A man becomes aware of his pseudo-reality and joins forces with those who seek to take over its creators

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2005)

The Matrix is innovative, intelligent, and provocative. It is not the average "action packed thriller" for it is one of few movies that involves so many philosophic implications when concerning the nature of reality. This movie will leave viewers with a plethora of ideas, questions, and inquiries that provide ripe circumstances for post-cinematic discussion. This is what makes the movie so dichotomous: it is a movie for the thinker, the intellectual, and the philosophically bent, and also fills ones desire for two hours of stimulation with thrill and excitement. The movies' psychological implications can best be described in terms of Cartesian dualism, the philosophic term that broadly encompasses Descartes idea theory of perception. What The Matrix and Descartes have in common is the hypothesis that human beings do not have a direct link to reality, that our sensory organs are mere buffers to perceiving reality, therefore, our perception of the physical world exists only within our minds. The question then becomes, if we do not directly see reality, and reality may not resemble what is outside of us, can an outside agent cause and control our ideas? To understand The Matrix is to understand this argument. Obviously, the Wachowski brothers understood this, creating a two-hour psychological and philosophic experience not to be forgotten.