...a futuristic film noir with big names like Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, big sets, big budget, and enough weirdness to ensure DVD sales for years to come.
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Summer movies are about action and adventure. When you can throw in special effects and surround sound, all the better. "The Matrix" comes in with all speakers firing, a sci-fi thriller that's short on logic but long on visual and visceral excitement. It's a futuristic film noir with big names like Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, big sets, big budget, and enough weirdness to ensure DVD sales for years to come.
The premise is promising: We all live in a dream. Literally. Nothing around us is real. In the movie's future world, every person on Earth is curled up in a little pod, millions upon millions of tiny pods all over the world, with each pod's inhabitant fed and nurtured by giant, insect-like machines. Our lives are merely sensory implants, cyber visions to keep us pacified, while the machines feed on our energy. It's a tempting idea, one that will have you looking at your own world in a slightly different way, but it's undermined by too much mundane explanation.
According to the story line, we got ourselves into this situation when we built computers that became smarter than we were. They took over and enslaved us. Yes, it's yet another "smart-ass machines taking over the planet" plot. How about we were colonized millions of years ago by higher intelligences, and this is how they left us? How about this is the way it's always been since time immemorial, sans God, gods, or any higher intelligences? How about the whole world is in the mind of the main character, and nothing else exists? Oh, where is John Conner when you need him? Where is Big Arnold?
Anyway, a few humans have escaped this illusory world, this "Matrix," and are working in a resistance movement headed by a character played by Fishburne. He has the unlikely but mysterious-sounding name of Morpheus (in mythology Morpheus was the god of dreams). Their latest recruit is a young computer worker named Thomas Anderson, played by Reeves. He is supposedly destined to be the world's savior. But first he has to be convinced that the Matrix business is all true, then he has to be sprung from his pod and brought into reality, and finally he has to be trained to use his new super powers. Oh, I didn't mention the super powers this savior possesses? It's not an easy job for Anderson, or his alter-ego Neo, or the viewer to keep up with all this.
The movie's most obvious similarities are to "Blade Runner" for its dim, shadowy look; to "The Terminator" for its intellectual nucleus; and to "Dark City" for its overall feel. Unfortunately, it lacks the internal consistency of any of those films. Once "The Matrix" establishes its broad outlines, it turns almost exclusively to computer graphics, special effects, chases, and fights for its plot turns. The cold, dark, metallic look of the sets and costumes, so reminiscent of every other post-apocalyptic movie ever made, becomes tiresome; as does the routine, often wooden acting of its stars, especially the cornball posturing from Fishburne and Reeves. It's also hard to take the villains seriously when they speak in such deliberate, melodramatic voices and wear getups straight out of "Men in Black"; or to take Anderson seriously when he is "bugged" with a real, live insect. These are times when it strikes the viewer that the story may be intended as a parody of futuristic thrillers, but then the plot reverts back to its more serious tone and rebuts the notion.
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