The film tells the story of a
virtual reality game designer, Jimi (
Christopher Lambert), who discovers that the main character of his game, Solo (
Diego Abatantuono), has achieved sentience due to an attack by a
computer virus. Asked by his creation (who feels everything the character in the game feels, including multiple deaths) to eliminate its existence, Jimi sets out to erase the game from the server of his employer, Okasama Star, before it's commercially released on Christmas Day, and thus spare Solo further suffering. Jimi has been depressed since his wife Lisa (
Emmanuelle Seigner) left him. He decides to make his search for her a part of his quest to delete Solo and the game. Along the way he recruits Lisa's friend Joystick (
Sergio Rubini) and tech wizard Naima (
Stefania Rocca) to help him avoid suspicious representatives of Okasama Star, who employ increasingly forceful methods to stop him. By the end, Jimi
hacks into one of the company's servers. This hack is in the world of virtual reality interpreted as encounters with persons from Jimi's life; the network defends itself by projecting virtual representations of people such as Jimi's father and Lisa. It tries to keep the hacker's mind in the loop of his own memories as it burns the hacker's brain. Jimi manages to pass through the network defence mechanism by freeing his mind, forgetting about life before or after, about bodily feelings, and entering a state of pure concentration where one focuses only on the target (in this case the server with the company's
bank account). It is similar to
meditation where one tries to concentrate on breathing; people who are able to do this are referred to as
angels (they are invisible to the system, can go anywhere they want, and their possibilities are limitless) in the film. In the end, Jimi feels enlightened and at inner peace with himself. He successfully deletes Solo, comes to terms with Lisa's leaving him, and understands why things happened the way they did. He is in the state of
Nirvana. Yet, during the film ending credits, a message flashes - "Naima is on line" - meaning the whole Nirvana intrigue was indeed a game within another game, that the player (the spectator) completed. ==Cast==