Tuesday nights are one of the few weeknights when I actually watch some “live” television in the form of whatever superhero series is currently running on the CW. But the local affiliate also runs Yankee home games and apparently baseball was on order last night. Regardless, I opted to knock something off one of my many watchlists, and since HBO Max gets the most attention in that regard–it is the only service I use that reliably tells me when something will be leaving the service at the end of the month–I decided to look to a different one. That’s where I found the 1999 David Cronenberg movie eXistenZ.
If nothing else, it will probably be visceral, weird, or weirdly visceral. I am always looking to expand my horizons as it is, so I went with that.
Cronenberg was apparently inspired by the fatwa out on author Salman Rushdie to imagine a story like that, only this time the death sentence was put on a game designer of some sort of futuristic VR video game called eXistenZ. Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a brilliant but reclusive game designer for a system that, to play, requires a jack of some sort in the back of the spine for these organic game systems that, you know, looks kinda fleshy and weird because this is still a Cronenberg movie. However, as Allegra is testing the game out with a group of willing participants, a young man in the audience pops up with an organic gun that fires human teeth, wounding Allegra and forcing her to go on the run with aspiring PR man Ted Pikul (Jude Law). Ted is a bit suspicious of these spinal ports and doesn’t really have one, but he’ll need to get over his fears because in the rush to escape the gunman, Allegra needs to make sure the game is OK, and she only has the one copy on the system she took with her. She’s going to need a second player, but first, the pair will need to find a safe place to jack up and play. That could be easier said than done considering there is a very large bounty out for Allegra for vaguely defined reasons.
By the by, a female game designer getting threatened by a bunch of male gamers is probably a lot more familiar (for lack of a better word) to audiences today than it would have been in 1999.
Now, as far as the movie itself goes, it is a Cronenberg movie, and it is weird. The bio-organic tech on display, to say nothing of small, two-headed lizard things, are part and parcel of that experience. There’s clearly a point to the whole thing, something beyond the whole “a bounty on a game designer for religious-sounding reasons”. The scenes inside the game have a fairly consistent look to the real world outside of it. It is a world where, for the tech at least, it still looks like a world that makes a lot of sense.
What doesn’t always make sense are the characters. Setting aside the obviously bad accents used by British actors Christopher Eccleston and Ian Holm, I sat there with a lot of questions. The conspiracy to kill Allegra didn’t make a whole lot of sense as it unfolded. As a game designer, Allegra didn’t seem to know much about what her own game was supposed to do. The movie felt choppy quite a bit, and the acting was either very subdued or very over-the-top. The in-game work made it difficult to follow what was the characters acting on their own and what was their being forced to do things by the game itself. Now, the thing is, all of that is intentional. This movie wants you to question reality, and many of my questions were actually answered in a final scene that managed to explain a lot without just dumping a ton of exposition in my lap.
That said, the movie as a whole didn’t work for me. I could see where it was going and what it was trying to do, and I am sure for a lot of people that will be more than sufficient. But for me, not so much. I don’t mind a movie where I am questioning things and get an ending that more or less answers those questions (or not depending on how you read the final few shots). But something about this one just didn’t grab me as tightly as I would generally want it to. Perhaps if the performances were more naturalistic for the majority of the movie. Or maybe if they just gave more to Willem Dafoe. I always like that guy in stuff, even if his character’s name is just “Gas” because he’s a gas station attendant/owner. I won’t say I am ready to write off Cronenberg as a director–the man asks big and important questions if nothing else, and I don’t mind that from other directors–but this one here just wasn’t my cup o’tea.
Grade: C+
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