If you enjoy video games, or consider yourself a gamer, watch this film.
For real, this movie appealed to the incurable video game addict in me a hundred times more than the awful video game "adaptation" movies that Hollywood pukes out every year. Directed by the brilliant (and Canadian) David Cronenberg, this is an intense study of a possible future of video games and the effects a person's immersion in them can have. Basically, games have progressed to completely realistic virtual reality. People get small holes called bioports surgically embedded into their lower backs, which allow them to plug into "gamepods" which are basically weird looking sacks of flesh that are apparently biologically engineered and grown from DNA, something like that. The player is connected via a tube that looks a heck of a lot like an umbilical cord, and is brought into a fully realistic virtual world. eXistenZ's plot centers around a game designer and her bodyguard (apparently) who are on the run because video game haters called "realists" want to kill her and stuff. This eventually leads to them entering the video game she created and chaos ensues, plot twists happen, and I become too lazy to summarize it all because I'm tired and ruining the ending(s) of this movie would be a dick move. Just watch it for yourself.
What I really want to talk about is the treatment of the subject matter. Cronenberg's attention to detail in the game world here is perfect, but if you're not a person who regularly plays games you're unlikely to notice. The characters programmed into the game appear as real people, but their mannerisms and the way they behave gives them away as constructs of the virtual reality. If waiting for a player to say the right line of dialogue or figure something out that they are supposed to do, they'll stand there looking around, silently blinking, waiting for something to happen for them to react to, just like the NPCs (Non Player Characters) in the video games of today. They have pre-programmed dialogue that they use to react when given the proper trigger, and their facial expressions serve as a reminder that they are really nothing but lines of code.
The people playing the game also had characteristics that are common in video game protagonists, and after a while I began to see them as characters, and not actual people. In the movie it is explained that people playing the VR games get "game urges", inclinations in their mind that strongly tell them to do something, actions that elicit responses from NPCs and lead to discoveries that further the plot. It's really convincing, and watching it reminds me of video games I've played where a hint, or a phrase pops up onscreen and you immediately know what to do. In addition to this, there's a fairly linear plotline (for a while, everything goes to hell eventually) where the players receive objectives through dialogue and must complete them on their own, like in every game ever where the guy is like "hey, go do this, it's your quest" and you do it to find out what happens next. The narrative is structured like a video game, and that aspect of the movie is extremely well done. Cronenberg is either a gamer or he really did his homework on this one.
eXistenZ also stays true to Cronenberg's style, his "body horror" genre of movies. This deals with augmentation, degradation and transformation of the human body. It bears parallels to his other film Videodrome, where the main character grows a weird slot in his chest where he can put videotapes. In eXistenZ however, the characters stick an umbilical cord in their backs and go into a video game world in a Matrix-esque (ehhhh, maybe more like Inception now that I think of it) transcendence of reality. And that is another theme that is also explored in Videodrome. Man's interaction with technology, his reliance on it for entertainment. Where does it end? Will we eventually be able to alter reality so much that we can't tell what's real and what isn't? Is that a bad thing? What moral and ethical rules apply in a virtual game world? I guess we'll have to wait until science catches up with David Cronenberg to find out.
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