Virtuality

Virtuality (2009) is an American sci-fi TV movie directed by Peter Berg — watch online on iFILM. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Kerry Bishé, and James D'Arcy lead a cast of twelve crew members aboard the spacecraft Phaeton.

The ship is on a ten-year mission to explore a distant planetary system. To keep the crew sane through years of confinement, each member has access to virtual reality modules — personal escapes into any world, any identity. Then something goes wrong inside the system. The line between the simulation and the real ship starts to blur, and no one can be certain what is actually happening.

Berg originally made this as a pilot for Fox; the network passed on the series and it was released as a standalone film. That history makes it a strange, melancholy watch — a show that never got to breathe, compressed into eighty-seven minutes. Coster-Waldau carries the emotional weight well before the world knew him from Game of Thrones. Stream Virtuality (2009) online on iFILM.