see something I've seen quite accurately described as "A Cyberpunk Christmas movie with Silent Hill vibes"... well, it's the only one you're gonna get and it could be a whole lot worse. I kinda dug this. And I'm pretty sure it couldn't possibly have been made anywhere other than Italy.
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