The arcade machine is revealed to be the “mainframe” of a multiverse of simulations, where all of the album’s videos took place. Likewise, the film ties up several other lingering conundrums hanging over the album and tour and, while it’s hardly The Usual Suspects in terms of everything suddenly clicking perfectly into place, the whole concept starts to make a fleshed-out, hodge-podged sort of sense. Of course! This is the origin story of the gigantic mecha-zombie that burst from the stage at the end of the gig.
Simulation movies code#
Is the gig in a simulated world? The scientists? Both? All we know is that the tear in the fabric of the code has unleashed a digital virus in the scientist’s reality which slowly turns him into a monstrous mutant called the Truth Slayer.įans that might previously have just gawped at all the neon ninjas and giant cyborgs at the live show might start to feel a little red-pilled at this point. One scientist tries to play the machine and inadvertently rips open a different reality in which a laser-slathered, pixel-goggled Muse are playing ‘Pressure’ and ‘Psycho’ to screaming banks of thousands. A team of scientists track the source of an enormous power surge to a deserted O2 Arena, where an arcade machine sits on Muse’s empty stage. Musers will be arguing about the philosophical, metaphysical and political implications of the film until the Matrix snaps, but the basic premise is ‘Alien vs Computer’. As the framing story of the film strives to connect dots between the album’s tracks and videos, the live-show set-pieces and the terrifying current events of 2020, they’ve wrapped up arguably the most creatively successful narrative rock artefact since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’, and might just have reinvented the live film while they’re at it. What seemed to start life as a late-out-the-traps ‘80s revival jumble of retro-futurist nostalgia fantasies – lots of fond homages to Tron, Critters, Gremlins, Teen Wolf and the arcade neons of early electropop, a project more concerned with aesthetic than message – has become a self-contained world with depths and nuances worthy of one of rock’s most cryptic and ideologically confrontational bands. A mind-bursting spectacular merging enhanced footage from their ‘Simulation Theory’ live show with a filmic narrative, it sets out to make the album, already their most consistent and coherent of recent years, into their most fully-rounded concept piece yet. So Muse – Simulation Theory couldn’t come too soon. The idea that Earth is an extremely advanced computer simulation and we’re all simply avatars in a corrupted game called something like Maximum Drake and that this entire year could be reset from a save file from December 2019 becomes increasingly attractive by the month. The further we get into 2020, the more we hope that Muse’s ‘Simulation Theory’ is actually non-fiction.
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