Posts Tagged ‘ science fiction ’

eXistenZ is director David Cronenberg‘s 1999 film that is his strangest and most disturbing yet. It was overshadowed during its release, but has picked up a bit of a cult fan-base since it was released on DVD.

A world-famous, celebrity virtual reality game designer named Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is unveiling a demonstration of her newest game at a private, focus group meeting. The game works off of a biological, non-sentient machine called a pod, which plugs into a bio-port, looking very much like an organic opening at the base of a person’s spine. Ted Pikul (Jude Law) is a marketing guy from the game’s company and when the game session is about to begin, a late-comer unveils a weapon made entirely from bone and which shoots teeth (thus rendering it invisible to metal detectors) and attempts to assassinate Geller, Pikul is the one who rushes her from the scene, injured, but alive and the two of them try to unravel what is going on and whether or not the game has survived the attack also.

Paul W.S. Anderson is not a director known for producing artistic films and this is no exception, but what he does deliver in Event Horizon is one of the most original and terrifying horror movies of the 1990s. Starring Laurence Fishburne as Captain Miller, Sam Neill as Dr. William Weir, Kathleen Quinlan as Peters, Joely Richardson as Lt. Starck, Richard T. Jones as Cooper, Jack Noseworthy as young Justin and Jason Isaacs as DJ who are all on-board a ship at some point in the future whose purpose is search and rescue.

With its story and its screenplay written by none-other-than James Cameron, Strange Days is director Kathryn Bigelow (K19: The Widowmaker) vision of a beautiful dystopian Los Angeles on the precipice of the turn of the millennium where violence is everywhere, the police are out in force like something in Bosnia or Northern Ireland with full-on riot gear and automatic weapons.

Matt Reeves‘s much marketed 2008 action/horror/thriller Cloverfield lives up to its hype.  It takes the point-of-view camera technique utilized in The Blair Witch Project and brings it to new extremes as it ekes out a truly creepy and unsettling looking at an attack on Manhattan by what can only be described as a monster.

The duo which brought us The Beach in 2000 now brings to theaters a zombie movie that will ultimately change the genre from one predominated by B-movies to one where humanity is examined after society has been removed to help us learn more about how essential socialization is to humanity. If that sounds like something too profound to be jammed into a mere 113 minutes of film, think again.