"Intellectually stunning"? It's just another martial arts flick

Rating: 4/10 (19 June 1999)

I didn't expect to see a hyper-violent wannabe-Neuromancer kung fu fest that mixes the worst of scifi and fantasy with ideas cribbed from William Gibson and Philip Dick... but that's what it is. It's like a rehash _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_ as written by a cloned Gibson gone mad with Hong Kong fight movies and superficial Hollywood scifi films.
This is a film for people who like to see their heroes walk in the front door and mow down all the evil guys with a huge machine gun to a blaring techno soundtrack.
_The Matrix_ is all show, eye candy, no brain. Neat effects, no content. It has the intellectual sophistication of a video game, senselessly throwing out "deep" stuff like "What is real?" like the filmmakers even cared. Such questions only serve as an excuse to show all sorts of neat special effects and stunts.
_The Matrix_ will appeal to a lot of little (mentally as well as physically) boys, and the huge number of tactically placed gratuitous Keanu shots will likely please the girls as well. This is a film that is presumptuous enough to begin by asking "What is real?" and end with a martial-arts fight between Good (as represented by Keanu as the originally named "The One") and Evil (as represented by three guys dressed in black). Spaceship-sized plot holes abound. Good acting doesn't save a horribly clichéd script ridden by stereotypes and comic reliefs that we've all seen before.
_The Matrix_ reminded of three films: _Event Horizon_, an exercise in morbidity and stupidity (over which _The Matrix_ towers, not that it says much), _Dark City_ (which has similar problems but manages to be stimulate the intellect at least part of the time, the rest of which it makes up for with sheer style; at least it offered a very intriguing premise, one that in turn reminded me a lot of Brian Aldiss' sublime novel _Non-Stop_), and David Cronenberg's _Videodrome_ (one of the most daring and challenging, and at the same time visually overpowering, depictions of alternative realities put on screen so far).
I look forward to, at some point in the future, we'll get an authentic science fiction film that doesn't believe in stupid audiences, hackneyed cliches, or box-office success, and dares to ask important questions and then deal with them. But that's wishful thinking, I guess. Outright science fiction, as it were.