Webmaster

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🎙️ EPISODE 669: 03.21.23 I mistakenly watched the English language dubbed version of this, although "mistakenly" is probably not the right word. This bananas Danish sci-fi cyberpunk entry is well-known for its late 90s graphics, predicting a future of technology and internet that doesn't exist (yet???), but as a film it functions more like a noir thriller does, albeit one — with the aided addition of said voiceover — that is as comical as it is visually delightful. Even through the strainer of LOLZ and wonderfully wacky visuals, everything still pretty much makes sense. Tack on a twist ending for the ages and you've got a, frankly, underrated should-be cult classic waiting to watch here, folks.

It's easy to harp on all the things Webmaster gets wrong about the future, but what it got right — theoretically, if not aesthetically — is even more interesting. The online world of "beboelseszone 4, Technostaden" (ok, sure) is stuck in the conceptual foreground of late 90s usenet-centric webs. Here the vision of the internet is not some expansive, all-encompassing, unwieldy thing, but rather a series of exclusive "groups," not unlike the recent reemergence of these old ideas made new again with platforms like Discord. We also see some pretty bold concepts/predictions for what would become the 'internet of things' and the dark web/crypto and the emergence of A.I. and the ever-growing surveillance state. Everything is being recorded in this dystopia and all that is recorded ends up, somewhere, on the web.

But, look, I'm not trying to be overly flattering about a movie that begins like this...


The most online person of the 90s made this and that person is Thomas Borch Nielsen. Nielsen's only other feature-length directorial credits include what appears to be three children's films...


(For the record, I would watch any of these in a heartbeat if I could find them.)

And that's a damn shame, because this is a very fun movie. Webmaster is about a, you guessed it, webmaster named JB. He 'works' in 'Cyberworld' as a 'virtual janitor,' maintaining a rich guy's extremely high-level domain. In what is essentially the Metaverse (lol), users build and cultivate 'Cyber-egos' that are like a hybrid form of avatars and A.I. His friend and colleague (?) Mia isn't quite as proficient at the web as ole JB and can't quite understand why her little cartoon person has to use such bad language...


The charm of these lower budget, cyber-centric flicks from the 90s lies in how the real world limitations of the time seep into the logistical structure of the worlds they've created. Like how all those beat-up cars are affixed with techno bells and whistles; creating the automobile of the future just wasn't in the budget. Still, though, I'll repeat: They got more right than wrong on a philosophical level but the visuals are stuck in that decade's idea of the future, and that couldn't possibly resemble reality when the actual future catches up with their vision of it. It's a beautiful and circular problem, and these 'types' of movies rank among my very favorite. Like this scene when he tries to sell hacked surveillance footage of a murder to a news network — what is his little Cyber-ego even doing here...


I won't get into the weeds of the plot here. Like I said, it's strangely and shockingly coherent for what it is. In addition to the brilliant animation design, there's some practical visuals that are equally as good in all their WTF glory, like this sicko dollhouse which also functions as a major clue...


The movie ends perfectly, presenting one final question. JB and Mia finally get together, and enjoy a picnic with an analog record player on "the green grass she always talked about" but when the camera pans back we see that this patch of grass is only about 20 feet-wide surrounded by massive concrete walls, buildings and lights, like some kind of prison. What does it all mean? That's the beauty of this. Only the Webmaster knows.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 668 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 670 ⫸

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Webmaster (original title Skyggen, also known as The Shadow) is a 1998 Danish cyberpunk thriller film. Directed by Thomas Borch Nielsen, it stars Danish actor Lars Bom as the cerebral, machine-like hacker-turned-webmaster J.B., who performs his job while hanging upside down, wearing virtual reality goggles, his mind busy deep inside cyberspace. Upon witnessing a murder, he teams up with the impulsive, energetic Miauv (Puk Scharbau). It was released on August 28, 1998.