Overlong music video or existential pondering?

Rating: Null/10 (4 April 2001)

THE MATRIX has great special effects and a good script. No joke. Where on earth people got the impression that it was #39 of the top 250 greatest films of all time (while E.T. sits near the end, rotting) is beyond me. It's just a bad movie. It attempts to be intelligent and existential, but it constantly wavers between action-adventure and intelligent film. Only people like Spielberg, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, etc, have managed this successfully. This movie's theories are generally typical, teen-angst pieces of "what am I?". The special effects and production values don't save the movie.