Nirvana (1997)

Pretty Good

People are voting emotionally.

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Films generally carry a title for a reason. Salvatores's Nirvana's is the key to understanding it. Without the key, the film will look like rubbish, like many comments here testify. But, if you get that key and use it, it can become one of the most astonishing movie experiences you may make.The title is not just the name of a videogame. That is totally incidental.The movie is about the voyage towards Nirvana - the real thing - of two men (or maybe of one man and his own projection in a virtual world): how the two (or maybe the man and his own inner conscience) start to understand what Nirvana is and how they eventually reach it, in spite of all misadventures and (that is not casual at all...) the cycles of deaths and rebirths that the virtual self Solo (meaning alone, in Italian, not Star Wars' character - again not a coincidence) has to go through.This is a movie about symbolisms. This is a movie about the deepest searches of the soul. Searches that cannot be disturbed by petty concerns (see Bebo Storti's apparently bizarre line after he appears in a flash for just a few seconds to shoot and kill a very unlucky henchman "I am MEDITATING [profanities deleted]!").Science fiction is incidental to its aims, and provides a fabulously well used tool to unravel the story in what I regard as a cinematic masterpiece.Blade Runner's climax ended on the recognition that replicants (and humans, maybe) were just "tears... in the rain". Nirvana's is about snowflakes that fall forever, and yet never fall.... Pity this is so far above the expectations of an average moviegoer that most viewers did not even recognize the genius in its simplicity. My congratulations to Cacucci, Corica and Salvatores!

Solo suddenly finds out that what he's living has happened before. In the middle of a "deja-vu" he discovers that he's not really alive. He's just the main character of a video game, and he refuses to keep "playing" in a non sense life, where he'll be born and killed again and again and again. He tries to convince the people around him, that they are inside a game, that their lifes are not real; that everything that happens has already happened before. But its useless: he's the only one who realizes it. Like a prophet, like a Jesus or a Buddha, he has just realized what he is, and the stupid meaning of his life-game. And he's the only one who can speak to their creator; their designer: Jimi Dini, a succesfull video game designer of the real life. A real life where Jimi lives, depressed, bored and numb. He's got something in common with Solo, thats why he decide to help him, erasing the game, his last an great creation, Nirvana, before its too late. Its not a matter of spoiling the great end of your life, but have you realized how repetitive it is? Maybe you should pay attention to Solo. Or try to find Jimi and ask him to be deleted.

An European hard-science action movie is rare these days, especially a good one, and Nirvana was a good surprise when released in France... The critics bashed it - with some interesting exceptions, and the public did not come to see it (bad promo material)... Nevertheless, it's still one of my favorite. This is not a Wakowsky Bros frenzy festival with "bullettime effect" (did you know that it was a french who created them ?) and kick-ass fighting, but Gabriele Salvatores (an "intellectual" director as it seems) did an excellent low-budget film with GREAT scenario, GREAT acting (Lambert at his best, seriously), a credible world... It's not centered on the VFX, and it's great. Sometimes a bit slow, but it's for the "ambiance", and, what an ending... A must-see, not especially for Lambert-fans... Be open-minded, and try it...

I'm totally baffled reading all the positive comments about 'Nirvana'!! This has got to be one of the dumbest, most obvious and simplistic science fiction movies of recent years! I can only grasp at the fact that I was watching an awfully dubbed English language version, which made this almost torture to sit through. Can that be why I found it to be so lame and tedious? Maybe the original Italian version has smarter dialogue - I hope so because it doesn't get much worse than this - but I still fail to see how whatever language 'Nirvana' is in will make this trite and incoherent mess any better! The concept of a virtual reality video game character becoming self-aware and having an existential crisis COULD be an interesting one if it was handled by a writer with the talent of Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg or Bruce Sterling (who have all dealt with similar subject matter - questions of reality and identity), but unfortunately the hacks responsible for 'Nirvana' miss the boat. Forget this, forget 'The Matrix' (which at least was ENTERTAINING), for a thought provoking look at virtual reality go straight to Cronenberg's excellent 'eXistenZ'. 'Nirvana' is a total embarrassment!