A movie for people who love to read sci-fi....

Rating: 9/10 (25 June 1999)

The beauty of sci-fi is in the details....When writing, an author has fairly limitless license to fire the reader's imagination with such amplification. A movie has not such luxury. There are time contstraints, dangers of trying to do too much. The writers of 'The Matrix' do an outstanding job of tantalizing the imagination without burdening it with superfluous information. The visual effects are unparalleled in anything I've seen recently (sorry George--there was simply too much to see in TPM), and the presence of humor rounded out this film's combustibility. In addition, the blending of drag-down, knockout, kung-foo commando is very well-done. My one reservation (and the reason why I only gave the film a 9) is the non-conformity of the romance. It was gauche and heavy-handed. The writers didn't need to dumb things down so much for the viewer. There were several intimations of what the Oracle had told Trinity, and they could have left things less implicit in the end...But in a movie where everything else is done so well, why complain? When all is said and done, I'd equate 'The Matrix' to the 'Ender's Game' of sci-fi novels.