Superb psychotic suicide | eXistenZ | Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law

Original and Strange - Still Cronenberg Has Done Better | eXistenZ | Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law

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	• eXistenZ Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law Dimension, 1999 average customer review:based on 242 reviews view larger image
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Could have been better

It's hard to rate this movie, especially without giving away any plot spoilers (which has to do with periods of bad acting). However it's a fun ride, yet it feels as though the whole "game world" wasn't as fully explored as it could have been. A few scenes, namely the "Chinese Waiter" one, are fantastic, while some are boring...like the car ride in the beginning. The plot itself is pretty easy to understand once you watch the movie twice, or just pay attention the first time. This is no Matrix, and it should hardly be compared to it (I'm not saying The Matrix is good or bad: the only thing these movies have in common is the ability to link up into a fictional world). I bought this as a blind buy and was slightly dissapointed...especially after watching Crash. Check out Equilibrium as well.

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Superb psychotic suicide

Cronenberg is a genius in a way. He leads us into the world of a new generation of console games and 3D virtual reality. Everything happens the way the characters you are projected into decide, and yet your deeper psyche can influence the characters. You liberate in such a game your most sombre death instinct and psychotic tendencies. You become the character and the character becomes you. You are entirely dominated by a logic that comes from the character and from the deepest layers of your impulses and passions. You burn up yourself in such a game and you do not know any more where reality is and where you stand in it. Everything becomes both virtual and real. You are lost and unable to make a decision and get out of this virtual world which is just as real as reality. Reality disappears by being blended with virtuality. The game becomes a nightmarish experience and a psychotic trip. You use any weapon at your disposal, in the game or in reality, to kill and destroy yourself and other characters or individuals. Death is at the end of the line, death of your mind, death of your psyche, death of your individuality, death of your freedom and free choosing mind. This film is dangerous because it reveals a real danger we are confronted to : playing any game builds in you a second nature that is rooted in your most morbid passions.

Dr jacques COULARDEAU

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Original and Strange - Still Cronenberg Has Done Better

A typical Cronenberg - blurred line between reality and fantasy, strange interaction between biology and technology, themes of addiciton and a psychological thriller plot. Leigh is average at best as a star game designer who is releasing a VR game so potent that people are out to kill her. Jude Law is good as the sidekick dragged into Leigh's alter world. However, as in all Cronenberg movies, he is the star and the actors are basically meaningless. Like "Naked Lunch" and "Dead Ringers" the sets and effects are striking and often gross. And also like those movies, Cronenberg injects biology where you would never expect it. In "eXistenz" the game console is a biological creature which must interact with the player via a connection to the spinal cord - weird stuff indeed. Gamers eventually develop a strong addicition to their bio-console in a drug-like way - another common Cronenberg motif. The story is intelligent and the artistic direction is quite interesting, but this film is not for everyone.

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eXistenZ

What a wonderful movie. All of the mind twisting about just what is reality anyway? and a feeling for what it's like if you are a videogame character living in a videogame world, where you may have to chop off a person's head to proceed with the game. I love the homage to Philip K. Dick, who beat the reality problem nearly to death in his works (movies made from his stories include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Screamers, Imposter (which I haven't seen), and the embarrassing Paycheck). When the main characters in eXistenZ get hamburgers to take to the motel, the burgers come from Perky Pat's, and Perky Pat comes from Philip K. Dick. Residents of Mars, to spice up their boring lives in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, take a drug and play with their Perky Pat dolls, becoming the dolls and trying to live a Barbie and Ken existence. They know it's not real, but it becomes more real than real. You know that you are viewing a great simulation of reality in this movie when the burgers come from Perky Pat's. This movie would not have been made if Philip K. Dick had not lived, and we are better for both of those events.
It also seems to me that people who love The Matrix as much as I do - and there are millions of us - can't help but love this film. I can only attribute this movie's small potatoes performance vis a vis The Matrix to not enough people having seen it. So if one one-hundredth of you Matrix fans out there and all of the Matrix haters one reviewer referred to would rush out and buy this DVD you would make David Cronenberg really rich, as well as one of our finest creators of off-kilter movies.

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