Critics reviews

It now looks in retrospect like a bold and brilliant career move for the actor. It was the first in a series of challenging, serious films that Pattinson would appear in, and showed that he had genuine ambitions, as well as a deft ability to pick great directors to work with.

Cronenberg presents talk (great reams of the stuff) as a kind of mutual infection between emotionally incomplete monsters, trying and failing to shape the world in their image. After spending years making prestige and genre films, Cronenberg returned to the crystal waters of the wired mind-benders from his early years and found he could still swim beautifully.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to suggest that in adapting DeLillo's novel about the spread of finance capital, Cronenberg made a movie that's equally about the rise of digital filmmaking. Both, after all, are mediums inherently built on dematerialisation—financial methods of wealth production don't involve the exchange of physical goods, and DV capture is divorced from the physicality of celluloid.

Cronenberg's fundamental argument, or so it seems to me, is that the entirety of existence – even acts or resistance – are predicated upon the operation of macro- and micro-systems that regiment and organize our lives. The reigning orders of technology and capital have at this point in history turned people into production line robots while unceasingly assailing them with images and information, rendering all actions meaningless.

Cosmopolis reflects a puzzled society in which the use of ‘exact' terms does not guarantee communication, and in which abstraction has overridden understanding. The only thing (if anything) that endures is the sheer beauty of a language which – since it says nothing – can be uniquely enjoyed for its sound and intonation, its pure materiality.

Cosmopolis is a film that addresses us as non-psychological viewers, processing multiple streams of data. If the film is offputting to some, it may because it understands that we have already learned how to cordon off huge swaths of our world through abstraction, and it does not presume to teach us how to care.

Cronenberg is after something unique; this is not a film that lets us indulge in the usual, rather pointless schadenfreude. His subject is the speed of the 21st century—the speed of cyber-capital, of the movement from analog to digital, the infernal future that's already here and that's left so many behind. He does not dramatize this speed by trying to approximate it. No, Cronenberg slows us way the hell down—asks us to stay put and encircles us in that hoary old fortress called language.

More so than any other Cronenberg film—including the manifesto-like Play of Ideas eXistenZ—this one feels like a summing up of everything he's been telling and showing us since the 1970s. Flesh, identity, consciousness are all prone to disintegrate or morph. By adapting a book by DeLillo, a fellow chronicler of slow-motion apocalypse, the filmmaker expands his vision to encompass a species grappling with cataclysmic change.

Cosmopolis's grimness is, it turns out, an altogether apt reflection of its theme, which is the remorseless momentum of post-Berlin Wall capitalism, of a New World Order that has no symmetrical foe aside from "terrorism" and which is wedded inexorably to technologies of such seamless, speed-of-light efficiency that it promises the very transcendence of the physical, an escape from mortality itself into the dream-realm of the cybernetic.

A most dense work, baleful, very funny and sinuous, never afraid to excruciate its audience, a master filmmaker's rumination on capitalism as a vision of diseased titanium.

Cosmopolis raises the question of abstraction—in art, in the movement of global capital—often enough that, in conjunction with the film's single (minimalist) trajectory, the connection comes to mind.

David Cronenberg's Don DeLillo adaptation is compacted and claustrophobic--verbally, structurally, visually. Working with an intentionally artificial style, Cronenberg crafts Packer's high-tech stretch into a microcosm of the late capitalist world: a moral vacuum where everything exists only in abstract terms.