Film: eXistenZ

Director: David Cronenberg
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Source: USA (1999)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Netflix Streaming
Grade: B

It took me a little while to get over the "look" of this film, as the version I saw seemed poorly transferred, like watching an old VHS copy. I'm not sure why that is, other than the movie was not received well enough to get a crisp HD clean-up. And that's a shame, because Cronenberg has created a fascinating world here--or multiple worlds really--in which the nature of reality is in question, but so is the morality of video games and other digital "escapes."

I've seen a lot of websites where this film is compared to The Matrix, and I guess I can see where that's coming from--both films involve jacking in to digital worlds--but they handle it in such diverse ways that any superficial similarities they have seem irrelevant early on. It's a bit like comparing Blazing Saddles to Unforgiven. Yes they're both westerns, but they're aiming at very different purposes.

Cronenberg, for example, seems fascinated with the melding of the biological and the digital, though not at all in the way The Matrix is. Cronenberg's "sci-fi" elements are fleshy, living game consoles, bred by humans and processed. When his characters "jack in" to their games, they meld with these semi-living electronics, holding them on their laps like kittens while their nervous system is activated. It's far from the cold mechanized chairs and the syringes into the skull that The Matrix presents, and the fetishization of technology and the weirdly sexual nature of Cronenberg's digital systems is fascinating.

And as a gamer I think Cronenberg is trying (though at times really heavy-handedly) to explore both the ways in which video games affect our perceptions of reality and existence and the ways in which our ethical frameworks can be skewed, altered, or diminished by video game immersion. The trade in of the real for the digital comes with a cost, he seems to say, whether social, environmental (enjoying the fake trees of Console Shooter 7 rather than the real trees outside), or moral. And he explores all that in a world in which there are almost no computers, electronics, or television screens shown. Pretty impressive.

Plus there are some great scenes in which the conventions of video games (character loops, poorly written "cut scenes," the discrepancy between true freedom and avatar freedom) are satirized in clever ways.

I thought I would really be bored with the movie, but it ended up sucking me in and intriguing me. I think I'd like to see a little more Cronenberg. 

(Side note: the cover/poster art for this movie is truly terrible. I am not sure if the picture I went with here is official or unofficial, but it was the least ugly of the American posters I found.)

Alternate Film Title: "Tooth Gun: 'Nuff Said"