Not all guns and fighting

Rating: Null/10 (19 April 1999)

While the trailer for The Matrix involves lots of violence, I was surprised at how little there was in the actual film. Also, most of what was there was very plot-driven, not just for show. Take the sparring match between Neo and Morpheus. The entire time they are fighting, Morpheus is trying to teach Neo how to "free his mind"-it wasn't just a senseless confrontation for the action fans to get all hyped-up about. And when it didn't seem to work, they didn't fight to a conclusion: it simply ended, right then and there. While I'll admit that the fight scenes where very good-especially the slow-motion, camera angles, and emphasis on abstract things, like spent shell casings-there was a decent plot behind it as well. Overall it was a good movie, one of the coolest looking films I've seen in a long time.