eXistenZ, 7/10
This is a sci-fi thriller by David Cronenberg about a game developer and a security guard having to go on the run after an assassination attempt on the latter, and having to enter a virtual reality world to make sure the game dev's latest genius project hasn't been harmed. This is an odd one out in Cronenberg's filmography, and I've seen it rarely talked about seeing it was a huge flop even with its meager $15 million budget. But undeservedly so IMO. For a premise sounding as silly as that (and it is very silly) it's a surprisingly engaging and interesting look at what the future of video games might have been imagined as in the late 90s. It is very strange and out there and at times hard to parse, but it wraps up in a suprisingly satisfying way, and it's got some surprising similarities with The Matrix and Inception in that the characters are entering a simulated world, and then enter a simulated world within that world and so on.
The biggest hurdle for people to clear about this film will be the hopelessly dated ideas about video games and virtual reality. This came out on the tail end of the 90s cyberpunk trend, so it's not quite as dated as something like Johnny Mnemonic, but it's still got some depictions and ideas that are hilariously dated after seeing a quarter century of gaming history progress since. It's best to put the way the characters use the word "game" out of your head while watching this, and instead think of it as them promoting revolutionary VR experiences. Considering just how wrong this easily could have gone with overt CGI the visuals hold up remarkably well, being often times reminiscient of Videodrome with its emphasis on grunginess and filth.
This movie is weird. Games are not played with TVs and controllers, but instead by plugging a fleshy pseudo-creature directly into your body with an umbilical cord. The movie seems to take place "5 seconds in the future" with seeming implications of nuclear fallout and severe climate change. For a lot of the movie it's hard to tell what the plot of the movie is even moving towards, and that's the point. You're pretty much thrown into the deep end and are expected to keep up with all the strangeness. For me it worked, but I can see people also completely disengaging from the movie and seeing it as pointless and meandering. Despite its dated ideas about gaming, it's still got some interesting thematic rumination on losing one's grip on reality, disconnect between player and player character, and the devastating effect that can have on people's lives. Towards the end the movie gets deliberately confusing about what level of reality the characters are operating on, which is a crucial part of the movie's ending. I liked it overall.
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