EXISTENZ
Disappointing, but a good omen

  Yeah baby, I want a vaguely cruciform sphincter at the base of my spine.  Just as long as Jude Law doesn't give it a good tonguing.  Jennifer Jason Leigh, maybe.  But not Jude Law.

How often have we seen a trailer get introduced by the director of the film?  I don't think I've ever seen that before.  Anyways, trailers for this movie started cropping up in approximately 1964, and I was just starting to wonder if it would ever, ever get a release date when it got one - smack-dab in the middle of this spring's "virtual reality" cine-trinity. (the other two flicks were The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, of course)

The concept ("I think we're still inside the holodeck - I mean, game!") was starting to get stale when I first saw that trailer, and by the time it was actually released, I feared more than a little for this one.  I love Cronenberg as much as the next guy, maybe a little moreso, but I didn't remember anything from that trailer that suggested that magic, whacked-out bio-fucked Cronenberg touch.

And yeah, eXistenZ (which makes a big fuss about those stray capitals in its first line of dialogue) is Cronenberg to the core.  People with weird names, a pace like a dying slug, lots of pieces of equipment that look like they were sculpted out of flesh, people melting down all over the place; hell, any one prop should give away who the director is.  (imagine the kind of sick shit Cronenberg and H.R. Giger could come up with if they worked in tandem, eh?)

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra Geller, the world's greatest video game designer.  (leafing through one of those video game mags the other night - some of those look fun, but my machine was 200 MHz behind the times within six months - the only female faces I saw were busty chicks used to sell the games.  ARE there any female video game programmers?)  About to give a big demonstration/test-drive of her new masterpiece eXistenZ (where she gets a sports-celebrity-like reception), some maniac shoots her in the shoulder and is killed while decrying the evils of what her and her company does.  Suspecting that there might be more, she speeds off into the night with a security guard (Pikul, played by Jude Law), who obviously isn't that good at his job, letting a guy in with a gun like that, weird as that gun was.  (the offending projectile is later revealed to be a tooth)  It isn't long before they're ambushed again (there's a fatwah and everything), so they decide to dive right into the virtual reality game in ferret out the conspirators.

The nature of this game is like what I suppose the nature of a movie must be to its characters - you find out what it's about as you go along, and you don't really know at the beginning what the object is.  It's quite a bit like a movie, actually - not played in real-time, extraneous crap is omitted and the action cuts from one scene to the next.

A lot of this has to be taken with a grain of salt.  No matter how wondrous a technical and entertainment accomplishment eXistenZ (the game) might be, nobody's going to be comfortable with cords that look like umbilicals, and controllers/CPU's that look like gelatinous wads of flesh that purr and gurgle.  Some of the problems are more glaring, like how Allegra is continually surprised by developments in the game which she designed.  Yeah, I know, these games aren't created as solo projects, but it's fairly basic stuff that wows her, stuff you'd think she'd be in on during development.  And the plot kind of lost me in its last act; particularly when Pikul discovers for the second time (but reacts as if it's the first time) that he's had a bad game port installed in his spine.  After that, I had no idea what was going on, until the "surprise" ending, which isn't much of a surprise.  But the surprise after that, I thought wasn't bad.

But the biggest problem with this film has to be its pace.  Cronenberg's movies are pretty slow overall, but usually rewarding in the end.  eXistenZ has its rewards (where else are you going to see somebody fashion a firearm out of Chinese food?) , but they're too few and it's tough goin' getting to them.

So yeah, eXistenZ is a bit of a disappointment from a director whose work I admire quite a bit.  What gives me hope is the fact that this is his first original script, not based on someone else's material, since Videodrome way back in 1982.  A working title for this movie was Crimes Of The Future, also the title of an early short film of his which I haven't seen.  I have no idea if eXistenZ is based on COTF.

Trivia note: Don McKellar's minor role here is, I suppose, a favor returned for David Cronenberg's minor role in McKellar's film Last Night, a wonderful little gem that was one of my favorites from last year. 

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