Far from mind-blowing or impressive, but I was entertained

Rating: 5/10 (10 May 2003)

Chihiro_Sen15's Rating: 6.5 out of 10

There's much hype among a little 1999 film called "The Matrix" a movie which I only discovered this year, a little before the release of the much anticipated (much overhyped) sequel "The Matrix Reloaded". I don't why I waited so long to see this movie. I just never got the time or just wasn't interested enough to see it. But I just kept seeing advertisements for "Reloaded": All of the soda and beer ads, the posters, the extremely good-looking Carrie Anne Moss. I had to check the first one out! I finally rented it on DVD from Blockbuster, and after taking out the disc, I came to the conclusion that the "Matrix" was one of the most overrated movies of all time. But that never stopped it from being entertaining.
"The Matrix" tells of Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a computer programmer by day and a hacker by night by the name of "Neo". But by having a mysterious encounter between peculiar strangers Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Neo learns that the world is not what it seems to be. Him and all the other humans are slaves in the "Matrix", a computer program deluding the humans from the "real" world. After being "unplugged", Neo joins with Morpheus and Trinity to fight against the machine army threatening to destroy "Zion", the last human city of the real world, and to free the rest of the humans from the Matrix while taking on Smith (Hugo Weaving) and the other agents.
"The Matrix" does have a few ideas, but Phillip K. Dick wrote better than this. The dialogue is banal and the movie is constantly explaining the whole explanation to the audience. "The Matrix" is a very, very simplistic premise but the film is able to expand past it's small idea into an over-wrought world laden down with special effects. All of the characters have no depth in them at all and are treated like special effects like the rest of the film! What begins as a fairly interesting plot turns into a video game with cardboard characters and fancy visuals.
Then why was I entertained? Simple: It was fun. I had a fun time. It's not the classic the desperate action junkies and video game nerds want it to be. Nor was it mind-blowing. I saw nothing here that I haven't seen in billions of stories written decades before this movie was thought of. The visuals are fun and "bullet time" was somewhat cool to look at, but there really was no POINT to the movie. What are we getting out of this? Nothing except minor entertainment. Should I bother with Reloaded...?