In detail: Cut to a one-legged woman (model and former athlete Lauren Wasser) waking up in a ruined high-security facility, crawling through the rubble to collect her golden foot and taking a lift down to ground level where she fights, kicks and laser flamethrowers her way through a horde of enemies, in what looks suspiciously like an arcade fighting game. Are these the creators of the simulation trying to eradicate an avatar that’s trying to escape? And where’s Matt headed in this crazy mix-up CGI world?
Pressure album muse code#
In detail: On the other side of the code barrier, back in the code zone, Matt is attacked by giant robot skeletons as he drives by, around and even through them on his way to some huge neon city. Matt returns the tape before Dom and Chris arrive, having taken the Bill & Ted time-travelling phone box route to the same place, but by then Matt has turned into a werewolf and kills Chris before speeding away, hitting ‘warp drive’ to break back through the sim code. The code area acts as some kind of a wormhole to a different zone, where the video store stands in an endless expanse of parched desert. The code that emerges when Chris’s bazooka bolt hits the car reveals that we’re still in a simulation here – and hence that ‘Pressure’ and ‘Break It To Me’ took place in a simulation within a simulation – and when Matt drives the DRKSIDE head-on into the police car, he breaks through the code entirely and into a Tron-like world that appears to represent the code of the simulation itself. The ‘80s-themed game he’s been playing from a VHS cassette linked to his VR headset is called ‘Simulation Theory’, and he sets off on a game-like driving mission to return it to the Retrograde Video store, chased en route by a couple of bazooka-wielding Grand Theft Auto cops played by Chris and Dom. In detail: Back in ‘reality’ (although since the road sign is scrawled with the legend ‘INFECTED’, the contagion isn’t, it seems, contained to the ‘80s) Matt is standing by that ‘real life’ (but strangely CGI-looking) road charging his DRKSIDE electric car, lost in the VR experience of ‘Pressure’. What happens: Matt is chased by Chris and Dom.
![pressure album muse pressure album muse](https://townsquare.media/site/366/files/2020/10/Muse-Matt-Bellamy.jpg)
Just as the threat appears to have been contained, however, the dead students start to rise up, turned into vampire zombies by some sort of contagion.
![pressure album muse pressure album muse](https://no-taste.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/simulation-theory-online.jpg)
The science teacher then turns out to be more than he seems, unlocking a secret room at the back of his lab where he’s been perfecting laser flamethrower weaponry, and sets about blasting the furry gremlins to kingdom come. Meanwhile, a frisky couple of BMXers in the science teacher’s darkened office accidentally spill lemonade on his laser arming computer and fire a beam at the school gerbil, which mutates into an evil blue critter, swiftly multiplies and sets off a prom-wide bloodbath as the swarm of teethy bastards bounce into the hall and start slaughtering the entire school. As a Back To The Future style band called Rocket Baby Dolls (which any decent Muse fanatic will tell you was the name that Muse first played together under at a Teignmouth Battle Of The Bands night) take to the stage to a smattering of bored applause. Here we see an unknown protagonist – presumably Matt, since he’s standing by the same ‘real life’ road we’ll see later – donning a VR headset and being transported into a virtual 1980s homecoming dance. In detail: Although the videos can – and perhaps should – be viewed in a random time-jumping sort of order, since they reflect the ability to easily switch between scenes, scenarios and even decades in a simulated world, for (relative) ease of following whatever story there might be, most dissections suggest that the viewer starts with ‘Pressure’.
![pressure album muse pressure album muse](https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/224697144483_/MUSE-cd-SIMULATION-THEORY-kyle-lambert-art-hits.jpg)
Spoiler alert: it’s basically Inception with zombires.
![pressure album muse pressure album muse](https://media1.jpc.de/image/w600/rear/0/0190295578855.jpg)
So now, with the release of the album, all of the retro-futurist clips are available to study, let’s try to piece together exactly what’s real, what’s simulation and what in Deckard’s name is happening. The films reference each other, have running motifs and hint at an underlying narrative, so naturally Muse’s avid fanbase has been hard at work deciphering them. And somewhere in all of this there’s a random guy with a laser flamethrower wandering about.Ĭonfused? Believe us, there are Twin Peaks fans who are bashing their heads on the floor trying to work out what’s going on in the album’s worth of videos for Muse’s eighth album ‘Simulation Theory’. A pair of desert cops chase down a werewolf driving a speeding Lamborghini to a defunct video shop. A ’50s prom night turns into a bloodbath of vampire zombies and evil blue critters.
Pressure album muse full#
A desperate vigilante fights her way through a warehouse full of assailants.