After his daughter Mai is killed in an auto accident, a genius programmer recreates her in the form of a computer program called AI. His jealous brother-in-law, wanting to get his hands on the technology for profit, sends his client to steal it and Mai’s father is killed in the process. Learning of her capture, Mai’s old friends race to free AI from her captors so that she won’t fall into the corporate clutches that threaten to erase her soul.
While extremely dated and takes place in then contemporary Japan of 1998, it should not be missed by anyone into cyberpunk. It is a commercial movie with very few artistic ambitions, but a well made example of the endless possibilities of the revolutionary internet back in the nineties, as perceived by the mainstream and media.
The movie is a teenage adventure/action movie and relationship drama and throws in a little bit of everything cyber. There are the nineties cyberpunk hackerspace with tubing and snaking cables, there is an evil technological corporation (Digital Ware Japan, co. inc.), there are baddies in black suits, there is a magically, eh, electronically remote controlled Volkswagen beetle by a gamepad, there are glass tetris blocks in cyberspace... And even a boy band number dancing on a stage with flaming ventilation pipes and circuit boards. Note that all of these are in the passing and the main plot revolves around the girl who has been reanimated (heh) into a digital clone by her father after her untimely death, exiled to the laptop of her crush.
While technically nonsensical and generally absolutely ridiculous, it does still have good pacing and is a good ride of surfing on the wave of cyber cheese.
