Let It Be
I rewatched eXistenZ. The film, a science fiction thriller, as well as a meditation on reality (as were The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, all of which came out in 1999), doesn't entirely work. Jennifer Jason Leigh does a fine job but Jude Law is awful. Also, the plot bogs down in the third act. Still I'd recommend it just for the design, which so successfully incorporates writer-director David Cronenberg's fascination/repulsion with the biological.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:11 AM
3 Comments:
Oddly, I rewatched it on cable just a couple weeks ago.
I disliked it more than you did, I think. JJL is always good (and pretty), but the plot was just silly. The whole point was the "twist" of "is this really reality?", which is such a cliche in cyberpunk by now, and was done to death by the Matrix movies (disclaimer: I didn't see Matrix III, nor do I have any desire to).
More broadly, the "You thought this was reality but now the characters are waking up to the REAL reality" thing is just a special case of the "twist" movie. The first time I saw a twist movie -- Deathtrap -- I thought it was brilliant. Maybe it was, or maybe I just didn't know the cliche yet. But by the time I saw Wild Things I could pretty much call out every twist before it happened, and I felt the same way about Existenz.
Perhaps you should have announced SPOILER in your response.
Anyway, I think there's a basic difference between the sf plot twist where there are different levels of reality and mysteries where characters are only pretending something is true until their scheme is revealed. (The closest a film has come to combining the two is Blade Runner.) Both have become cliches, true, but the Matrix/eXistenZ/Thirteenth Floor cliche is much newer.
When you wrote "JJL" I read "JL" and thought you were referring to Jude Law, who definitely is pretty.
I believe the plot of eXistenZ (minus the twist) is more based on something like Salman Rushdie's situation, where an artist creates something that has people trying to kill her.
You're right about the spoiler warning.... sorry about that!
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