a neat if philosophically perverse technology demo

Rating: Null/10 (25 July 1999)

There's something mighty peculiar about the message of this film. In many ways it's desperately conventional, old-fashioned and defensive, an anxious piece of hand-wringing over the new technologies which, as a piece of cinema, it milks for all they're worth. It's self-divided, fetishizing novelty, yet investing its narrative energy in the old faithfuls - shooting at people, hitting people, kicking people and (very, very occasionally) kissing people while wearing skintight leather.
We're battered again and again with the lesson that the real is everything, anyone who panders an attractive illusion to us is in league with a dehumanising, mechanistic future, and anyone who prefers to live in a luxurious fantasy world rather than the bleakest of bleak realities is about to open fire on some of your friends and unplug your remaining friends' life support. And yet (you can see where this is going!) the Wachowskis' film buys into fantasy and the technology that drives fantasy; it only really countenances the 'reality' our freedom-fighters are fighting for because it too is a wonderful, post-apocalyptic design statement. This movie *is* the Matrix, and there is nothing outside it, no reality for which the Matrix is an ideological cover - it is the world, all worlds.
The film looks like an attack on Hollywood's ideological power, but that's like the chairman of the Disney corporation walking around EuroDisney with a big placard saying 'Don't trust us, we stink. Stop me and buy one.'
And for a movie to attempt to enslave you imaginatively while feeding you the line that it's offering liberation from enslavement is about as hypocritical as we should expect from the Hollywood imagination factory. This is thematically so explicit that I can't help wondering if a radical self-critique is actually the point. But I don't think so, because at every technical level it radiates self-satisfaction.
As a *movie*, it's - how can I put this - at a certain level strangely dull. The problem is that it wants your admiration rather than your engagement; its interest is in showcasing the flair of its technologies, both computerised and human (the martial arts). So the last thing it wants is for you actually to get involved emotionally. And you sure as hell don't. Keanu Reeves is perfect casting for a film whose climax is the hero's ability to finish off the bad guy while appearing not particularly to notice.
The films that will come along riding the coat tails of 'The Matrix' (and there are going to be dozens) will fall terribly flat; 'The Matrix' itself doesn't, because there's a real visual and technical intensity, a passionate, purely aesthetic ambition, that the film-makers radiate. And you can be sure that all the sequels (official and unofficial) will ditch that as the first thing they do.