Reviews

David Cronenberg is doubtlessly one of the greatest directors alive and in activity (along with Lynch, Kiarostami, Kitano, Moretti, Oliveira, Rohmer, etc). Having seen almost all of his films (excluding "Dead Zone", "The Fly" and "M.Butterfly"), I have this somewhat rare opinion that "eXistenZ" is one of his masterpieces. It seems to me that this film was hugely misunderstood, culminating with the stupid idea of comparing this film to "Matrix", a rather worthless and meaningless piece of nonsense. Here in "eXistenZ", we have instead a very dense and deep meditation on the mystery of reality, of our inability to apprehend where do things come from. The characters appear and disappear as if moved by some mysterious agent, which remains inhapreenshible. Being Cronenberg a professed atheist, we can only arrive at the conclusion that each world which is presented to us and to the main characters comes from their own mind, which, nevertheless, only constitutes a part of the human body (it is now hazard that the characters have access to the game by means of something - a game pod - which is implanted into their bodies). Cronenberg stated many years ago that all reality is virtual; so, in this film, the use of the plot-device of virtual reality is a huge metaphor to the virtually of reality, as our director sees it.

If this was intended as a tribute to the great Alfred Hitchcock, this is simply disgusting: in fact, there are many obvious quotations (the opening credits, the first scene with the little girl screaming like in Marnie, the other one who believes to be already dead, remembering us Madeleine in "Vertigo", the music, etc, etc). Nonetheless, where Hitch's films are deep and fascinating, this one is just a sample of the lowest-grade cinema. It is outrageous towards Hitchcock, to say the least, showing that the director of the film either is not capable of understanding anything about the greatness of A. Hitchcock, either is simply a bad director. 0 / 10