EXistenZ
Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers.eXistenZ is a 1995 film by Canadian director David Cronenberg. Its plot is based on the confusion between reality and virtual reality as the characters move in and out of a computer game called eXistenZ, the aim of which seems simply to survive. The players are linked to the virtual world of the game by a console that resembles a lump of animal tissue (and is slightly vaginal), which is connected to the player's nervous system through a 'bio-port', a hole resembling an anus drilled in the player's lower back.
The "game world" features many touches that pick up on aspects of video games, particularly graphical adventure games of the 1980's and early 1990's. Some of these are explicit, such as the repetitive "loops" of actions that minor characters perform, or the need to provide certain trigger phrases to make progress possible, but there are many other more subtle ones. Examples include the sparsely populated nature of the game world and the physical proximity of certain locations for no sensible reason (for instance, a Chinese restaurant next to a fish processing factory in thick forest). Another trait repeatedly used is the tendency of "game characters" to perform certain actions to quickly establish their personality which, presented in a more real world, make no sense. A striking example is near the end of the game where a soldier involved in a gun battle approaches the two main characters, firing his gun repeatedly in random directions, then stopping to have a conversation to impart vital information to those players seemingly little concerned about the gun battle he was involved in a second previously.
Some compare the questions raised of the issues of what is reality and what is merely sensory input fed to the individual as having been done much more strongly in The Matrix, and quite seriously in Total Recall while only peripherally raised in the movie Vanilla Sky.
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