Sunday, July 17, 2016

eXistenZ

I watched this film by David Cronenberg this week. I have seen the film before, I even remember it was at the cinema actually. The first time I saw the film it blew me away but it was something like 17 years ago now. That is a long time not to have seen a film a second time.
The story is a very interesting one to me. A famous games designer played by Jennifer Jason Leigh is making a special appearance to promote her new game. There is something slightly wrong and unsettling from the first moment though. The place they are unveiling the new game looks like a classroom in a school or some location that is very small considering it is a new game. The other unsettling thing is that the player is biologically linked to the game via a bio-port in their back. An umbilical cable then plugs into a console that is a moulded shape in flesh coloured latex. It is semi-erotic in that sense and the quiet, strange way that JJL portrays the character. The main male character is played by Jude Law who does a good job of playing a naïve young man who has to turn from being a marketing junior into a bodyguard. One neat idea in the film is a gun made out of bone that fires teeth. It was designed to prevent detection by metal scanners.
The film plays with blending reality with the world inside the game called eXistenZ and it does this very effectively in my opinion. To the point where the characters are not sure whether they are in the real world or not. I can recommend this film but I can also see that a lot of people might be confused and turned off by the subject matter of virtual reality games.


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