Go see it, but *not* the best sci-fi film ever.

Rating: 6/10 (2 January 2001)

A lot of people have rated it as the best movie they've ever seen. I ask all those people to start thinking of other great movies of the past, even if you restrict yourself to science fiction movies - think of the characters you fell in love with, and the performers who brought it all to life - then try to imagine some of those actors, those characters appearing in equivalent parts in The Matrix. Think of Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard (from Blade Runner) as either Neo or Morpheous. Think of Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley (from the Alien series). Think of the witty dialogue and excellent character interaction of writers Joss Whedon or JJ Abrams. You can think up your own examples. Then compare it to what we've actually got in The Matrix. It just doesn't stand up.
Storyline: You can see that at the script stage, the concept works very well as being a marvellous "coup de cinema", when Neo wakes up and the "real world" is revealed for the first time. But the advance publicity told you all that before you even got to see the movie. I don't believe in picking holes in plot points, unless they rely too heavily on coincidence - it's not an easy thing to build a foolproof scenario to achieve the high concept you have for the movie. But I will say that generally in any movie you are supposed to be on the side of the good guys. In this situation, however, all I could see was that Morpheous and his friends were determined to wake the whole world up to the fact that they are living in an enormous dank sewer, under a gunmetal sky, with apparently no other living creatures or vegetation on which to survive. Or they could stay in The Matrix (what we call "real life") and remain "slaves". I was with Cypher's (Joe Pantoliano) side all the way - better fake steak that's better than the real thing, than physically real but otherwise totally unappetising food which resembled some kind of edible snot.
Regarding the action, I have two points to make: a) If I see one more helicopter flying alongside a glass skyscraper, so help me.... b) There is such a thing as "too good". I originally wrote how pathetic it was that high speed fight scenes were so obviously speed ed up film. I now know that in fact the film wasn't speed ed up, but Reeves and Fishburne were moving so fast that it looked like it was. A little slower and they'd have had ten times the impact.
Here was a film where the dialogue could have done with some serious polishing by a script-doctor. Imagine, if you will, if Sean Connery had been cast as Morpheous - can you see him saying the bland dull-as-ditchwater stuff that Fishburne was trying to make so much of? No of course not, and Connery would have made sure of it by calling in his favourite script doctors (like he did for 'The Rock'). Why didn't the studio step in? Did they make a mistake and think they had the Coen brothers instead of the Wachowski brothers? There was no characterisation whatsoever - we didn't know anything more about Morpheous, Trinity or Neo at the end than we knew at the beginning. About the only fully rounded character was Cypher (which was why he got all my sympathy). Trinity's interactions with Neo, in particularly, needed to be ten times better to achieve anything like the meaning and emotional fulfilment for the audience that that relationship merited.
The remainder of the cast did their best with poor material. Keanu Reeves did what he always does. I don't know what it is, but it isn't acting. Reeves is a star because he infallibly picks smash-hits to be in (Speed, The Devil's Advocate, The Matrix), so they keep sending him scripts. But I cannot think of a single Keanu Reeves star-vehicle which wouldn't have been better with anybody else who just had some presence and charisma.
I'd like to deal with the deficient morality of the film. It's very easy to say "It's an action movie, so lots of bad guys will need to be killed", but 'Terminator 2' for example, is a very violent action film which has a moral sense. In 'The Matrix' not one of the bad guys are killed (they are only software constructs, after all), but lots and lots of innocent policemen and security guards are just wiped out, and, what is more, by the supposed good guys! Morpheous tries to explain this away by telling Neo to regard every human as an enemy, but this doesn't expiate the wholesale bloodbath which occurs when Neo and Trinity are just trying to get into a building. Why wasn't that sequence put together as a Kung Fu spectacular, with all the human opponents merely stunned? The last shot of that scene shows just the elevator as the doors shut on Neo and Trinity, and broken bricks and plaster and all the devastation which has just been wreaked - there is not a single dead body in the shot. This sanitised view of what constituted a totally unjustified massacre on the part of our heroes failed to make me feel better about what they had just done.
I think it's easy to get carried away when a big-budget movie has an interesting and (relatively) original premise, and the visual effects do a good job of showing it off - but these factors do not make a truly satisfying film.