Keanu versus Philip K. Dick

Rating: 7/10 (17 September 2008)

Action set pieces in this movie have already become iconic: brilliantly choreographed, inventive and gloriously over the top, they represent a fine mix of science fiction and martial arts. The "bullet-time" effect, in particular, has been ripped off dozens of times since.
Unfortunately, that's the only real achievement of the Matrix series; everything else reeks of Philip K. Dick for dummies. Not only the stuff about alternative realities and cyberspace, but also pretty much every other idea seems to have been discreetly borrowed from other sources (aside from Dick, major inspirations are Alex Proyas' Dark City and William Gibson's Count Zero). Even the famous set piece where Neo (Reeves) infiltrates an enemy base to rescue his mentor/guru Morpheus (Fishburne) has its precedent in Dick, bullet-time included (read Counter-clockwise if you don't believe me). The result is an admittedly pretty collage.
Human element is weak, which makes emotional involvement faint; characters are bland, showing little personality. Reeves' Neo is just a blank. Fishburne and Moss fare a little better, but the stand-outs are Pantoliano as traitorous Cypher and an icy, smug Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith: every time he is on screen the movie shift gears. It's one of the Matrix' ironies that its cybernetic villain is a lot more lively than the human hero. Kubrick did the same in 2001, but that was a deliberate choice.
While Dick's works are rich with irony and melancholy, the Wachowskis go for kung fu and head shots. Still, better an overdose of action than the portentous posturing which they tried to pass off as philosophy in the two sequels.
7/10