eXistenZ

Rating:
Summary: Scary, inventive David Cronenberg thriller
Review: The gifted Canadian director David Cronenberg first got attention in America with a little film called Videodrome. Later, he helmed the commercially successful remake of The Fly, one of my favorite sci-fi movies of the 1980s. With few exceptions, he has stayed in the fantasy and sci-fi genres. eXistenZ is his best effort in over ten years, but is the kind of movie which divides audiences into those who think its a cult classic and those who think its just bizarre.

Cronenberg has a fascination with technology and how it might alter civilization in ways much more ominous than the average person would ever dream of. In eXistenZ he looks at how game technology might advance to the stage where is alters our perception of reality. His vision may seem silly to many viewers, but, considering that some current popular video games are said to be much like those our armed forces use to dehumanize recruits, he may be more on target than we'd like to think.

It is hard to say much about the picture's plot without giving too much away. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra Geller, a brilliant games programmer. She is a star to game world aficionados. A group, perhaps terrorists or perhaps people from a rival corporation, are out to get Allegra. Ted Pikul [Jude Law] is assigned to protect her, and the two go off in search of a safe place. Along the way, she talks him into playing her latest virtual reality game, which is eXistenZ. I'll end the plot information by saying that this is one killer game.

Cronenberg has created a movie that works only if you go with it. If you resist what you see, it doesn't work. The scenes where Allegra and Ted are in the virtual reality game are naturally dreamlike, but even the scenes in real life have a disturbing, nightmare quality to them. Rest assured that everything makes sense in the end.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is near perfect, as always. She has always chosen roles that appeal to her, rather than ones which might make her a movie star. As a result, she is easily among the top ten actresses of her generation. Her Allegra is intense, alert, brilliant, driven, and more than a little crazy. Jason Leigh is one of those rare performers who has acting down to a glance, a hand motion or a slight shift in eye focus. Jude Law himself continues on the road to becoming a memorable character actor. His Ted is at once sensuous yet reserved, cocky yet paranoid, steely yet vulnerable. I can't imagine anyone else in the role.

eXistenZ certainly does not have the digital FX power of The Matrix, a film it vaguely resembles. It is not played for laughs like The Mummy. It is a carefully thought out movie. Cronenberg has delivered one of the scarier and more innovative pictures of the year.

Rating:
Summary: eX-BoX
Review: David Cronenberg's (THE FLY) film operates in a world dominated by bio-reality altering video game machines. Sort of an organically created PlayStation 2, users plug in to the 'pod' through an umbilical attached to their spine. And when they are connected anything can happen. Much of the story follows a couple thrown together by fate searching for safe haven. Allegra gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a video game designer whose pod contains the only copy of her latest creation and it is in danger. She puts her trust in Ted Pikul (Jude Law); a public relations exec turned security guard to help her along the way. There are plenty of creepy characters, gross-out scenes and weird activities. I left the film feeling I watched an excuse to turn organic beings inside out, attached to a corporate espionage plot. But, the plot does not hold up as, to be true to the 'storyline', problems brought up in one reality no longer apply when a new reality is introduced. That leaves no restrictions on story telling. This film was designed for cyber-adventurists. Definitely not for the weak stomached. The DVD has very little to offer other than a standard audio/video transfer.

Rating:
Summary: Passable Reality Play
Review: If you enjoy wondering how you know if your really awake or dreaming, this movie will really rev your engines. Cronenberg plays with layers upon layers of being inside virtual worlds. I enjoyed it. My wife thought it was weird. My teenage son started badmouthing it with her, but about 1/3 of the way in, told her to "please shut up."

It is intriguing and well conceptualized. It lacks the Gee-whiz FX of Matrix, the painstaking attention to detail of Thirteenth Floor, and the sympathetic character bonding of Jim Carey in The Truman Show (I won't say it lacks acting talent, a la Arnold Schwartzenegger in Total Recall, however). Perhaps this is part of the point? It's a video game, a toy. MS Flight simulator doesn't have the realism of the military flight simulators developed by LockMart & others.

What left me feeling flat was that the movie never really grabbed me. I found it much more entertaining than Dungeons and Dragons (for instance), but I didn't really jack in. It never provided me with the virtual reality so necessary for a great movie experience. Video games lock me in. Addict me. Far too often I say "Oh [impolite word for excrement]!!! The sun's rising and I have to go to work!!!" before I turn a game off.

While this movie had a game-like quality, it didn't have the hook, and that was disappointing. Matrix, The Truman Show, Thirteenth Floor, and even Total Recall--these are movies I watch again and again. eXistenZ ... once was probably enough.

I'd give it 2 1/2 stars. It had some creative ideas. It dropped some good hints early on, hints that were subtle enough not to give anything away. It ended ambiguously. I like that. But it really failed to dig deep, to stir anything in my soul or my shadow, to make me recoil or cheer. If you enjoyed eXistenZ, you'll probably really enjoy Jack Chalker's excellent Wonderland Gambit trilogy (books, not videos!). It's well written and it plays with reality levels in some creative and intriguing ways.

(If you'd like to discuss this movie or review with me, click on the "about me" link above & drop me an email. Thanks!)

Rating:
Summary: It wasn't me, it was my game character!
Review: "eXistenZ" uses virtual reality as a loophole and an excuse to whittle its commitment to the viewer down to nothing. It raises questions and then pretends it didn't. It begins a philosophical parable and ends a horror show (though, I have to admit, a staggeringly simple and effective one).

I find it rather ironic that the first entry I made in my notes while watching "eXistenZ" is the following: "From the first scene there is a feeling of artifice. The speaking characters are continually framed so as to make them appear alone before the camera. They talk, they grimace, but there is neither cause nor effect. They are reciting lines of dialog, but the dialog is cast in stone. There is no sense of reality." The film is indeed about detachment from reality, and, for all its simplicity uses a number of tools with great mastery to evoke a powerful knee-jerk response from the viewer, but (unfortunately) little else.

The scenery is a big help: a sort of X-Files meets Sliders ominous evergreen forest, a forsaken ski chalet, a dark, lonely gas station (one character suggests going to "a local country gas station," and seconds later arrives at a building conspicuously labeled "Country Gas Station"; elsewhere, there is an equally anonymous Chinese Restaurant, though it's nothing like you would expect). There is a lot of reasonably cheesy squishy, squirming, stomach-turning, slimy little things, like mutated amphibians and the Metapods reputedly cobbled from their flesh. Cronenberg doesn't even reveal the true story a good while into the film - he's too busy grossing us out with the over-the-top wet sounds of umbi-cords being plugged into spinal bioports.

A glycerin coat of tongue-in-cheek humor keeps the level of absurdity down. "eXistenZ" continuously pokes fun at the gamers' technobabble, with some accuracy ("It's most probably a pathetically mechanical attempt to heighten the emotional tension of the next game sequence").

Sadly, "eXistenZ" is a bit too trigger-happy with the virtual-reality switcheroos. Whenever any single storyline becomes potentially interesting, it is revealed to be unreal, just another level of Allegra's game. Pretty soon I stopped caring, since whatever was established in the previous stretch is put on its head in the next. A fairly good sci-fi thriller, but don't hold your breath for any meaning or insight.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible
Review: I can't believe the morons who gave this movie a bad review! It truely is a great movie if you stop to consider it. The plot can be confusing, but what's great about the film is how open it is to interpritation. There are subplots that may exist, or may not, depending on how you look at it.

Rating:
Summary: Eeeeeewwwwwww
Review: Much slime will ensue. Though I must admit it can't hold a candle to the carnage which runs rampant in most Cronenberg movies, this has a serious squirm factor. The opening scene, set in a rustic church, seems like some bizzare, twisted dream only Cronenberg could formulate. For some reason the sight of ten fleshy blobs sitting on peoples' laps while pulsating and screeching is one of the most deeply disturbing things i've seen in campy sci-fi movies since the facehugger in Alien.

The plot itself is rather sketchy and confusing, though I personally think the acting was potentially shaky, giving a more realistic portrayal of video game characters. Anyone who plays Baldur's Gate or any of the proliferate spawn games will appreciate the dialogue between them and the human players.

Overall...eeeeeeewwwww.

Rating:
Summary: The horror! The horror....
Review: I think watching this movie actually lowered my I.Q. I'm a fan of really bad movies. I actually own "Boxing Helena" and "Sliver," so you can see that my tastes tend towards the corny... But this movie was soooo bad that not even I could find anything of redemptive value in it. It seems to have been written by ninth-grade boys who were high at the time. The special effects also seem to have had about a comparable budget. I only made it through the first hour of this movie, mainly because I was too paralyzed by the sheer awfulness of it to get my frozen finger to press the "off" button. If I were Jude Law, I would make it my life's quest to hunt down every copy and burn it.

Rating:
Summary: movie reviews will make you want to kill
Review: Hey do yourself a favor: forget this movie and go pick up a copy of Brainscan (...). No one wants copies of it either, but I think its got better actors. That movie's soundtrack had Old on it...that counts for something.
The moral of the story is don't play video games because they will make you want to kill. In like uh... videodrome the moral was dont watch tv cos it makes you want to kill. This Cronenberg guy is a genius. And I just saved you some money.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable, but lacking
Review: Despite David Cronenberg's position as my second-favourite director, even an out-and-out fan like me notices when he starts to repeat himself. One of the problems with auteur directors who write, produce, and direct their movies is that you tend to see a repetition of themes. Now these might be put down to style, but there are lots of ideas here from Videodrome and The Fly, albeit with more up to the minute special effects. The obsession with the body, self-inflicted bodily change and decay is here, with a good measure of William Gibson thrown in. Unless I missed something, the idea of plugging yourself into an organic computer and experiencing virtual reality first came up in the Matrix in 1976's Doctor Who in the story The Deadly Assassin, and the idea of not knowing which reality you are in has been rather worn out by Philip K. Dick. It's not a bad film by any means, and Jude Law turns in a particularly impressive performance. It is however predictable and derivative, and a director with a track record for originality as good as Cronenberg's is capable of so much more.

Rating:
Summary: Wow! That was terrible!
Review: It just does not get any worse than this movie. Simple words cannot describe the nausa I feel every time I recall that awful day I was subjected to eXistenZ. Perverted and grotesque, this movie embodies all that is wrong with modern cinema. A knockoff of Matrix & The Thirteenth Floor (a knockoff of a knockoff!) the only new feature this movie brought to the screen was mutant reptiles being disected for use in a gameboy. Wow.