We soon also find out that Michael (guy in the harness) has a troubled marriage, the woman monitoring the experiment who is leading the research, Lillian, who was smoking up a storm in the lab ('80s!) is going to pay for all those filtertips and the bossman in the suit might well cave to the military interests doing all that funding. Oh, and this tech that can record human sensations so that they can be replayed endlessly (like a looped orgasm) is kind of open to gargantuan abuse.
Cinema technologist Douglas Trumbull, whose skill can be seen throughout 2001: a Space Odyssey and his own directorial debut Silent Running, took the further step in bringing this story to the screen at a time when advances in technology were enhancing our daily lives as well as making the existential threats of the late Cold War exponentially terrifying. Trumbull's vision is an extension on what was known of virtual reality experiments (by NASA, among others) from passive immersion into direct stimulus. Like any technology designed to elevate humanity this has a big problem in the way: humanity. Forget about the porn possibilities, imagine what it could do for the torture industry.
It is this theme that presses and allows what might otherwise be a pedestrian thriller plot, as different characters encounter the possibilities of the invention (soon shrunk from a lab filling machine to a headset) and are plunged into experiences like psychosis or sex and eventually death and possible afterlife. The theme is compelling and the goodies and baddies plot only extends it. A lot of this is casting.
Christopher Walken is at a stage of his career where he appears to be discovering the unpunctuated vocal delivery that was to make him one of the impressions to perfect. To be fair, he uses it to give Michael the appearance of a purposeful scatterbrain but this trades screen time with the other side of the approach which renders him emotionless and dull. Louise Fletcher is more impressive as Lilly the head boffin, taking the character from impatience with authority to humility in the face of death. If you were soured by her turn as Nurse Ratchet, try this movie for some depth and warmth.
The mastodon in the room, though, is Natalie Wood as Karen the idustrial designer and Michael's wife. Her performance is fine, nothing outstanding but neither an embarrassing swan song. Wood died during the production. This was unrelated to the film but its occurrence brought production to a standstill as thecash strapped MGM and insurers went into a spin. That didn't help an efforts to add some dignity to the demise of a well loved movie star but the film, when completed and released two years later, wasn't burdened with the same bad business that accompanied the death of actors in the Twilight Zone movie at around that time, but emerged as a kind of farewell performance.
Even with this tragic setback, the film did get completed and to a fine sheen. My recent viewing revealed something I didn't remember from the cinema screening in 1983 and would have been undetectable on VHS and broadcast at the time. Most of the film is shot and presented in standard widescreen (1.85:1) but everything showing the point of view of someone in the VR is in scope (more like 2.35:1) so it widens out. I rented this through Prime in HD and it went from scope back to wide with the same letterboxing above and below, making it look like a mini-IMAX show. Trumbull had been developing a format using 70mm stock shot at 60 frames per second (normal rate is 24 fps) but MGM freaked at the cost and logistics of getting it shown far and wide so it varied between 70 and 35 mm. This is not particularly helpful as an indication but slow motion is often shot at 64 fps and projected at 24 but you don't really get much of an idea of the smoothness of the motion. If you've bought a digital tv in the past twenty years and winced at how scrubbed and tv-like movies look before finding out how to get rid of motion smoothing in the settings, that's more like what Trumbull had in mind. It might well be truer to the image but we're just too used to the old 24 per second rattling away. So, who knows how it would have gone down, anyway?
What remains of Brainstorm after this history is a solid vision of the technology to come. It's not quite pre-internet as there are frequent instances of people tapping in to the lab recordings through acoustic modems but that technology is allowed to function as a kind of plastic age magic (even though it was real at the time) but the online realm we live in now would require more than lip service with a story like this. Later excursions like Strange Days and The Matrix owe more than a little to Trumbull's notions here and more recent fare like Possessor show that the garden's still fertile. If it were to be remade (no, it shouldn't be but ...) it would probably need to intersect with AI to make any sort of dent. But then I wonder, would that not just push it irretrievably into genre territory to the point that it lost its ethical basis? Perhaps some futures are best left in the past. Seriously, visit or revisit this, if only to see what didn't happen.
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