Existenz
1999
**
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Jennifer Jason Liegh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Sarah Polley, Christopher Eccleston
eXistenZ is a virtual reality game people play through organic pods which are plugged into the bio-ports in their back. Following an assassination attempt, the game's designer Allegra Geller and a complete gaming novice escape inside her creation to discover what is happening. Like The Matrix, David Cronenberg's futuristic film teeters between reality and alternate reality, which makes its twists pretty predictable. The Wachowski brothers produced a groundbreaking visual feast, Cronenberg gives us a worst example of a shoestring-budget scifi movie which cannot afford to show, so it must tell. The game he depicts is so incredibly and implausibly dull that the whole premise falls apart right there. The rest of the film is so full of the director's recurring motifs (bodily fluids, organs and orifices) that it becomes almost comical.
