Quantum Metaphysics

The screen swirls with zippy images: a cocktail tumbler that mysteriously waddles on an airplane meal tray, a Tinker Bell electron that darts through our hero's thoughts, a vortex of digital effects that suck you into cyberworld, and a few Fellini moments, like the tunnel full of empty cars and the ghostly accordionist on a picturesquely creepy streetscape.

You don't have to go to a theater to see these apparitions. In fact, you can't. Quantum Project, a 32-min. epic about a physicist (perpetual star-of-the-future Stephen Dorff) who defies his Merlinish dad (blustery John Cleese) to find love with the proper electron (petrochemical-sunset-haired Fay Masterson), is the first medium-length, Hollywood-style movie made uniquely for the Internet. Just log on to , as the Web faithful did at 12:01 a.m., Friday, when Quantum popped online. Pay $3.95 to rent or $5.95 to buy. Download for four minutes--or many hours, but we'll get to that later--and the future is yours.

Directed by Oscar-winning production designer Eugenio Zanetti (Restoration) and produced by Barnet Bain and Stephen Simon (What Dreams May Come), the $3 million Quantum Project wants to be the Jazz Singer of cybercinema--a landmark for the millennial medium. "The Net is a mirror for the way human beings think," says Bain. "Hypertext is the bedrock for a whole new nonlinear art form. When you're clicking your browser from site to site, you're exploring chaos theory. The scenes have no connection, except in your head. Quantum Project is like that. It's not just nonlinear, it's noncontextual. It cuts together stuff that has meaning in ways that are insightful."

If these guys could make a movie as well as they talk it, Quantum might stoke hope along with the hype--be a mini-Matrix. But it doesn't work. David Aaron Cohen's script charts a familiar journey into oneself (Dorff is an implosive Luke Skywalker), and even with a final kiss that detonates a supernova of special effects, the movie remains stubbornly stillborn, emotionally unwired.

Technologically, too, there are problems. About 9 min. in, the lips and speech fell out of synch. Visually, Quantum is a handsome package that's hard to see. The recommended screen size is a weeny 3 in. by 6 in., creating pictures only a philatelist could love. If the screen size is doubled, things go blurry, far below vhs or dvd quality. The miasmic visuals look duped from video. They would bring shouts of "Focus!" in a crowded theater, but at your workstation, no one can hear you scream.

"Nothing's real until it's perceived," Dorff says. And no Internet movie can be applauded until it's downloaded. At a hefty 166 megabytes, Quantum Project can be smoothly swallowed only by the relatively few PCs with super high-speed broadband connections. The majority of Websters, with 56K dial-up modems, could take all night to access the movie--if their computers didn't crash first. And this one, alas, isn't worth the wait.