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Review by Susan Granger
1 star out of 4
Aimed specifically at a young, male audience, this challenging
sci-fi adventure is big on visuals and short on story. Bland,
androgynous Keanu Reeves plays a 22nd-century computer hacker who is
recruited by Carrie-Anne Moss to join a band of cyber freedom fighters
led by Morpheus - that's Laurence Fishburne - in a struggle against
the scary, menacing machines that control mankind. Powerful computers
keep their oblivious human slaves passive by literally plugging them
into a virtual-reality universe that appears as the 20th-century world
we know. Written and directed by brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski
("Bound"), the complex, pretentious script combines mythology,
mysticism, and technical mumbo-jumbo in a kinetic blender and concocts
a dazzling but illogical, incoherent head-trip in which specific
public telephone booths are the only conduit from one reality to
another. According to the Wachowskis, "We began with the premise that
every single thing we believe in today and every single physical item
is actually a total fabrication created by an electronic universe. So,
if the characters can have instantaneous information downloaded into
their heads, they should, for example, be able to be as good a kung-fu
master as Jackie Chan." Sci-fi genre aficionados will spot familiar
elements from "The Fifth Element," "Virus,"" Dark City,""Terminator,"
and "Alien," and the stunt work was supervised by Yuen Wo Ping, one
Hong Kong's top specialists in both kung-fu and wire-stunts. On the
Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "The Matrix" is an eye-popping,
deafening, mind-numbing 3 - unless you're a guy who's gung-ho for the
muddled mayhem and dizzying arsenal of ammunition of a weird,
big-screen video game.
Copyright © 2000 Susan Granger
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out of 4
