The trouble with the story is that it's too clever for its own good.
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Falling well into the shadow of 1999's hit sci-fi cyber-flick "The Matrix," writer-director David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" is, nevertheless, a near rival on a far more modest scale. The thing about Cronenberg, when you step into his films, you know they're going to be different. You might love them or hate them ("Scanners," "The Dead Zone," "The Fly," "Crash," "Naked Lunch," "M. Butterfly," "Rabid," "Videodrome," among others), but you're confident they're going to be, at the very least, bizarre. "eXistenZ" is eccentric right from the title.
In the film, "eXistenZ" is a video game system developed by a legendary female game designer named Allegra Geller, adeptly played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. The date is an uncertain future, a time when people don't just sit in front of computer monitors to play games but actually live them. Dedicated gamers have "bio-ports" surgically implanted in their bodies that enable them to hook directly into game pods, controllers, and live out their fantasies in the virtual-reality world of their minds. The game cables are not so much wires as they are umbilical cords, and the gamers themselves are the source of energy.
When the story opens, Ms. Geller is conducting a secret test of her latest creation, "eXistenZ" (existential existence?), with a group of people in a secluded mountain hideaway. It's all very hush-hush because there is intense competition among rival game makers. No sooner does the beta testing begin, however, than a fanatic from an anti-gaming faction of the world infiltrates the proceedings and attempts to murder Ms. Geller! Geller escapes with her life, barely, and hits the road with a fellow employee of her company, Ted Pikul, played by Jude Law, an administrative type who knows nothing about games. Together they spend the rest of the movie hiding from and ducking their pursuers. And playing "eXistenZ." Ah, there's the rub. Because once they plug into the game, nothing is for sure anymore.
The trouble with the story is that it's too clever for its own good. Once you catch on to the gimmick--that reality and non-reality are merging and that before long it's going to be impossible to tell one from the other--it isn't half as entertaining. We've seen this thing before, of course. In "Invaders from Mars" (1953 and remade in 1986) a little boy dreamed he saw Martians taking over the Earth, but was it a dream? In "Total Recall" (1990) Arnold Schwarzenegger took off on a hallucinatory thrill ride to Mars, but was it all drug induced? In "The Game" (1997) Michael Douglas was given an elaborately staged adventure as a birthday gift, but how much of it was really a game?
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