Hey! It´s The Turner Diaries - the Movie!

Rating: 1/10 (3 March 2002)

For starters, I´d like to say that there are lots of films out there that use special effects to make brutal killings look cool, and I have no problem whatsoever with that. In fact, nothing clears the head better than an hour or two of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Wesley Snipes killing baddies and shouting one-liners. As long as an action movie doesn´t take itself too seriously, nor do the audience have to. But the Matrix is one of those really dumb action movies that aren´t content with serving as eye candy. It desperatly wants to be Thought Provoking and Carry A Message. When you start analyzing that message, you almost get to belive that perhaps the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh filled in as script doctors. Let´s review the facts, shall we (warning, spoilers down below, stop reading if you really want to be "surprised" by this film): After the initial action scenes, the movie gets rather boring while three important facts are established: 1: That even thou "the Matrix" is a simulation, nearly all the people in "the Matrix" are real people who think they live in the real world, except for a small select group of people who know The Truth.
2: That you cannot go from living in "the Matrix" to living in the real world without going though excrutiating amounts of fysiotherapy.
3: That if you get hurt and die in "the Matrix" you also die in the real world.
And after that those facts have been implemented over and over, the film goes on to show the heroes remorselessly shooting down and killing hordes of policemen, security guards and the occational homless person, "real people" who we have to persume are just performing their choirs and duties in what they belive to be the "real world". All this carnige is justified in the name of a Greater Cause, namely to "liberate" the inhabitants of the Matrix all at once, even though they will have no real chance of survival once liberated. Am I the only one that gets a bit distraught by this?
Oh, and in case you actually didn´t know, "the Turner Diarys" is a rather infamous old science fiction novel written by a nazi and treasured by white supremacists. It tells the "heroic" story of a little group of self-righteous fascist terroists who overthrow the American gouverment by instigating riots and killing all the evil FBI agents, among other things. Add a bit of trendy cyberspace mumbo jumbo and what have you got? You figure it out.