The Truman Show

The library@esplanade has many titles worth watching. For $20 a year (and then some for GST and stuff), you get to borrow 4 audio-video items for a period of 1 week. If you finish earlier you can return and borrow another 4. Through this facility, I have watched a few good shows that I would otherwise have difficulty getting hold of. For example, to buy or download the entire Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles will need quite some cost, or effort, but I was able to borrow the excellent animation from the library. I will write about that another time.

Tonight's screening on my PC was The Truman Show, a 1998 production starring Jim Carrey. Now I had never been a big fan of Carrey, but the reviews of this show had been good. It took me a few years to get around to finally watching this, and I'm not disappointed. The story goes that this Truman Burbank person lives in a seemingly perfect world where people are nice to him and he is always happy. However he puts a few clues together and eventually realises that there is much more to his world than it appears, that there is a conspiracy around him. He sets out to discover the truth, which has been artfully kept from him for 30 years.

This is conspiracy theory and paranoia before The Matrix (1999). Will you brave storms to find out the truth for yourself? Will you risk losing everything you know? And what will you do, when "the creator" speaks to you at last? Or will you turn back and go back to the comfortable lie, as Cypher did in The Matrix?