Film assumes you are an idiot but excellent action

Rating: 7/10 (24 February 2013)

One minute I was sitting in front of my PC flying a dragon across a mist strewn landscape, the next minute I found myself sitting in the UCI Cinema. Whoa! (I thought). What's happening dude? It seems I was watching a film called "The Matrix" starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and the very toothsome Carrie-Anne Moss. Apparently human experience is just a Virtual Reality created by weird AI beings to lull us into compliance and enable them to harvest us for our bio-energetic essence. I thought everyone knew that by now? Well, apparently not according to this film.
In fact there are many, many things that this film believes the audience does not know. For a start it believes we do not know that AI machines will take over the world because we are so stupid. It believes that we know nothing about the history of Western philosophy and even less about Eastern philosophy. It is not aware of the fact that most of us have spent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours in our lives discussing the nature of reality both sober and (more frequently) drunk and that we are intimately familiar with all the arguments involved. The film does not know that we can recognise a cliché-ridden script when we hear one. (Sample: "My way or the highway." Someone is pulling our virtual legs here surely?)This film does not know how restless a modern audience can get waiting for the action to start nor has it ever heard of the Lizard's First Law of the Cinema i.e. First make your film then cut at least thirty minutes out of it because it is just annoying dreck that has been put in to pad out the film because all film directors are too chicken to make films that run 90 minutes these days, pal! Suddenly I hear Keanu's voice in my mind – "I know Kung Fu!" I find myself in a sparse Japanese Hall. Keanu makes several hypnotic gestures culminating in a flick of the wrist beckoning me to fight him if I dare. I realise that he is imitating Bruce Lee's postures and damn me he nearly succeeds. I step swiftly aside and Laurence Fishburne steps in to take my place. Even though my Real Life mind knows Keanu and Larry don't know anything about Kung Fu, my VR mind believes they are old hands at it. As a long time fan of HK Action films I find this sequence absolutely exhilarating. What Keanu and Larry lack in terms of authenticity is easily hidden by the choreography, editing and special effects.
Then, in the blink of an eye, I'm cowering behind a pillar as a dozen men and one woman with an armoury of guns blast hell out of the marble-clad walls, floors and ceilings of a huge office lobby. Remarkably a thousand wall tiles die for every person killed but in due course and in suitable John Woo style, the good guys win only to go on to the next action-packed scene.
Taking the action scenes and the effects alone this is one of the best films I have seen for some time. When they really let rip with the guns, bullets, machines, kung-fu and upside-down, sideways and backwards balletics I felt a real adrenaline rush of joy of the kind denied to all those po-faced critics in the broadsheets who have to seek meaning and purpose and socially responsible messages in modern films.
But then suddenly I was back in plotland with all the lack of logicality you'd expect from one of the worse technobabble episodes of the least good Star Trek franchise show scrapped from the bottom of the barrel when they are running out of money and ideas at the end of a long run. Bought back down to reality with a bang.
Forget the plot. Go for the action and the effects. And one more thing – Existenz has this film beat hands down. The two films have very similar questions to ask about the nature of reality. Existenz treats you as though you are an intelligent human being and never ever lets you guess which reality is real. The Matrix assumes you are just a dumb puppy that only wants to be amused for the moment.