| Schmaltz | 5 |
| Violence | 7 |
| Romance | 5 |
| Nudity and Sex | 4 |
| Plot | 8 |
| Buckets o' Blood | 6 |
| Terror | 3 |
Link in the Internet movie database
Synopsis: Allegra Geller (Jennifer 'Still Single, still white and still female' Jason Leigh) is the top virtual game designer in the Not So Distant Future. In this era, technology seems to be largely organic (which is cool by me!) and often writhes, squirms and otherwise makes a general pest of itself. She's semi-guarded by Ted Pikul (Jude 'My Talented Face is Made of Plastic' Law), who has a phobia about getting his spine drilled so he can hook up a wriggling, jiggling, Jello-like gameboy to it and have a goooood time (what a wuss. I get mine drilled weekly. You should too). Allegra is demonstrating her new video game, named (ready for it? ready? you'll never guess. really, you'll never guess) eXistenZ to a focus group filled with Fen of Allegra. Apparently, top gaming companies can't shell out for anything better than an old church in which to hold their game-demos, because that's what our intrepid bunch is using today!
All is not right in the state of Verona, however, when one of the fen manages to smuggle a gun (made of flesh and firing human teeth) into the demonstration, making an attempt to assassinate Geller. At this point, Allegra and Ted take it on the run, baby, looking for a safe haven while trying to discover the terrible secret of eXistenZ (and perhaps even figure out what possessed them to spell it that way).
Commentary: I am about to commit a sin. I'm sorry that I must commit this sin, but I must, in exactly the same way that Saturday Night Live's take of Antonio Bandares simply must remove his shirt, week after week, to the jeers and yawns of audiences across the country. What is that sin, you might ask? What could I be doing that is so terrible that it requires me to fill an entire paragraph mentioning it?
Simple. I'm going to bring up The Matrix.
The Matrix was a fairly good movie that blew the hell out of me the first time I saw it, and got progressively less engaging with each reviewing of said flick, until it settled into its comfortable niche of 'doesn't suck'. What it did, and what will remain with us till the End of days, is open up the floodgates for the exploration of reality in the cinemaverse. It suddenly became okay for the audience to be forced to wonder 'what, precisely, is real and what is not'. It became okay to shake people up and tell them that everything that they knew was wrong. It became okay... as long as it was completely safe. The Matrix was a very safe film, for all the subversion of genre that the film attempted. Oh, I'm making no value judgement here; if it had not been safe, it would likely have really screwed over any chances of this genre gaining acceptance in the public's eyes. But really, in The Matrix, within the first half-hour you understand just about all of how the world works. Your mind can stop playing itself into knots figuring out what's what and get on with the business of watching Reeves pretend to know Kung-Fu.
eXistenZ, on the other hand, takes the off-ramp about seven miles south of Safe and just keeps driving hard into the night. The viewer is allowed to get a handle on the movie every so often; and every so often, your grasp on the movie is as tenuous and changing as Janet's grasp on Tam Lin. Throughout this film you find yourself putting together clues, reevaluating those clues in the light of new clues, tearing up those clues in light of new revelations and finally, just sitting back and enjoying the Hell out of the ride.
I can't really talk much more about the plot to this movie. Suffice it to say that the characters journey into eXistenZ (the game, not the movie) and that's where things get weird. Weirder. Much weirder. The game becomes a very interesting metaphor for popular entertainment, but at no point does director/writer/mime David Cronenberg ever whip out his trusty Steam-Hammer-of-the-Message and beat you mercilessly into the pavement with his Vision of What Everything Means. I've already probably said enough, so onto the characters!
What can I say? Casting in this movie gets a nine out ten from me. Leigh and Law (the new crime drama, coming soon to NBC) fill their characters' shoes so well that you wonder if they really did cross over the line from fantasy to reality. Even the supporting cast is almost entirely filled out with the right man or woman for the job; I can recall one or two clunkers, but they tended to fade swiftly into the background before they could leave their stain upon the movie's carpet.
As for the plot, well... as we're told, there's nothing new under the sun. There's really nothing new in this film; sadly, the novel features it had got covered by The Matrix, which beat it out by not even a month. However, as they say, 'we're second best, so we try harder'. And eXistenZ tries really hard in places where The Matrix just sort of let things slide into an action film. You'll recognize all the parts that Cronenberg used to build his movie, but you'll also find them arranged into a delightful new shape, pleasing both to the eye and to the mind.
In short, this is a good film that probably never had a chance at the box office, owing to its competition and its attempt to really fsck up the viewer. I'm finding it rather amusing that in this limited-but-growing sub-genre of Reality-Bending Movies, I enjoy the imitators (eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor, et all) over the granddaddy of them all.
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