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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 35.53%
Worth A Look: 42.11%
Just Average: 13.16%
Pretty Crappy: 5.26%
Sucks: 3.95%
13 reviews, 74 user ratings
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| eXistenZ |
by Wendell Walker
"Intrigue, Admiration, but not Inspiration"
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eXistenZ is the socially crippled twin of The Matrix. Where the latter is outgoing and eager to please, eXistenZ is completely internal in that maddening Cronenberg way.I've been a Cronenberg completist for almost twenty years now. When he really gets going he can put the shivers into you like no one else. But in the last ten years or so his visceral gutslam has been struggling with a cerebral urge to view his subjects from a distance--not a good sign for a horror film maker.
His last few films have almost been about that struggle. Naked Lunch focused on "intellectual splatter" author William Burroughs, but was really about the writing of Burroughs' most infamous book and his accompanying mental disintegration. Crash was about a most inflammatory subject ("the erotics of car crashes") in a nominally bold handling but without those messy bodily fluids. Its performances were so restrained, almost completely affectless, that the whole film felt like it was in bondage. These are both "interesting" strategies, with results (the sense of disassociation of the former flick and the tension of the latter) that were intriguing, maybe brave, possibly even admirable. And now there's eXistenZ.
You can take this as a straight horror picture, and at that level it's not bad drive-in fare, though free of the resonances that inform the best horror. It's possible that C. is looking to re-establish touch with his old audience, that appreciates his willingness to put your face into the ickiest stuff around. But I doubt it. The conceit of the film is that video games have gotten completely immersive, to the point that players have trouble distinguishing game reality from "real" reality. Almost the entire movie takes place inside a game, or inside a game inside a game, or...
But WE have no trouble telling what's real-real (that is, movie-real) and what's game-real. Game reality feels punched up in some ways (the characters are just a little bit more heroic, better-looking, decisive, forceful) and flattened in others (blowing another person away has no more weight than it does in other games). What's best about eXistenZ is the number of ways Cronenberg finds of skewing the movie-reality just so, giving a subtle sense of the facade.
But the movie's best feature is also the heart of the problem. Cronenberg's overall point seems to be that even if you take the implementation of interactive games to the limit, you still wind up with a reality that's about as interesting as a nerd's thought processes. That real reality has a texture and a weight that an artificial environment will never provide. In other words, the theoretical limit of games ia about as interesting as a bad movie.
Does this mean that eXisteZ is a bad movie? If a book that's about boredom is boring, does that make it a good book? Good question, one that you might consider arguing with your friends after you take in this one.For my money, I'll give Cronenberg the call, because I like him, and because he's nervy, which is rare enough these days. I just wish he would start playing for higher stakes again.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=1322&reviewer=82
originally posted: 05/02/99 12:32:05
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USA
23-Apr-1999
UK
30-Apr-1999
Australia
11-Nov-1999
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