Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: VHS Tape EAN: 9786305538011 Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC ISBN: 6305538018 Label: Walt Disney Video Manufacturer: Walt Disney Video Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Walt Disney Video Release Date: August 01, 2000 Running Time: 97 minutes Sales Rank: 24521 Studio: Walt Disney Video Theatrical Release Date: April 23, 1999
Amazon.com: Director David Cronenberg's eXistenZ is a stew of corporate espionage, virtual reality gaming, and thriller elements, marinated in Cronenberg's favorite Crock-Pot juices of technology, physiology, and sexual metaphor. Jennifer Jason Leigh is game designer Allegra Geller, responsible for the new state-of-the-art eXistenZ game system; along with PR newbie Ted Pikul (Jude Law), they take the beta version of the game for a test drive and are immersed in a dangerous alternate reality. The game isn't quite like PlayStation, though; it's a latexy pod made from the guts of mutant amphibians and plugs via an umbilical cord directly into the user's spinal column (through a BioPort). It powers up through the player's own nervous system and taps into the subconscious; with several players it networks their brains together. Geller and Pikul's adventures in the game reality uncover more espionage and an antigaming, proreality insurrection. The game world makes it increasingly difficult to discern between reality and the game, either through the game's perspective or the human's. More accessible than Crash, eXistenZ is a complicated sci-fi opus, often confusing, and with an ending that leaves itself wide open for a sequel. Fans of Cronenberg's work will recognize his recurring themes and will eat this up. Others will find its shallow characterizations and near-incomprehensible plot twists a little tedious. --Jerry Renshaw
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Rating: - An experiment that somehow made it to film and now relegated to Cinemax at 5:00 on a Monday and this DVD.
Watch it on Cinemax at 5:00 AM on a Monday morning or buy this DVD if you want to watch this strange digest of other film concepts.
The cast seems like the A-List of 1999 who happened to be in between other studio projects and dropped in on this film to just hang out and do a movie.
First year acting school students are given improvisational assignments to convince the audience an inert object like a coffee mug or the recalcitrant professors ball point pen are a meaningful object and have to interact and portray that object as a significant story element.
Jude Law and JJLeigh seem to replicate a better acting school exercise as they carefully cultivate and protect the "Game Pods" which are organic looking cybernetic storage devices which are just latex movie props from John Carpenter and Alien movies the studio didn't want to throw away just yet.
Rating: - eXinstenZ
[Existenz [IMPORT]Forget "The Matrix". Now, really forget it. It's a different movie. "eXistenZ" lives in a world, or really nested realities, all its own. Cronenberg is a master of mixing up reality with non-reality and physical with non-physical. I think one of the beauties of "eXistenZ" is the ugliness of the Virtual Reality world created by Geller's (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) half-mutant amphibian/half plastic game pod. The icky porting into it with an umbilical cord into the spinal column is so Cronenberg. I liked the way he had the characters (and us) believing they were out of the game when they were still in it... those pesky nested realities. It does harken back to some of Philip K. Dick's visionary short stories, as well as Cronenberg's own "Videodrome" (especially with the "Death to..." sequence). I also liked the use of some of Canada's best actors who have since become more well known, such as Don McKellar, ... Read More
Rating: - Existenz - Imaginative, Spooky, Thought Provoking
eXistenZ is a very interesting movie that follows the heroes as they try to succeed in the ultimate game of virtual reality. Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh must go through a series of challenges to unlock the game and it's secrets. The thing that is most allusive about winning the game, is that it's not clear what winning means. In fact, it's not even clear what is part of the game and what is not. As they learn more and more about the inside and outside of the game, they come closer to solving the mystery of Existenz.
This is not a new concept. The idea of a thriller wrapped around a virtual reality game has been done many times, starting with Videodrome and continuing through movies like Strange Days. But what really sets this movie apart is the interesting way it's done; the overtones of attraction, the sexual nature of the apparatus, the philosophical struggle between reality and fantasy. All ... Read More
Rating: - Strange. Dream Like. Not for everyone.
Ever wake up from a vivid dream and wished that you could make it into a movie? If you're David Cronenberg, you don't have to wish, and the result is Existenz, an ethereal, strangely sensual odyssey into a world only the subconscious mind could conjure.
A weird little movie with a befittingly weird title, Existenz flew under the radar during the 'Summer of the Matrix'. On the surface, Existenz is little more than a vague narrative of two unlikely companions, played by Law and Leigh, who alternate between reality and a virtual reality game called Existenz.
On a deeper level, this film is an an exploration of the meaning of consciousness and reality and revisits Cronenberg's fascination with the power technology has over its creators. It features Cronenberg's trademark gooey special effects and organic weirdness, but the most striking element is the conspicuous eroticism of existenz's virtual world. ... Read More
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- An experiment that somehow made it to film and now relegated to Cinemax at 5:00 on a Monday and this DVD.
- eXinstenZ
- Existenz - Imaginative, Spooky, Thought Provoking 
