Cultish, or would-be cultish, adaptation of a novel by the erstwhile science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard -- albeit a novel infinitely less science-fictional, though no less inert, than The Drowned World or The Drought. It plays out on screen as little more than a slice of soft-core (or semisoft-core) porn, right down to the requisite absence of recognizable human conduct, discernible motivation, credible dialogue, free will, spontaneity, compunction, and so forth, found in the most mindless of fuck fests. Not itself completely mindless, as its allusions to Albert Camus and Nathanael West will attest, it has something to do with the "psychosexual energy" released in the survivors of car wrecks and their apparent desire, urge, compulsion, to re-create the sensation in reckless -- but not wreckless -- behavior behind steering wheels, as well as in boudoir behavior on front and back car seats. (No one here is ever going to worry about such fetters as seat belts and condoms.) Something to do, in the most science-fictional terms possible, with the "interface" of man and machine, and the farthest-out ramifications of same. We know the movie is serious because, in addition to the mentions of Camus and West, it was written and directed by David Cronenberg. And it maintains his accustomed high level of physical revulsion, morbid curiosity, neurotic queasiness, sickroom gloom, and such like. The problem with all that is not with his genuineness, which is never in doubt, nor even his humorlessness, which tends only to corroborate his genuineness, but rather his lack of adequate narrative sense to make it in any way compelling. James Spader, Elias Koteas, Holly Hunter, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosanna Arquette. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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