Excitement is churned out, chases run through ever-changing settings and sinister elements emerge from surprising places. As written with much surface ingenuity by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote ''The Net,'' the film has the steady momentum and flat trajectory of a video game. He mirrors its commanding chilliness and creates an impression of sensible consistency, something that the story itself often lacks. Douglas, who delivers a new shade of cruel elegance each time he plays another urbane monster, is the ideal star for this vigorously contrived thriller. These include rejection, powerlessness, invasion of privacy, temporary poverty and ruining very expensive clothes. Forget political conspiracy, invading aliens or danger from the insect world: ''The Game'' puts its yuppie potentate through worse terrors. Fincher, like Michael Douglas in the film's leading role, does show real finesse in playing to the paranoia of these times. ''The Game'' is the work of David Fincher, the director whose ''Seven'' gave grisly new cachet to cat-and-mouse manipulation and whose sleeker new film amounts to gambits 8 through 20. After all, at the movies we've been doing that all summer. Those tricks mean an expensive and mostly unrelated string of shocks, illusions and chase scenes, so the audience should have no trouble sharing Van Orton's brush with flashy artificiality. This thriller's surprise scheme for Nicholas Van Orton, a joyless investment banker whose first name is effectively Mister, is a string of tricks to disrupt his privileged tranquillity. MIGHT ''The Game'' suggest a special gift? It's for the man who has enough of everything except nightmares.

Pelicula invasion 1997