Real deal sci-fi.

Rating: 8/10 (23 March 1999)

This is a ludicrous film. Loud, brash and generally bombastic at every turn. Fortunately, it knows this and wears these features on its sleeve. It is knowing and ironic and has its tongue firmly in its cheek. The ideas, which will no doubt be hailed as 'startlingly original', are all stolen from Philip K. Dick, but at least its stealing from the best. It is basically familiar territory, territory mined by Dark City only a few years back. The Matrix, however, is an immeasurably superior film, simply by virtue of the fact that it does not take itself seriously. At times, the characters play their ludicrous lines so deadpan, it achieves a bizarre spooflike quality. Fishburne's performance, in particular, is splendidly arch as he delivers lines like 'Welcome to the desert of the real' with a misplaced Shakespearean grandeur.
The effects are also ground-breaking and mostly effective. The use of slo-mo to eroticize the violence is reminiscent of Woo or even Peckinpah but with the use of clever CGI, Matrix achieves the feel of ballistic science. The shootouts do not revel in the familiar 'operatic grandeur' that has been a staple since Bonnie and Clyde. Rather, they play like FBI reconstructions of shootouts. We see the paths that bullets take, the positions of spent shell casings. It is shamelessly fetishistic and utterly irrelevant to the film's central idea but spectacular and exciting nonetheless.
I hate virtually everything. Dark City was a nauseating waste of my time. Everything released over the last three summers has seemed despicably lazy film making. Godzilla, Armageddon...these films are offensive cynical money pits without a single grain of wit, a single interesting idea to tie the whole rotten mess together. Therefore, I fully anticipated hating the Matrix with equal vigor. As it was, I was pleasantly surprised. While I would make no claims that it was in any way a classic, it certainly appeared to have been put together with a great deal of love and humour and these attributes go a long way. It was overlong and unnecessarily portentous at times but these are minor quibbles when one is being bombarded by such a wealth of outrageous imagery and ideas. What other film could link Dick, Christ, Alice in Wonderland, Monty Python, Woo, Jackie Chan, and still find time to make Keanu Reeves look good?