cinematic dilution of gibson's NEUROMANCER

Rating: Null/10 (6 February 2003)

some spoilers:
the matrix's combat sequences were extremely cool, and a few of its techno-suspense scenes were well done (exempla gratis, navigating the cubicles with directions via cell phone), but the movie had some difficult premises to swallow.
first, why would an artificial intelligence need to learn martial arts techniques to neurologically zap (sorry, split infinitive here) a human? even if martial arts within silicon were merely a representational interface for digital hacking, an artificial intelligence should have been able to find far more direct ways to kill its human targets. the flash and style of combat are at time eye-popping, but pure hollywood (or, more accurately, hong kong; the silliness of the premise remains hollywood, however) and in the end, unnecessary. and seeing keanu try to pull off bruce lee-ish moves was comedy.
another problematic premise is the harvesting of humans as an energy source. it takes a hell of a lot more energy to feed and construct and care for a living being (iow, battling entropy) than you can extract out of him/her. so it would be the opposite of efficient to have human farms for energy production. an artificial intelligence would have done better to harvest what little solar power could be had under the conditions of nuclear winter.

another oft-used but nonsensical sci-fi trope found its home in this movie. why should someone who dies a neurological death have his dream death represented in real life by corresponding physical wounds? iow, why would someone who was shot in the belly (can't remember the exact modes of death in the movie, but take this as a for-instance) while navigating the matrix end up having blood spewing out his mouth in the 'real world'? a flat line on the eeg and ekg would have been more realistic.
those who want a real kick to the brain (and don't mind the effort of reading in these postliterate times) would do better to put their heads in the novel that inspired this film, william gibson's neuromancer.