The cinema of 1999 is memorable to me for four key experiences: the Star Wars prequel I’d been looking forward to for years; David Fincher “fucking the frame” with Fight Club; the Blair Witch Project nearly making my heart beat out of my chest, and of course The Matrix.

No one saw the Wachowski brothers’ film coming, it just appeared in cinemas backed with a cryptic advertising campaign which told us that no one could be told what it was, you had to see it. For most of us seeing it didn’t even solve that riddle, you had to go home and think about it with a cold flannel on your forehead. The Matrix was brave and complicated film-making that looked and felt like very little before it. Whilst it was rightly celebrated for John Gaeta’s pioneering camera technology and visual effects, the real hook of the film was that irresistible germ of an idea that lay below and alongside all of the eye-candy: what if none of this is real? The Wachowskis’ story has mankind living out a virtual existence whilst reduced physically to the status of a battery. The hero’s story arc is from entrapment in a virtual world to the emancipation of mankind back into the real world.

A decade on and there is another action blockbuster making considerable waves at the box office: James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar. Again there’s justifiable praise being piled on the cinematography – this time because of the film’s pioneering implementation of 3D, but the more interesting comparison is how the film represents the experience of living virtually. The hero is a marine confined to a wheelchair who finds freedom, love and a sense of social responsibility when remotely controlling an alien body; his arc is from frustration and limitation in his own body to community and fulfilment in a new one, which he eventually comes to inhabit leaving his human form behind.

It’s interesting that in ten years we have gone from trying to break free of our virtual selves to striving to fully become them. Can we take these two massively successful pieces of entertainment as indicative of changing attitudes to the virtual?

First let’s compare the manner in which the connection is established between the human and the avatar in each film. In the 1999 movie Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson has to endure a very painful looking and certainly invasive procedure which involves having a 15cm spike inserted into his brain stem. The architecture of the machinery used to establish the connection is (ironically) Giger-esque, replete with heavy cables and innumerable wires. The process is uncomfortable, scary and potentially fatal: one sequence in the film makes clear that the consequence of prematurely severing the connection is death.

In Avatar, Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) has a far more pleasant experience: he simply has to lie still on a padded bed and empty his mind, a sheet of something resembling fiber-optics does all of the work. In addition, the penalty for a severed connection seems slighter; at one point some big red buttons get pushed too early and our heroes simply rise from their beds disoriented but otherwise unscathed.

We can read this as indicating a shift in how we are used to connecting to our virtual lives. At the time of The Matrix everyone was labouring away with a dial-up connection, accustomed to having wires tangled up in thick bunches behind their desks, and unintentional disconnection was commonplace. Jump forward to now and Avatar’s less painful, wireless experience is closer to the truth for most of the film’s audience. In addition the experience of being online has become a far more familiar one and commonly a daily occurrence with which we are far more comfortable.

The more important difference perhaps is that the 2009 film portrays the act of connecting to an avatar as a desirable thing, one which gives Sully new reasons to live, whereas the earlier film has disconnection as synonymous with liberation. Where Thomas Anderson must endure connection to acheive his goal, connection itself becomes Jake Sully’s goal. And he doesn’t stop there; ultimately he chooses to transfer his essence to the vessel which he had formerly inhabited remotely: essentially to become his own avatar.

The past decade has seen an explosion in popularity for the virtual. The internet has become ubiquitous in the culture of developed nations, and at the close of the decade digital has become the default solution for any number of formerly analogue tasks: written communication, the buying and consuming of music and video, food shopping. Search algorithms and the advent of blogs have dramatically altered how content in every arena is created and disseminated, making users feel more empowered and informed than ever before.

Launched in 2004, World of Warcraft has become a part of life for more than 11 million paid subscribers, all living out a second existence in a fantasy world. It ranks as the largest of hundreds of online virtual communities equally passionate about their digital second-selves. Also launched in 2004, Facebook now claims more than 200 million users, all of them participants in a virtual existence. To a far greater extent than at the end of the 20th century our lives are now digitised: music collections, photo albums, journal entries. In a very real way people have taken ownership of their virtual selves and embraced the task of curating their digital footprint, realising that what they choose to share and create online is an important part of their social lives.

All of which readies an audience to accept the story arc of a character who chooses to exchange one mode of existence for another. Although the titular avatar isn’t digital but organic within the fiction of James Cameron’s film, the allegory stands. This is an existence-once-removed originally accessed via technology; in which case the conclusion of Sully’s story is sending a message at opposites with the core thesis of the Wachowskis’ film, which told us that to unplug and accept the reality of your existence is to be free. What does it say about our changing relationship with technology that Avatar’s happy ending is watching Jake Sully, in more ways than one, take the blue pill?

- Thanks go to David Edelstein for inspiring this train of thought.