AllMovie

In this combination of documentary and fiction film, the directors Hellmuth Costard and Juergen Ebert have reinterpreted the meaning of "real time" to their own purposes: they have military satellites transmitting images of the earth's surface to a computer screen, where operators can afterwards manipulate those images as they like (take the desert out of the Sahara, for example). But the tenuous interface between the "real" earth below and the flickering world on the computer screen creates a conflict in the mind of one computer scientist. He feels that as a human being, his sensibilities have been replaced by the computer programs, and he envisions that he is flying over the earth like one of the satellites -- and falls to his death. His young mistress later discovers his lifeless body in an empty field. Although "real-time" means that a computer program working with objects in the real world has to manipulate those objects within actual time parameters, here the writers and directors seem to be asking questions about the effect of computers on our perception of reality. They continue with other imaginary examples of virtual and actual "reality."