As a document of the early 1990s, The Lawnmower Man serves as a colourful time capsule. Aside from its big shirts, tight jeans and unaccountably buoyant hair, it’s also a snapshot of the era’s technology and fascination for virtual reality.

At a time when the media was gripped by images of people wearing cumbersome headsets and gloves pawing eerily at the empty air in front of them, virtual reality was widely considered to be the emerging technology which could transform life as we know it. And while this may yet come to pass – Oculus Rift has recently seen VR back in the news – we’re no nearer to having our daily lives transformed by it than we were 20 years ago.

The Lawnmower Man, then, is quintessentially 90s. It has virtual reality helmets, Pierce Brosnan in white shorts, those spinning aerotrim gyroscope things you don’t see very much anymore, gratuitous sex scenes, and lots of once novel computer graphics. Join us, then, as we climb into cyberspace and take a look back at 10 remarkable things about this curious film…

1. The film’s opening is shot from the perspective of a chimpanzee

After an opening slab of text warns us about the perils of virtual reality in the coming millennium, The Lawnmower Man takes us deep within the bowels of Virtual Space Industries, a science facility of high-tech, arcane experiments and oppressively dark blue lens filters.