A lot of fun.

Rating: Null/10 (26 November 2006)

Keanu Reeves Carrie Anne Moss Laurence Fishburne
The Matrix is the beautifully-filmed remake of the lyrical 17th century french play isolée la fleur, in which a man becomes trapped inside a massive computer simulation, and must fight to free himself and his fellow man.
Keanu Reeves (Bill and Ted's excellent Adventure) and Lawrence Fishburne (Booty Masters) turn in excellent performances as Neo and Morpheus, two souls locked in battle with the Matrix. The story unfolds when Neo, a typical male computer hacker (fit, good-looking, great fashion sense) meets Trinity, a typical female hacker (also good-looking, fit, wears tight leather). She reveals to him the awful truth of the Matrix, that life is merely a computer simulation meant to fool humanity.
Neo realizes that he is the key to unlocking the Matrix - but this is where the film slows down a bit. Neo finds that the only way to defeat the Matrix is to write a virus that will destroy it from within. We then spend the next hour and twenty minutes watching Neo code a virus in C++, a long, tedious process that could have been left unfilmed. In scene after scene we watch him type, type some more, look up the Matrix's packet transport protocols, type, get a snack, type...
You get the picture. Only after this does Neo realize there is another way to defeat the Matrix: by killing everyone attached to it. However, he must kill each person in a new and different way - each killing more spectacular than the last.
In the final act of the film, Neo arms himself with dozens of machine guns and goes about killing all six billion people attached to the Matrix. After this is accomplished, humanity (the five remaining humans) is finally free.
I question the moral sent by the third act (does violence really ever solve anything?) but it sure is fun to watch. I also learned some valuable lessons about coding software from the first half of the film, and got some fascinating insight into the world of computer hackers: all of them are cool, good-looking killing machines with great bodies. Rarely have hackers ever been portrayed so accurately on film.
A classic. I give The Matrix two stars.
**