This is a fairly interesting, but slow-moving, sci-fi drama that was made for German television by director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Definitely a bit long at over 3 hours.
The story involves a high-tech company that operates a virtual-reality computer called Simulacron. When the project leader dies, his replacement, Fred Stiller, starts experiencing strange phenomena such as a colleague disappearing without a trace and no one remembering that he ever existed. Stiller finds himself in the middle of a nightmarish situation where he cannot distinguish fantasy from reality and he doesn't know who he can trust.
This movie reminds me of a cross between Kubrick (specifically, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), Cronenberg (without the gore), 1984, and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT. Overall, it is a thought-provoking film. Unfortunately, it is often tedious with long scenes of people sitting around on art-deco sets, smoking cigarettes and having dull conversations. I think it's a good movie, but it could have been better if they kept the running time to around 2 hours.
I got my 2-disc DVD-R copy from the wonderful Super Strange Video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvlQ8TQsmQA
I rented it a week ago, just couldn't get into it. I'm on a shortened attention span pretty much all the time these days.
I loved it, very thought-provoking and way ahead of its time. The reason its three hours long is that it's a TV miniseries, it wad originally broadcast on back to back nights. That's how I watched it, an hour and a half at a time. Three hours at a stretch might have been a bit much.
Barbara Valentin, yowsa!
(http://deeperintomovies.net/journal/image12/worldonawire03.jpg)
Public Television gave us "The Lathe of Heaven" but also "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" re sci fi