#6: Compare and Contrast Realism and Surrealism Viewpoints within Cronenberg and Spielberg’s Films
Virtual reality has taken off over the last decade. Society’s fascination with technology and escaping to an alternate world has intrigued many. In reviewing the two movies, eXistenZ (1999) and Ready Player One (2018), there are notable similarities despite the almost 20-year gap between the making of each film.
The film, eXistenZ, was produced and directed by David Cronenberg in 1999. The film’s genre is a science fiction horror film based on a young woman who created a biotechnological virtual reality game. It is a production using the state-of-the-art technology available in the late 1990s. This film visually portrays a more real-life experience using the talent and skill of the producers to create layers to evoke emotions and suspense.
The other film, Ready Player One, is a 2018 science fiction action movie directed by Steven Spielberg. This movie is based on a novel written by Ernest Cline. It was produced using more advanced technology and creates vivid images to quickly and easily transform and transition from reality to fantasy realms.
Although both of these movies are science fiction based on virtual reality, Croenberg’s movie was an original creation using more dated technology. While in Speilberg’s film, he directed a re-creation of a novel using more advanced technology.
In both films, two different artificial virtual reality game interfaces are precious and sought-after entities that need to be protected. The virtual reality game interface within Cronenberg’s film is an ultra-sustainable biotechnological device. According to David L. Tamarin’s article “eXistenZ: David Cronenberg’s Prophetic Warning About Virtual Reality,” and my opinion, the device seems to be a living organism that connects players to the game through UmbiCords. These cords are surgically inserted into the players’ spines, and the device creates games based on the users’ “…memories, desires, wants[,] and fears…” (Tamarin). This can be seen in the scene where Allegra Geller and Ted Pikul appear in a ski lodge shows Geller’s worst fears of losing her game. It demonstrates Geller’s attempts to sterilize the game interface with a sporicidal solution, revealing her willingness to go to any lengths to protect the interface she sees as her child.
The game interface presented in Speilberg’s film is an electronic virtual reality headset that creates a computer-generated environment. The headset enables the player to put themself in the game with visual input. This computer-generated environment in Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One and Megan Amber Condis’s article “Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel, and the Geeky “Canon” of White Masculinity” is called the “Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation” (Cline 48 and Condis 2). It is “a massively multiplayer online game that …[has]… gradually become the globally networked virtual reality used by most of humanity [daily] (Cline 1 and Condis 2). In the movie “Ready Player One”, there is a scene where Wade Watts, also known as his virtual identity Parzival, and Shoto, also known as his virtual identity Sho, infiltrate Sorrento’s office space to gain access to Samantha Evelyn Cook’s virtual holding cell, known as Art3mis. They accomplish this by recreating the real world within the virtual environment. By obtaining access to Art3mis’ holding cell, they can retrieve information that helps them to bring down the shield protecting the final challenge to obtain the Crystal Key and gain ownership of the OASIS. This is important because it prevents Sorrento from taking control of the virtual world. Similar to Ready Player One, the device in eXistenZ is also fought over and there is a battle to protect the entity from the wrong hands. These messages from both films are very similar. They both share an overall tone to save humankind from getting lost in a fantasy world and to keep their feet grounded in reality. They take the human viewer on a journey between reality and computer-generated fantasy.
I appreciate Cronenberg’s ability to convey complex feelings and imagery with less advanced technology, while Spielberg crafts visually compelling and theatrical adaptations of science fiction novels. Cronenberg and Spielberg’s films are both set in the future and explore similar, yet distinct, virtual reality interfaces that face realism and surrealism viewpoints.