Customer Reviews

eXistenZ

5 star:		(59)
4 star:		(47)
3 star:		(30)
2 star:		(25)
1 star:		(37)

 

 

Those who love "sci-fi" (i.e. puerile George Lucas ray-guns CGI bulls**t) should stay away from this film. It has an intelligent script, good acting (not wooden Hollywood posturing), clever dialogue, captivating visuals (not facile CGI effects), and a truly mindbending narrative that plays with our perceptions of reality and provides a great deal of cerebral entertainment. As one critic noted, eXistenZ "pulsates with a furtive fury that's pure Cronenberg." In other words, not to be missed.

Where does one even begin to explain the genius of this film? David Cronenburg creates some of the most disturbing and controversial films ever put on celluloid. It's no wonder people have so many strong opinions about them. This movie grabs you, puts you in an uncomfortable position of a "where are we going, and where are you taking me to" feeling. It's only in the last three minutes of the film where you finally get the psuedo-assuredness of being halfway understanding when in the last few seconds you're thrown for a loop all over again. This movie is simply something you don't see in movies anymore. The story is dreamlike, the characters are peculiar and mysterious and the technology is frighteningly surreal under todays mesmerizing love of video game consoles. This movie taps into the principle and possiblities of how far big video game companies could really go in the near future. I actually loved this movie more than "The Matrix." Although both movies are completely different, for the sake of everyone comparing, this movie has a far more delicious story and a far more realistic probability presented by two very underrated movie actors. Which makes the comparison of the two sci-fi flicks no contest.

I am Karen's daughter and I was the one she got this movie for. I watch this movie with my husband. I had first saw it when I was living at home, and thought it was a good sci-fi movie. Of course the end still stumps me.

With the exception of "The Dead Zone" this is the only other Cronenberg film I enjoyed, (and was able to stomach.)

Believe it or not, seeing a guy getting his face blown in half by a gun firing human teeth and people porting into a game system that looks like a bizarre fleshy body part is rather tame for Cronenberg. Certainly a lot easier to watch than the flesh-eating puke in "The Fly" or drinking fluid out of a fleshy straw on a large bug's head in "Naked Lunch".

One of the reasons I enjoyed this film was it reminded of the mind-bending plot twists of a really good Philip K. Dick story. By the film's end you have no idea what, if anything, is real and not just a game.

Some reviewers found the performances very weak. But often, this is done deliberately: one character named D'arcy Nader is played so cartoonishly that the main character, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, comments on how lousy his dialogue and accent were. Personally, I thought the two lead performances were very good. Leigh gives this picture her all playing a sexy game designer whose whole life revolves around this virtual world she has created. Jude Law is also very good, especially his humorous reactions to all the weird stuff that happens around him.

This picture is particulalrly entertaining if you've ever played a role-playing computer and are familiar with the "game loop" that computer characters go into when you're not speaking to them.

The movie also makes a very strong comment on how video games have de-sensitized us. In one scene Jennifer Jason Leigh shoots a character dead just because she didn't like him, but then she can't figure out if she killed him for real or just in the game. a brilliant comment about seperating fantasy and reality.

This is a very well crafted, highly underrated movie. Possibly the most intriguing science-fiction film of the decade.

Fantastic DVD here, and at a great price. You can also find an even more budget-conscious version, but there will be fewer extras.

Opinions on this film vary. Die-hard Cronenberg fans sometimes find eXistenZ to be a little lightweight. Especially when compared to more provocative films like Crash or depressing films like Spider or Dead Ringers.

On the other end of the spectrum, those unfamiliar with Cronenberg's work may find this movie to be too bizarre!

I won't talk too much about the plot, as other reviewers are better at it than I am, but I'll say that it's kind of a game within a game within a game (within a game?). Like a few other films of the day it explores the nature of reality (The Matrix of course is most popular).

eXistenZ was actually Cronenberg's biggest budget at 25 million (not including his current project A History of Violence). The special effects are fantastic, and there are some good moments of gore. A couple people get shot in and around the face. Yes, this is a return to his past in many ways, though again, in a slightly more playful manner.

There's plenty of extras on the DVD, most notably three separate commentaries and a long (almost an hour, I think) feature about production designer Carol Spier which mostly focuses on eXistenZ but also touches on some of her earlier work with Cronenberg.

Definitely worth getting, and an especially good introduction to Cronenberg's work (before moving on to more disturbing pictures like Videodrome and The Brood, and more slow, paced pictures such as Spider and Crash).

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.

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.

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.

The biggest strike against David Cronenberg's eXistenZ is the year that it came out - 1999. It was a summer dominated by Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss. Cronenberg's film covers strikingly similar territory to The Wachowski Brothers' comic book/kung fu/sci-fi/action opus, The Matrix. Whereas The Matrix was a big-budget Hollywood movie aimed at a wide mainstream audience, eXistenZ is an independent lower budget Canadian production aimed at a significantly smaller audience. Both movies deal with issues of technology, specifically actual reality versus computer-generated reality. That's where the similarities end. The Matrix may ask profound questions, but it's an action film at heart, and it's only interested in asking those questions so long as they pave the way for a set piece filled with special effects and stunts. Cronenberg is not interested in dazzling the viewer with effects and action. He wants to make the viewer think (and of course, feel completely repulsed and disgusted).

eXistenZ is a smart sci-fi thriller that is thought-provoking, complex and completely immersing. The premise is pure Cronenberg brilliance: A designer of virtual reality games which use living, organic "controllers" that plug into the user's spinal cord, is pursued by a gang of realists who resent her attempt to deform reality as we know it. She enters her game to make sure it wasn't damaged in the attack, and things get interesting from there. Is anyone even after her at all? What is real and what isn't? Cronenberg manages to infuse his usual trademarks into the story, particularly technology versus biology. The part synthetic/part organic game pods are very clever, and I especially liked the completely organic gun made of bones and cartilage which fires human teeth as bullets. Cronenberg loves to combine flesh and bone with technology as illustrated in many of his films. The film has its share of gross-out moments as per usual for the director. The Chinese restaraunt sequence was particularly memorable for me. This film may put you off Chinese food for good.

Cronenberg's vision is decidedly much darker than the comic book universe of The Matrix. I felt that The Matrix had good intentions but took the wrong approach. It's very difficult to successfully merge existentialist philosophy with action shoot-outs. The Wachowskis felt the need to dumb down their subject matter for the action movie crowds and the movie suffered as a result. David Cronenberg is not trying to make an action movie, so the ideas reign supreme here. The subject matter itself, is hardly original, but Cronenberg deals with it in a fresh and unique way adding his own grotesque sense of style. This is not a movie for all audiences, certainly. For those who like their science fiction cerebral, dark and grimy, eXistenZ should be right up their alley. I find it to be an overlooked gem of a film that is a great alternative to that over baked Hollywood cash cow The Matrix.

Every once in awhile when I am feeling reflective I like to watch a David Cronenberg film. I have seen quite a few of them at this point, from some of his earliest stuff like "Shivers" to his seminal reworking of "The Fly" starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. One thing you will always get out of a Cronenberg film is a serious look at how technology and human beings interact. Like science fiction author J.G. Ballard, Cronenberg's films embrace a synthesis of man and machine that is exceedingly grim, usually served with a generous helping of gore. The overarching theme in his cinematic examinations seems to be that humans simply do not know enough about the technology they develop, or if they do, their arrogance in the ultimate abilities of mankind always leads them charging into experiments despite the risks. That we are just not far seeing enough to predict the outcome of using new drugs, messing around with human genetics, or plugging game units into our spinal cords may be a good message to take from a Cronenberg film. "eXistenZ" is almost a sequel to his masterful early 1980's effort "Videodrome." Whereas "Videodrome" dealt with the addictive and manipulative potentialities of television, "eXistenZ" warns about the addictive and manipulative potentialities of video games.

Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a top video game designer, is about to premier her latest efforts to a select gathering of techies and marketing schleps. Called eXistenZ, the game promises to blow every other previous effort out of the water, and the people in attendance at the debut of the game are beside themselves with joy. It is difficult to get so excited over a mere video game until we learn that the games these people play goes well beyond a television set and a joystick. In Geller's world, the games plug directly into the human brain via a bioport, or a hole in the base of the spinal column. The system connected to the spinal cord is a half-flesh/half machine game pod, a squishy, living organism sporting an umbilical cord attachment. The action starts when a person plugs in and uses their hands to manipulate this grotesque bag of skin. As for the program itself, well, it goes far beyond virtual reality to create a reality nearly identical to the one we see through our own eyes. Sure, there a few differences easily noticed by players, such as characters who repeat phrases until the player says the right thing to move the game along or weird little creatures that could never exist in reality, but eXistenZ is light years ahead of Donkey Kong.

Geller barely fires up eXistenZ before a nut in the audience attempts to kill her with a weird gun fashioned out of bones that uses teeth for bullets (!). Allegra flees the chaotic scene with Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a public relations gopher, and the two head to a hotel out in the sticks until they can figure what the heck is going on. Geller's astonishment about Pikul's lack of a game port leads the two to an out of the way gas station where a guy named Gas (Willem Dafoe) installs unregistered bioports for a fee. More weirdness ensues when Gas makes an attempt on Geller's life, fortunately thwarted by Pikul, and the two confused fugitives head even deeper into the woods to a pod repair shop run by a couple of Geller's old friends. As if it couldn't get any stranger, Pikul and Geller at this point plug into eXistenZ in earnest and are rapidly propelled through a series of strange scenarios involving a Chinese restaurant, a really disgusting meal, one of those strange bone guns, a pod manufacturing plant, and a conspiracy concerning Geller's invention. You are never quite sure when Geller and Pikul are in the game or in reality, which makes the movie quite confusing at times. About the only thing that really makes sense is the conclusion of the film, an ending I will not spoil except to say that it was quite a twist and one which I did not see coming. I probably didn't pick up on the numerous clues throughout the movie because I spent too much time soaking in all of the epic weirdness going on every few minutes.

I always enjoy a Cronenberg film, but the real reason I liked this film was the presence of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Although I have heard several things about her that are slightly off putting, I think she's a real cutie who only gets better with age. I also admire the risks she has taken with some of her roles over the years. I couldn't help but draw a comparison several times in "eXistenZ" between Leigh now and Leigh when she starred in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" two decades ago. She's definitely attained a greater range since the early 1980s, and she is much, much prettier as an older woman. At one point in the film the script calls for Allegra Geller to cradle an assault weapon while talking to Pikul, a very short scene that reveals how stunning Leigh is even while toting military hardware. As for Jude Law and Willem Dafoe, they do an adequate job with what they have to work with here. "eXistenZ" ultimately focuses more on the twisty plot and the oddball effects than it does with character development. "eXistenZ" is not David Cronenberg's best film, but it is an entertaining romp through employing his usual themes. The DVD has no extras except for a trailer, disappointingly, but the movie is in widescreen and the quality is excellent. Here's to a long career for Cronenberg, a man who has brought up plenty of wild and wacky films and who will hopefully bring us a few more in the future.