eXistenZ: Yet Another Pre-Millennium Virtual Reality Trip
By stephanie - Saturday, July 8th, 2006
In keeping with our Dark City/Matrix theme, I recently watch David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), which explores virtual reality via a game within a game. Starring Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh, eXistenZ (pronounced existaaaance) makes for a decent rental but isn’t anything mindblowing.
Leigh plays a video game developer on the run from extremists out to save the world for “reality.” Law is her unprepared body guard. Jude Law is eminently watchable (at least to me, but he does have that hot guy factor going for him), but Leigh is a bit flat and cliched. Her performance was somewhat remiscent of a heroine from a 1980s B sci-fi flick, which makes me wonder if this was her fault or Cronenberg was still stuck in Videodrome days when he made this.
With any Cronenberg film, the gross-out factor is high and includes oozing “bioports” for the games that look like anuses (and get poked and licked in a very sexual manner), plus a biotech video gaming system that uses sticky, gooey reptilian animal parts. The game console, in particular, looks like some sort of warped mammary gland.
I did enjoy some of the aspects of the game world – for example, the virtual reality characters would often get stuck in “game loops,” the type you might find in a standard video game, rather than just acting like normal people.
All told, this is a mediocre addition to the 1998/1999 flux of reality-blowing films, but it’s still entertaining and worth a rental.