Shadows and the Substance of Things to Come

Rating: 8/10 (20 March 2016)

A perfect metaphor for Hollywood! Part of the Mass Indoctrination Machine that educates us to worship shadows and not to probe beyond the surfaces of what we see for the inner workings of it all. Now this is a film with meat on its bones both thematically and technically. What is not touched upon here? There is the interface between 'reality' and 'illusion', a very cinematic take on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, a consideration of reification versus abstraction aided by CGI imagery to nail down all the particulars.
Here you have the process that must be undergone to conquer every prejudice, every narrow-minded POV that precludes the unleashing of true potential and beingness. What must be renounced and destroyed in our illusionary constructs to seize upon a new and more salutary truth? What must be accepted and embraced to be newly constructed as the rebirth of Truth? We have in this film presented in a very entertaining way a means of exploring these concepts from a fresh perspective.
THE MATRIX is a perfect paradigm for the Computer and Information Age, where the energy of machines becomes a surrogate for passion and data itself is the substance of a Hell masquerading as Heaven. Keanu Reeves as the Computer Programmer/Computer Hacker Neo is a secret rebel against the Status Quo without realizing that what he is rebelling against is beyond even the range of his understanding. The legendary Morpheus comes into his life to pull his coat about what's really going on, but first must send him into the abyss of his own unreality turned inside out and back again.
Because of the limitations of Cinema, no plausible utopian worlds are postulated realistically; only the idea of a universe at constant war with itself involving citizens awake and citizens still slumbering. This is all very artfully and dramatically explored, with beleaguered humanity fighting in a wasteland to reclaim a vision that long ago was co-opted by their data spewing machines.
The beauty of THE MATRIX is that it fully rests on Cinema's strengths; its ability to create artifice and circus like magic tricks in a spellbinding way. It also serves up and reveals its primary weakness; its inability to pierce the skin of the apple and go to the core of experiences and ideas even when to all the world that appears to be precisely what it is doing.
There is not much more I can add about this ground breaking work, rooted as it is in this new cultural mileau of ever advancing data assimilation towards a global awareness of what it takes to run a planet or even a universe populated with slaves operating as the servo-mechanisms for those sentient entities forging their chains with the stuff that dreams are made of, but it looks good and it rides good and who knows but that it might somehow lead you to read a book and create your own abstractions to reify?