Like a bass guitar solo - pointless, self-indulgent pyrotechnics.

Rating: Null/10 (17 December 2001)

Possible spoilers within.
Dude, it's, like, this really wild concept, y'know, where we're all in this cyber-reality and the machines are, like, in control and dude, they also make the reality, or like, what is reality, and we're the energy source and then there's like, this Saviour-type dude only cool with shades and he's all into computers but he's not a geek or he is but he's a really cool geek and hard too and only he can save the world but he doesn't know it like he's the Second Coming or something...
If I'd loved this movie, that would be my review. It's sci-fi for So-Cal surf-dudes, thrash-metal roadies and other sub-genres of the main MTV marketing demographic. Any sci-fi fan worth her salt could see through this flimsy rehash of ideas the screenplay has plundered and diluted down to something more digestable, a dumbing-down if you will, and that's not the kind of thing to do with sci-fi. Lofty and well-constructed concepts are at it's heart. I've seen more original concepts in a Star Trek episode. Hollywood's not the most original of thinkers yet still manages to produce good movies though so let's not be too harsh on this point. After all, Star Wars plunders a whole mythology or two but still works.
The first clue that we're heading for an extended MTV video is in the lobby of the cinema. The poster and life-size cardboard cutout feature the main players dressed in their de rigeur black leather and shades. All of them. It would only have taken one of them to take the shades off to give it a touch of humanity but no, nobody wanted to be the uncool one so consequently there's no eye contact at the initial point-of-sale. It made me wonder how much of their rebellious time was spent shopping for sunglasses in this oppressive alt-reality. Screen-glare must be a real drag in cyberspace. It's all so cool it's cold. In a movie that's about humanity vs. technology, that's a big strategic oversight. George Lucas gave Darth Vader sunglasses as helmet and got the bad guy of all bad guys, apart from the Emperor whose eyes also remained hidden, but if Han Solo had been in Rayban Aviators we'd have been making closed-fist up-and-down motions to our companions at his every utterance.
So, a story that avoids any stretch of brainpower, an over-abundance of "cool" and performances that are journeyman at best. What's left? Editing? Lighting? Set design? Heh, I'm teasing, of course. We all know the star of this movie is the SFX, and there's it's Achilles Heel if it can be said to have one specific weak point. The secret of a good special effect is that it's like a Starbuck's bliss bar: best nibbled in small doses, not scoffed like a bag of M&Ms. The FX should complement, not dominate. CGI needs economy of use. [CGI-only movies needing even stronger storylines and characters] Use the same Photoshop filter on an entire roll of film to get sick of it real fast.
The Matrix's SFX are so in-your-face that it's top-heavy, and they aren't even that original. The stop-motion camera array effect has been around for a long time as far as SFX go and had been done to death long before The Matrix. I believe Sting was the first one to take it out of the art world of it's creator, and how convenient for my review that it started it's life on MTV, not on the lot of Industrial Light & Magic.
The Matrix is not a lousy movie. The Wachowskis brought the same stylishness to this as they did to Bound. Unfortunately they left the rest of the successful elements behind. I'm as anticipatory of the sequel[s] as Speed 2.