*** (out of ****)
Starring Jude Law, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ian Holm, Christopher Eccleston, Don McKellar, Sarah Polley, and Willem Dafoe
Directed & written by David Cronenberg
1999 R
What a gleeful, naughty movie. Writer-director David Cronenberg’s “eXistenZ” is either a great, sick joke, or an above-average mind-game about two people trapped in virtual reality. Unknown forces are hot on their trail while they try to decipher what is real and what is a computer fabrication. Finding out usually leads to some cheerfully macabre results, like characters saying “this is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done in my life—but I can’t stop!” But “eXistenZ” is also surprisingly prescient. It is a skewed look at video game culture, in which programmers get to call other people nerds and meaning is sought in games that deprive their players of free will. More importantly, “eXistenZ” shows, however weirdly, the results of becoming addicted to the non-reality of the computer world, of video games, or internet relationships, or whatever. The movie does not take a specific stance on the matter, but is more of a cracked-mirror view.
Set in my favorite historical era, the “not-so-distant future,” the movie begins with a focus group about to try out a new virtual reality game titled “eXistenZ.” Gaming has achieved almost religious significance; the group meets in what looks to be a church basement and the game’s designer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is treated like a rock star. But something goes wrong before the game can be tried out: an armed man, claiming that virtual reality games are an affront to real life, attempts to take Leigh’s life. Her death is narrowly averted and soon she is on the run through the countryside, not with an armed guard, but with a company PR trainee (Jude Law), who happened to be standing by the door.
Leigh fears that her virtual reality unit—her “bio-pod”—may have been damaged in the assassination attempt. This bio-pod contains the only completed version of “eXistenZ,” which cost thirty-eight million dollars and five years to make. As a company man, it doesn’t take much to convince Law to join her in the artificial world, to see if the pod has been damaged. Once inside the game, Leigh and Law find themselves in a world surprisingly like their own, in which they are members of an underground pack of “realists,” intent on destroying all virtual reality. Inside the game, things run not so much in a logical progression but on a senseless kinetic energy to which Leigh is constantly releasing herself. Law is skeptical, and when he complains “I’m worried about my real body,” she scoffs.
Cronenberg fills his frame with macabre details that are both sexual and slimy. The bio-pods that allow players to enter “eXistenZ” are not computers at all, but genetically engineer lumps of flesh, activated by what look to be giant nipples. The “devices,” if they can be called that, are hooked into surgically implanted orifices at the base of the spine called “bio-ports,” which look, well, frankly vaginal, and require lubrication. Law has no bio-port and finds himself in several compromising positions in order to have one “installed.” The bio-pods come from genetically mutated amphibians, and we see them in several slimy stages of disassembly, including being serviced on a surgeon’s table, presented on a platter, and growing fat and nasty for the harvest. Another neat touch is the gun Law assembles from his mutant meal, made entirely of bone and cooked flesh, with teeth used as projectiles. Yuck. Cronenberg piles this all on not to impress us like a big-budget filmmaker might, but to make us squirm, the true goal of any low-budget schlockmeister.
But “eXistenZ” gets even more fun. Leigh is constantly urging Law to exist on a higher plain of reality than this one, i.e. abandon real life for the superior, artificial existence. But when she is finally presented in real life with the kind of life-or-death situation that has always populated her simulations, the first thing she wants to do is play more video games. Once inside “eXistenZ” the first place she and Law visit is a video game emporium. (Some of the games for sale include “Chinese Restaurant: Will You Get Out Alive?” and “Hit By A Car: The Game That Puts You in the Driver’s Seat,” names that rival that great game from “The Simpsons:” “A Streetcar Named Death.”) Inside the game they must insert more bio-pods, and Leigh’s search for a so-called higher plain of reality comes across as quixotic. She is enamored by the phony world and disgusted by the real one; one of her earlier games gives God her initials. Everyone wants to reshape the world in his or her own image.
Page two of "eXistenZ." Back to home.