The film came at a time when cinema was filled with mainstream blockbuster science fiction films, so it was nice to have eXistenZ around to provide viewers with something repulsively different. Cronenberg’s signature vintage gooeyness will have you writhing in disgust, but that’s what makes it so much better. It’s a subtle story about existence, as the name suggests, the blurring of reality and fantasy, and will have you thinking about what it means long after the credits roll. She teams up with Ted Pickle, a hapless marketing trainee played by a young Jude Law, who is tasked, bizarrely, with protecting her as they wander through the game. It follows celebrity game developer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) as she flees into her own virtual reality creation to escape an assassin trying to kill her in the real world. eXistenZ is a psychotropic trip into a mad world of bone-shaped guns that shoot out teeth, icky human plug sockets, game pods and fish. But disgruntled cinemagoers soon realised that eXistenZ was the complete antithesis to the film they were told they were going to see. Buy on Amazon eXistenZ (1999)Īva Gerlitz/Alliance Atlantis/Kobal/ShutterstockĪt the time of its release, David Cronenberg’s body-horror eXistenZ was constantly compared to the Wachowski’s sleek science fiction film The Matrix. The Matrix brought questions about existential philosophy and nihilism to the forefront of the story and coupled them with intense action scenes that drew from martial arts and Japanese animation, to create an enduring cyberpunk sci-fi film that reverberates around contemporary culture.
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Several of the film’s stylistic inventions – such as the digital rain of the code that composes the Matrix – are iconic parts of contemporary culture. A hacker, Neo, is alerted to the falseness of the world they live in, and soon starts on a quest to uncover the truth. With The Matrix, released in 1999, the Wachowskis turned that on its head – depicting a dystopian future, where all of humanity had been trapped in a simulated reality, being used as an energy source for artificially intelligent creatures. Commercial science fiction films could be stylish – like Blade Runner – but studios and filmmakers often focused on bringing science fiction elements to an otherwise human story.