**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, and Joe Pantoliano
Directed and written by Larry and Andy Wachowski.
1999 R
“The Matrix” is a highly-stylized, gorgeously-rendered fight scene. It creates a frightening, thought-provoking future world, then instead of contemplating those thoughts, has its characters beat each other senseless.
Keanu Reeves plays a programmer drawn into a band of radical computer hackers when he finds himself being pursued by law enforcement agents for no apparent reason. He begins to be plagued by strange dreams and even witnesses those pursuing him bend reality. The explanation to all this is made by Laurence Fishburne, the leader of the hackers, who reveals to him that the current world is actually an illusion created by a massive computer that has taken over at the end of the twenty-first century, designed to suck our thoughts dry, and the real world is a desolate wasteland devoid of all humanity, save the band of hackers.
An interesting premise, to be sure, but the filmmakers behind “The Matrix” are pretty much only interested in how our heroic band of hackers can enter the illusory world and bend its reality in order to fight the evil computer from the inside out. I’m skimping on the details of how all this works because they are not the crux of the film. The crux is that Reeves is able to dodge bullets, run up walls, and pretty much fly if he gets enough of a start. Once all this is established by Fishburne—who lectures both Reeves and the audience as quickly as possible—the hackers proceed to do battle with the emissaries of the illusory world, who are also aware that reality can be bent, and who can dodge bullets, run up walls, etc.
There’s little else to “The Matrix” besides that. There’s some nonsense about an oracle telling Reeves he is “the one,” there’s a love story that pops out of nowhere in the last fifteen minutes that’s absolutely unforgivable, and there’s some empty-headed anti-establishment rhetoric thrown in toward the end to try to give the movie weight. I spent a good forty minutes of the film waiting for the rug to be pulled from under my feet one more time, to watch the characters realize that the “real world” was just another illusion, and that some hyper-reality exists beyond that. My heart sank a little when this never came to pass.
Not long after seeing “The Matrix” I saw a low-budget television movie called “Virtual Nightmare” obviously intended to cash in on “The Matrix.” It has no-name actors and minimum productions costs, and it follows a man who learns his world is created by a computer, and that the real world is a post-nuclear wasteland, populated by freaks that only think they are normal because the computer sends messages into their brains. This is about where “The Matrix” stops, with thoughts of evil machines ruling our lives, but “Virtual Nightmare” goes one step farther (further? never mind) when its protagonist realizes that the nuclear wasteland is also an illusion, and that the real world is hopelessly beige and banal, where everyone has decided long ago that virtual everything is better than real everything because it’s cheaper. No war, no nukes, no evil machines. Just capitalism. There’s something to think about.
Character development in “The Matrix” is reduced to Fishburne looking like he knows how everything works and Reeves being dubious. Much care and attention has been lavished upon the fight scenes and they are genuinely thrilling, as Reeves flies in slow-motion past stationary bullets toward his enemies. Like an ultra-violent music video, “The Matrix” drips with style; the art direction of the illusory world, although like our own, is somehow more shadowy, more cold, more grey; the real world, although obviously computer animation, is a world of caves, populated with squid-like machines in service of the evil computer, and of humans in desperate escape; and the heroes, once they bend false reality, start wearing more leather than the NFL uses in a year and look like they belong on the cover of Spin or Rolling Stone.
“The Matrix” is aimed at fourteen-year-olds that don’t just play video games, but love what they stand for: the idea that a boy who stays in his room all day with a computer for a best friend can, by mastery of his PC, miraculously become one of the physical, kung-fu, gun-wielding powerhouses he plays on screen. I enjoyed the film’s premise and the fight scenes, and had a good time watching stuff blow up in slow-mo, but I wanted more. You can only watch someone else play video games for so long.
P.S. Recently I read a critique of the film by science-fiction author William Gibson, who referred to Reeves’ character in “The Matrix” as his “all-time favorite sci-fi hero” (naturally the voice in my head switched to the Comic Book Store Guy from “The Simpsons” when I read this). Why? Because he is a “hero of the real,” because Reeves chose a dark reality over a pleasant illusion. Putting aside what it might mean for an author of fiction to start making claims about objective reality, or why he might choose his favorite character based on his symbolic meaning rather than his actual character development, of which Reeves received near nothing—I pondered why I didn’t think of Reeves in any terms as grandiose as “hero of the real.” I found myself coming back to my opinion of Reeves as the hero of fourteen-year-old computer junkies, and found myself hearing that same imaginary fourteen-year-old telling his parents “you don’t know what it’s like to be me,” and in that imaginary cry I heard the child’s assertion to the parent that “my grasp of reality is better than your grasp”—and so I decided that “The Matrix” is catering more to juvenile feelings of vague anti-authority more than making a large statement. But that’s just my interpretation—my subjective reality where I am both prisoner and pharaoh—and unlike Mr. Gibson I cannot lay claim to “the real.”
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night