Derivative Spectacle

Rating: Null/10 (17 June 1999)

The Matrix has managed to build tremendous word of mouth and great publicity based mainly on silence and mystery. The advance word was that it was "amazing", "mind blowing" and the like. It's not of course. But it is ground breaking. This is not necessarily a good thing however.
The movie starts in a green-filtered world. Coming off like a cross between the urban nightmare of "Blade Runner" and the claustrophobic intensity of "Eraserhead". Keanu Reeves inhabits a grey-green world populated by pasty people whose lives are dominated by technology. What no-one seems to realise is just how far that domination goes, and that in fact computers are not only running the world but manipulating reality itself.
Keanu is contacted by a bunch of cool hackers who slowly introduce him to the truth, and his place in it. He is transformed from hacker geek into a lean mean Keanu machine, expert at martial arts and shooter of HUGE weapons.
Well, come on, this is an adaptation of a comic book - it has to fulfill at least ten adolescent fantasies. Did I mention that a cool girl fancies him as well? There we go, that's fantasy number 3 taken care of... As the truth dawns, colour seeps back into the movie, like a nightmarish "Wizard of Oz", and Keanu assumes his role as saviour of mankind (boy are we in trouble).
The world this movie depicts is one where computers are blurry, fuzzy things. Computers that look like they were build by over-adventurous Blue Peter presenters out of bits of vacuum cleaner and cling film. In the Cronenbergian future, computers will be more organic, the film suggests, and more "understood" than programmed, where a well-timed kick will serve just as well as a keystroke. At the same time, the movie darkly hints at our ongoing "evolution" from humankind to machinekind. We're losing something in the technical age, it warns. I think they were talking about human warmth, but I'm not sure because there wasn't a lot of that on evidence. Did I mention innocent bystanders don't do particularly well in this film? (Can't these people learn to duck for god's sake?)
The movie builds very slowly to its' extremely violent climax. The last half-hour is a veritable orgasm of bullets, violence and bits of falling masonry. But we take an awful long time to get there. The film gives us each new revelation with a breathless sort of oooh-you'll-never-guess-what-ness about it. This is the mind-blowing part by the way. I suppose it would be mind-blowing for those of us who haven't seen "Blade Runner" or "Total Recall", because we're in: "What is real, and what is reality anyway?" territory (again).
The style of the film is where the film brings us something new however. It borrows in style from "Terminator", "Blade Runner", "Aliens" and that horrid Bacardi advert with the cute couple trying to escape the bald guy that goes on forever. This is science fiction noir, full of red brake lights glowing under rain, and computer screens glowing darkly in dim rooms. The movie also borrows liberally from the slow-motion violence of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and far eastern directors such as John Woo. Like Tarantino, this is a film with a plagiaristic eye on previous action movies, both referencing and parodying them at the same time.
But by far the biggest influence on this movie is comic books. Whole scenes are shot and framed like comic books, with artefacts shot in close up and actors framed behind. Keanu himself is turned into a walking piece of anime, exuding a blank sort of menace behind dark glasses and swirling leather. The dialogue is stagy and melodramatic like a comic book. So much so that I kept expecting the dialogue to come out of the actor's mouths in little bubbles, but it never happened. And let's not forget the huge impact that computer games have had on this film, the action set pieces look like they might have been computer generated, and actors take a lickin' yet keep on gettin' up until the big GAME OVER in the sky beckons.
This is absolutely the style of movies to come, it will be duplicated, and built upon, much as "Blade Runner" was. It's not a bad thing, but it definitely sets a new level of style over substance in the movies. The plot attempts depth, and the script has some gratifying moments of humour, but lets face it, what we're here for is the slam-bang, action packed, bullets-flyin' finale and to hell with the plot. You get it, but it's a long slog. They would have been better off calling the movie "Blank People Shooting at Each Other With Large Guns" and got down on it in the first half-hour. It would have made for a shorter movie, and I wouldn't have been so late to bed.
I'm not saying "The Matrix" is a bad movie. It's an action movie, which at least looks damn good and attempts a little on the intellectual side. Just don't expect too much, of it - it's not the second coming...