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Plot:
Set in the near-future, eXistenZ depicts a society in which game designers are worshipped as superstars and players can organically enter inside the games. At the center of the story is Allegra Geller...( read more 
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Meet Other Fans
Recent Reviews
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MCT:August 20, 2008
Um bom filme com uma idéia legal, pena que apesar de ser um filme de suspense e ação me pareceu meio monotono
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MCT:August 7, 2008
"Makes 'The Matrix' look like Child's Play" is nonsense. "eXistenZ" does have the Cronenberg mark sprinkled about, but compared to his other films, it's not much of an effort. Video gamers will love it as multiple deceiving realities bring you in and out of the video game world, into the movie world, out of the video game world via the escapism, etc. Of course I liked it.
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MCT:July 22, 2008A...Mazing!! Yes it is. Twisted, strange and quite possibly the future of videogames. Gamers will simply salivate at the idea, its that darn good. I f you like your sci fi well you'll just eat this up
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MCT:July 17, 2008i really dug the concept of a blurred reality set in a game within a game mindfuck. perception is a motherfucker what can i say? i also really luv cronenberg's open curiousity with modern opiates of the masses. very cool!
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MCT:July 12, 2008
Decent acting combined with a twisty plot equals a good movie. The game device eerily reminds me of the newer game systems.
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MCT:July 6, 2008Terrible production value, but pretty fun overall. I agree - way smarter than the Matrix, not that that's saying much.
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MCT:July 6, 2008
The plot is very original... and the mix betwwen the virtual and real's worlds are really disturbing... highly recommended to that people that love videogames since were childs like me :) Let's go play just one more time!!!
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MCT:June 15, 2008The story had potential, but in the end, there was really nothing special about this movie except Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh...
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MCT:June 7, 2008
Wiiii, so crazy and twisted innovative sci-fi Cronenberg tale. I totally love his films and his visual style and perspective.
82/100 -
MCT:May 11, 2008
Great cast, director - but the story is a bit predictable. Sprinkled with platform game references from Electronic Arts, but without connections. A trite warning about everyone playing video games instead of actually going, say, skiing. Cronenberg revisits the theme of flesh and technology becoming one, which he's explored in his other films such as Videodrome and Crash (and to some extent, The Fly). This is definitley NOT an action movie or even a mianstream sci-fi movie. i loved it and it reminded me of my favorite director Mr. Lynch. a must see if ur into trippy out of the box films.
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MCT:April 30, 2008
eXistenZ is a supremely original and bizarre flick from David Cronenberg. Existenz erects reality with bio ports, bio pods and guns with teeth for bullets so much so that real seems surreal and there in lies an enthralling ride of supposed virtual madness along with the two main leads in Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law who were terrific.
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MCT:April 28, 2008
One day David Cronenberg decided that he needed to remake Videodrome, but make it about video games, and eXistenZ was born (pronounced eggs-iz-stends). Unfortunately, that movie was not as good as Videodrome, even the cult French movie Avalon surpassing it in terms of story concept, though it was packed with Cronenberg's very cool aesthetic for blending flesh and circuits. Of course, the prop design is great, and talented actors begged to be in this, but it's just not resounding. It's Cronenberg, so it's well done but like I keep finding myself saying abut some directors: it just doesn't compare to their other films, which while is a fault for Cronenberg, most other directors would be blessed to have done this well. The pace works well, almost too well as the 90 minutes whiz by a bit too quickly. Just needed more....material than some typical scifi twists and mimicry of PKD paranoia.
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MCT:April 18, 2008A star and a half for a sort-of idea which is vaguely interesting, and I know millions disagree but I think this is a fuck-dull movie; the script is weak and not saved by terrible acting from both J J Leigh and Jude Law which is laughably unconvincing, the screenplay is bizarre and it's impossible to relate to any aspect of its plot because it's so unrealistic and false. 'Makes The Matrix look like Child's Play'? If there's ever been a misleading review...
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MCT:April 12, 2008
Very original but that's about all I can say.
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MCT:April 8, 2008
A simple film that confuses u about what's virtual reality & what's not!Best Cronenberg's work so far!"death to the demon who didn't understand this movie"!Quick&smart direction(mainly in the epilogue)along with a capable cast!Though "eXistenZ" didn't gain the proper acceptance by the cinema-going public,it should have been a well known movie in its particular field!!!
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MCT:March 24, 2008One of my favorite Cronenberg movies. A total mindf*ck, a bit reminiscent of Videodrome and Naked Lunch. Fans of The Matrix will enjoy this also.
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MCT:March 12, 2008
en comparación con sus otras peliculas, esta es una obra menor en la carrera de cronenberg. quizas sea uno de los films del canadiense que mas me costo ver. demasiado intrincado.
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MCT:January 30, 2008
Early Cronenberg with Jude Law. This is pretty weird stuff... and it's like waking up from a dream within a dream within a dream.
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MCT:January 26, 2008
Vraiment sympa. En fait, le prototype même du film me rappelle beaucoup trop les réalisations hollywoodiennes, le genre de scénario revues maintes et maintes fois par les réalisateurs de bas de gamme, mais la réalisation de Cronenberg l'améliore du tout au tout. J'ai bien apprécié l'écoute du film, comme un moment de détente dans lequel on ne veut que passer du temps dans un monde futuriste, là où la réalité se mêle à la fiction. Par contre, la fin, personnellement, me semblait beaucoup trop prévisible, si bien que la confusion s'en mêle parfois un petit peu à la fin. Bref, pas adoré, pas détesté, juste bien aimé.
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MCT:January 21, 2008
I often spend time watching movies thinking about what to write in the review afterward (it can often take me a half hour or more as is, so I like to have something in mind, even if it's disparate chunks to be assembled later--not that I don't end up incoherent anyway) and I spent part of this one trying to recall how it was I first heard of eXistenZ. Suddenly the image of Willem DaFoe as "Gas" popped into my head along with the idea of Fangoria. A quick Googling followed by perusal of my collection led me to issue 1999 from January 2001. Lo, there is Willem being interviewed for Shadow of the Vampire, and one of the accompanying photos is the one I recalled. He notes in the accompanying interview that he finds it amusing how much his part was played up, makes a joke about the "name" his character has and vriefly discusses working with Cronenberg on it. This was the seed of my interest in the film, leading me to eventually catch it on some premium movie channel or other. I avoided purchasing the DVDs, despite the number of times I revisit the movie, because I wanted the Canadian release, which actually has special features.
eXistenZ begins in a very barren church, barren, that is, except for the non-religious (actually, that's debatable, but it's not the religion the church building stands for) gathering occurring there. Christopher Eccleston (the second-to-last Doctor Who, military commander in 28 Days Later and so on) is introducing a crowd in the pews to the new game they are about to test--eXistenZ ("little e, capital X, capital Z"), designed by Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh). A group is selected to test the game out of the crowd, after having passed under the scanner of Ted Pikul (Jude Law) to guarantee they have nothing to record the game or sneak out video or audio. We discover suddenly that we are in a world where console systems (here called "game pods") are strange, squishy, animate objects that have cords that look somewhat stunningly like intestines to plug directly into the player's spinal cord. Obviously at this point we know that we are not in the world we are all familiar with, and things only go further when an assassination attempt on Allegra fails, with Pikul whisking her off to escape any further attempts and attempt to preserve her new game.
When we meet DaFoe, a gas station attendant (creatively named "Gas" according to his coveralls' nametag), we find a strange two-headed mutant lizardbeast that Geller ponders. After another unexpected attempt on her life, the two of them hide instead with Kiri Vinokur (the always-great Ian Holm), Geller's fellow employee at Antenna Research, and finally we see what eXistenZ (the game, that is!) is like. It's much like reality, a completely immersive experience that is only slightly off-kilter from the reality Pikul and Geller know. There are the marks of games as they exist in the real world--NPCs (Non-Player Characters, here referred to as "Game Characters") will get caught in loops if not prompted with the correct action, simply repeating themselves or staring dumbly until the player performs the correct action. Suddenly we find ourselves in a somewhat more Cronenbergian environment--Ted, as his game character, is a worker in the "Trout Farm" where mutant fish and amphibians are dissected so that their parts can be used to build game pods. They are tossed back and forth in a sort of political intrigue between "realists" and the employees of Cortical Systematics, a game company in the eXistenZ world--agents like Yevgeny Nourish (Don McKellar), Hugo Carlaw (Callum Keith Rennie, Memento's briefly seen Dodd), and D'Arcy Nader (Cronenberg favourite Robert A. Silverman) replete with intentionally awful Irish accent as a game character.
Unsurprisingly, the film is both laden with visceral physical effects and with intellectual/psychological discussion and symbolism, both inevitable in any work of Cronenberg--and he both wrote AND directed this one. The overarching ideas are that reality is a confusion, and how different are games from reality? What is the separation, when technology is effective enough to blur the lines to even our senses? It's one he has already visited in Videodrome, leading to unfair and inaccurate comparisons between the two. Yes, there are some basic-level similarities, but Videodrome is a dirtier movie, which I say because of its centering on the idea of "snuff" films, where eXistenZ is both visually and thematically slicker, dealing with gaming and games, things that are not accidentally picked up from stray broadcast signals. It becomes less a revelling in the despairing confusion between vicarious living and reality and more an exploration of where that confusion begins and ends--or if it even does. Geller says at one point, after Pikul points out the deficiency of free will in the game--"It's like real life, just enough to make it interesting." In the various levels of reality, both the one we know in our own reality, the one we first experience in the film and finally the one that is labelled "game" in the film, we find familiar objects re-purposed or re-arranged to new effect, or sometimes even similar ones but re-formed in new ways to achieve this same effect.
One of the absolute stars of this film is Carol Spier, despite the fact that she is not one of the actors. She is Cronenberg's production designer and has worked on the great majority of his films from 1979's Fast Company all the way through last year's Eastern Promises. She brings a strange beauty to the grotesque so prevalent in Cronenberg's work, such as the gynecological instruments used by the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers, or the strange biological gun in this film, or the living typewriter in Naked Lunch. All have the appropriate amount or lack of goo and texture for their respective purposes, occasionally perhaps enhanced beyond the "appropriate" to perfectly enhance the impression the viewer gets of them. She masterfully sets up even the design of the church the film is set in, following the requests of David insofar as inclusion of pews and how he lights. Howard Shore, another of Cronenberg's consistent collaborators brings a nice, creeping score to the film, simply modulating string and brass tones beneath scenes in that way that our brains have been trained to associate with ominous, disturbing and unusual atmospheres.
A lot of criticism has been levelled at this film for various reasons, often thanks to comparisons with The Matrix, Dark City and so on. It's not really appropriate, as they are all addressing different concepts, though all operating on the same theme. Jude Law's acting is criticized, but this is almost even more unfair. He's playing a character in much of the film, which is to say, even WITHIN the film, and outside that he is an outsider trying to break into an environment which he admires but is unfamiliar with. He's appropriately subdued and ignorant throughout, surprised and believably nervous whenever something becomes clear to him that he was not previously aware of regarding the gaming world. Leigh is a perfect balance to this as the shy, quiet sort, natural for a programmer, but also consistently, she is filled with brassy confidence, always sure that she knows what's going on better than most people around her. Neither performance really ever slips from what it is intended to be, the real problem stemming more likely from expectations that people have wandering into the film after hearing the above comparisons, or after seeing some of Cronenberg's less cerebral work.
I remain just as entertained, satisfied and yes, even puzzled by this film as ever, despite seeing it a good number of times over the years, and I am enthused to have this particular disc, what with its discussion of Spier's work on the film, and a brief discussion of earlier work on David's films. -
MCT:January 12, 2008
An interesting film dealing with the perception of reality. Made me think a bit. Plus Jennifer Jason Leigh is hot.
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MCT:January 12, 2008
A great movie that brings you into a world(video game) you could never imagine, great idea and good dilivery
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MCT:December 21, 2007
Really enjoyed this film, it has a Matrix feel to it with the added grossness of David Cronenberg, Jennifer Jason Leigh was great as always. The first half hour was very strange though, but after that it was a fast paced movie with a few good twists.
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MCT:November 17, 2007
Ok then.
eXistenZ is a movie that, apart from Jude Law, had everything to be among my top favorites. This has one of the greatest concepts I've ever seen. I've seen Cronenberg talk about it, which also made me realize that this concept was built under some pretty pertinent philosophical and personal questions.
And that's why I was a bit disappointed with the final outcome.
Not with the actual ending, which I must say was rather surprising and somewhat opened to several possibilities. But with the movie as a whole. I think that, with such a brilliant idea, the script should have been a lot better.
Though this really was a roller coaster in terms of judgment. I started mentally critisizing the movie pretty much since the beginning, regarding some incoherent scenes, only to realize later on those were unfounded ones. And this was one thing that happened to me almost throughout the whole film. And always with the same results.
But, when the movie ends, you stay there looking at the screen for a while, and you can't help thinking that they could've done better, as some parts should have been developed in a more deep way and even towards a different direction.
Overall, the acting is not that worth mentioning.
They did their job, period. No brilliancy here.
Plus, there's Jude Law.
But eXistenZ really launches the grounds to a different kind of movies, and although the main concept had already been approached in several previous movies, I think they had everything to bring it to the next step.
Which, somehow, I guess they did.
Just not as greatly as I was expecting.
Though no doubt it's definitely worth to watch.
Except for Jude Law.
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phaybulousposted 808 days ago
