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| Film vitals |
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· Year: 1999
· Director: David Cronenberg
· Writer: David Cronenberg
· Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law
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| Synopsis |
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A game designer and her companion are confronted with a murderous conspiracy related to a mind-bending virtual reality game.
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RATING
Out of 100 |
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57
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| COLD ANALYSIS |
| 3.25 -ATMOSPHERE |
| 2.75 -GORE |
| 1.25 -HUMOR |
| 1.5 -SCARES |
| 2.25 -TENSION |
I watched eXistenZ several days before I saw Videodrome, and I am struck by how similar they both are. In Videodrome, the protagonist's reality was fragmented due to the hallucinogenic effects of a pirate-TV show. In eXistenZ, the protagonists' reality is fragmented--or layered, more appropriately--due to a virtual reality video game. The same criticism applies to this particular Cronenberg mind-screw as much as it did to the other one; if the audience doesn't care about the characters, you stand a good chance of losing that audience's attention. I felt more for the dying video game pod than I did for Jennifer Jason Leigh's character. It's not her fault, nor is it Jude Law's, whose performance I enjoyed quite a bit. By its end, the film makes so many turns that it takes on the quality of an annoying dream, with lines of thought and plot directions popping up out of nowhere. I realize that was part of the film's point, but it didn't work as well as it could have. And the ending? The problem with this kind of film is that it doesn't matter where it ends. As a result, we're not only left without a resolution, which can be okay, but with a feeling that the whole damn thing was pointless, which isn't okay.
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