Plot holes aplenty, but lots of action - typical movie

Rating: Null/10 (7 February 2000)

Spoilers!
Story, on a classic premise, about smart machines taking over the world, sometime in the future. Humanity is utterly enslaved, bred merely for bio-electrical energy for the machines; people growing and dying in little bowls of slime, with tubes connected throughout their body and probes into their brains, the bowls stacked miles high like Christmas lights strung down a tall electrical pole. The idea is that the machines create a dream world, a fantasy world for these millions of 'battery' people, these people lying still under the slime, practically comatose their entire lives, so that they will in fact take many years to live out their lives content in the belief they ARE living their lives and all is normal - just a means of extending 'battery' life, as it were. And the fantasy chosen is the world from the last part of the 20th century. And the fantasy world is called - the Matrix. It's elaborate and confusing, and so there's a LOT of narrative in this film - understandably a little too much. The tag line is that you can't explain the matrix - you have to see it. But I think I just explained it. (?)
The good guys are an organized resistance, operating in gigantic sewers under what had been the cities, all bombed out now, flying what look like spaceships, one assumes lingering from the ultimate fight with the machines as they were taking over - but it's suggested the resistance movement began afterward (?). Somehow, this resistance retains their futuristic ships and weapons; each ship operating as an independent cell, tied to the last city of free people - which we never see - called, Zion. Somehow, this resistance manages to enter back into the matrix, at will, to communicate with other members of the resistance, to recruit new members, trying to avoid detection.
Most of the good scenes, the sf/x stuff, occur when they are in this dream state, in the matrix. But the sf/x, in the real world, for some floating robot hunter/killers, called 'sentinels', which go after the resistance space ships, make these 'sentinels' look all too CGI. They look like part of the dream, and it's confusing, cause they are supposed to exist in - reality. Just unconvincing effects, is all.
The hero is ultimately able to somehow ignore the dream, make it dance to his tune, and frustrate the machines, thereby - at least in the matrix. It's not that bad guy and good alike don't alter the dream reality - cause the good guys fly through the air and the bad guys also make lips grow together. But the hero does it to the extent of practically busting up the dream itself. He's the 'chosen one', as it were. In the real world, the resistance ships use EM pulses to disable the machines - and why machinedom can't trace an EM burst to its source, I don't know. Ultimately, the matrix is thwarted by the hero, or is just about to be by film's end. How this disables machinedom, itself, isn't explained. Why the machines wouldn't just reprogram, as they admitted to doing once before, isn't explained. Etc.

If fact, it isn't explained why people are bred. Are cattle too big? Are rabbits too small? In the slime, people in this constant matrix dream don't use their muscles at all. When the hero is rescued by the resistance from his bowl, it takes days to rebuild his atrophied muscles, using future technology. What kind of energy does a body utterly undeveloped generate? It would seem the machines would be pumping everyone full of steroids, and having them run a treadmill every other hour of the day in their 'reality'. Or better yet - why not breed Brahma bulls? I guess the answer is that there couldn't be the story, or the struggle, if people had already been x-ed out of the picture.
I suppose the most interesting thing about the film are the effects. And a few mini-documentaries follow the flick, which explain the burgeoning idea of 'virtual photography' (in this film, a rapid cascade of still cameras along some path, when motion is the necessary artifact of the method), when another shows the storyboards and some rough CGI of scenes from the film, another how they trained in the martial arts, and so on.
Interesting film, in some ways. But if you think _too_ much about it, it makes less and less sense. As for casting Reeves, he does seem a little overly bewildered sometimes, and one wonders how a Samuel Jackson would have done in the role, or someone else; save that the hero is supposed to be some younger nerd/hacker type in the dream/matrix. Reeves gives sort of a Harrison Ford everyman showing, but without the same edge or character Ford always had (even in his Gunsmoke villain days). Then again, they could have cast Leo DeCaprio or David Schwimmer in the lead - so . . . could have been worse.