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Director: David Cronenberg Screenplay: David Cronenberg Starring: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Don McKellar Running Time: 97 minutes Studio: Dimension MPAA Rating: R |
Director David Cronenberg is back bending reality, melding biology and technology, and driving audiences batty with eXistenZ, a film about virtual reality, fatwas, and the act of creation.
Game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is on the run from the realist assassins who view her as a threat to normal life. Her games, set in virtual reality, are very addicting and involving, and the realists want her stopped. Accompanying her is Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a marketing trainee drafted at the last minute as her security guard.
Cronenberg's fingerprints are all over the film, as evidenced mostly by the goopy biotech and the shifting realities. Shooting from his first original screenplay since Videodrome (1983), he fills the movie with startling creations: a game system that taps into players' spinal "bioports" through a metaflesh game pod with organic folds and nipples; a gun made of animal bone that shoots human teeth; mutated fish and amphibians used as game pod replacement parts; even a cellular phone that looks like a body part.
The virtual reality portion of the film disappoints: if you know Cronenberg, you know not to expect a glossy Hollywood video game movie like The Matrix. The world of eXistenZ is deliberately low-tech -- it's used and rusted-out, much like the movie's characters. No wonder so many people have dropped out of reality and tuned in to Geller's games. The story really isn't about the game, though -- Cronenberg takes an hour to give us our first glimpse (the original draft of the screenplay excluded game scenes altogether) and what we see looks like the real world, just one step askew. The term "virtual reality" doesn't appear in the screenplay; instead, Cronenberg uses the story as a metaphor for the artist as creator and how the world reacts to "abnormal" creations. As he told Creative Screenwriting in an interview, he wrote the screenplay as a reaction to the fatwa that Iranian khomeinis placed on writer Salman Rushdie's head for The Satanic Verses.
As Geller and Pikul reel from situation to situation, wondering what is reality and what isn't, the viewer is left questioning what it all means. The characters really learn nothing from their experiences, and the ending feels like a cheat. Though a sight better than his previous offering (1997's embarrassing Crash), eXistenZ feels like mid-level Cronenberg, as though he's marking time for the next Really Big Thing to come along.
