THE MATRIX (1999) Face it people - the cookie means nothing There are some movies I liked at the time, while I was watching them, and for long enough afterward to write up an impressed review, only to later look back on it less favourably, ultimately wishing I hadn't recommended it. And the thing is, I'm pretty sure I knew at the time, deep down, that I was being way too easy on them. This would've been one of them, except I never did write a review of it, until now. The Matrix is the kind of sci-fi movie that invites you to bring your brain to the party, but your brain ends up sitting on the couch all night, snacking on chips with the other brains, while everybody's stupid bodies are up there dancing to "Dragula". There are so many things that annoy me, frustrate me, and otherwise piss me off about The Matrix that it's tempting to disregard all the many things it does right. I've long thought of it as a bad movie wrapped in the skin of a really good one, but I can't deny it being more entertaining than not while I'm watching it. It's the following few hours (days, if I'm feeling vindictive) when I get the mental equivalent of that too-much-greasy-food feeling. Bringing up my problems with it in any significant way is not going to be served well by avoiding spoilers, so consider yourself warned - I'm gonna give away the whole damn movie here. There are only five or six of you who haven't seen it anyway. And since you know the story, I'm not gonna describe it for you. I'm just gonna say what I liked about this movie, and what I didn't. Keanu Reeves stars - wait, stop right there. I've complained at length about Keanu before. I won't repeat it all here - I'm just going to say that he's no better or worse than he usually is, still just Keanu, never the character he's playing, but he's actually pretty convincing (to my completely martial-arts-clueless eyes) in his fight scenes. I'm not gonna be mean. But I do kinda hold it against this movie that it rescued Keanu from his direct-to-video destiny. I guess I'll start with the plot. The central concept of The Matrix is intriguing and loaded with so many possibilities it's easy to understand why, more or less concurrent with the release of the film, a collection of short stories set in the Matrix was published, written by a stack of authors including Harlan Ellison. Wish I read it. So while the concept is great in a broad sense - while expectedly owing its share of debts - it is in the details that it falls apart. And it's not just a little here, a little there - it's a non-stop barrage of "What the...why don't they just...wouldn't it be easier if..." For starters, the AI machine race is using humans as a power source. I can swallow my elementary understanding of the laws of thermodynamics to accept that more energy can be extracted from human bodies than is being invested in keeping them alive. Hey, it's a movie. But the script has to add that this process is "combined with a form of fusion". That's just insulting, because of course it doesn't matter what kind of fusion it's combined with - the laws of thermodynamics still apply. It's like somebody telling me an obvious lie to avoid hurting my feelings, which I don't take personally if they let it go at that, but then then they tell me another lie two seconds later to cover his ass because he knows I saw through the first one. The Matrix was created in order to keep the brains of all these humans active, so that the bodies can continue to live and produce power. Why do the brains have to be active? For that matter, why use humans at all? Wouldn't cattle or pigs or just about anything be less complicated to work with? I doubt their brains would reject a reality that was too happy and perfect. I can understand if it's simply the AI's having taken the war with humanity personally (I loved Weaving's frustrated words about how much he hates it in the Matrix), but why then did they try making it a paradise in the first place? Aside, of course, from the pretentious religious angle (it's, like, we were exiled from Paradise!). The Matrix has been around for...well, nobody knows, but it's always the end of the 20th century, the peak of our civilization. Has nobody noticed that, year after year, it's still the end of the 20th century? So while humanity mills about each in their individual roles in the world of the Matrix, the AI powers that be have assigned individuals amongst themselves to enter the Matrix to ensure everything goes smoothly. Like people who jack into the Matrix from outside (that this can go on undetected by the Matrix program is pushing it), they can bend or break natural laws within limits. They can move and jump super-fast, they can alter physical matter (changing windows to brick in one scene, Keanu's mouth into a much-improved non-orifice in another), they can defy (if not entirely defeat) gravity. What exactly their limits are, is left pretty vague. I liked most of this, except for the part about altering matter. Here are guys who can fight their opponents by, say, encasing them in stone or bringing entire buildings down with a thought if they have to (why not? A few support columns disappear and BOOM), and instead they're shooting at each other and fighting with kung fu. Kung fucking fu, are you kidding me? If an Agent is killed in the Matrix, no problem for him - he can just pop up again in some bystander's "body". While generally they only go to a new body if the one they're in is killed (bullet in the head, run over by a train), there is one chase late in the movie where they keep turning up in body after body. If an Agent uses your body for a minute, but then leaves, do you remember leaping from building to building, and throwing knives at Keanu? If a human is killed in the Matrix, he really dies - either flatlining back on Morpheus's ship, or getting flushed down the giant toilet in the AI power plant. You can also die if you're unplugged from the Matrix before being beamed out by answering a phone call (you would think that a program that effectively controls the entire universe would have some connections at the phone company). One scene has a woman facing the prospect of being so unplugged. "No...not like this!" she pleads. Oh come on - I can think of a million worse ways to go out. Now, the Matrix aside, how about the "real" world? Well, the war between humanity and the AI's wasn't good for it. It's cloudy all the time (I don't know how you would "scorch the sky"), and all the humans who aren't copper-tops (cute in-movie slang) live in an underground city called Zion. HAR-HAR - I can see why Morpheus doesn't like "waking up" people past a certain age - he might get some Muslims! In the real world, everybody gets a single name, no last names here. Big ethnic guys get names like "Tank" and "Dozer". Kids get names like "Mouse". Mysterious guys who might be traitors get names like "Cypher". You get the idea. Everybody we meet lives on Morpheus's hovercraft, zipping around an abandoned sewer system avoiding squid-like AI prowlers. I don't know if the squids are individuals like the Agents or if they're "ships" or drones or whatever. The hovercrafts only have one weapon that works against them: the EMP (we saw a lot of EMP weapons in the movies around this time). Humans can instantly download, into their brains, knowledge required for all sorts of things. You can master kung fu or helicopter piloting in seconds - every student's dream of knowledge without patience or discipline or work, the antithesis of the pseudo-Buddhist aspects of this movie's deafeningly unsubtle religious angle. This is one of the more intriguing aspects of the world in which these characters live, but I kept thinking, how much can you download before your brain just melts? How hard can it be to think of a better weapon than an EMP when you can instantly download the world's store of science into everybody's brain? And how do people handle all that knowledge and power without the discipline put into learning it? Keanu seems to learn how to become a cold-blooded killer in as much time as he took to learn the moves - he'd apparently never been in a fight in his life, but after some practice duke-outs with Morpheus back on the ship, suddenly he's able to casually walk into a building and mow down a roomful of security guards like it was nothing more than a video game. There aren't just ones and zeros - there's a real human getting flushed for everyone they mow down. Collateral damage, sure...but don't present it as wild-ride action sequence with funky dance music and expect me to think it's fun. Of course, the concept of "collateral damage" was a lot more academic for most of us in 1999 than it is after Sept. 11 - I didn't like this then, and I really don't like it now. Now this was all the sci-fi side of the plot. I might complain, but this is the side I liked. Now we get into the flaky religious side. Now, I did like the sort-of zen mind-over-matter aspect to this. I liked that a bald kid can reflect "There is no spoon", and it actually makes perfect sense (though it also suggests that you don't have to be the Matrix program or an Agent in order to alter Matrix pseudo-matter - maybe Keanu should've been the one encasing Agents in stone). All the pop philosophy stuff here, I can hack. What I can't hack, is "The One". Keanu is told that he is "The One". This is another stop-right-there moment for me. I've said many times, I hate The Prophecy That Fortells Of The Coming Of The Chosen One Who Will Lead Us Out Of Bondage. I hate it I hate it I hate it. Could the Brothers Wachowski think of no other reason Morpheus would want to pull Neo out of the Matrix, that they had to bring out this millennia-outdated device? I'm sure there's a school of thought that says that this is a timeless concept that will never go out of style - I call bullshit on that, I think its time was up so long before I was born its best-before date had only two digits. And there's actually a point where he's told he's NOT the one. Yeah, the scene with the Oracle (Gloria Foster). Goddamn, I hate that scene. It doesn't just bring the movie to a dead stop, padding it out to over two hours. It's only here to have the Oracle lie to Neo and the audience, to create a false conflict later on when Keanu has to decide to embark on a suicide mission to rescue Morpheus from some Agents, and discover that he really IS The One. Would the ending have been less suspenseful if Keanu had only Morpheus's word to go on that he's The One? We never even learn what makes Morpheus so damned sure; we're never given any reason to take him any more seriously than a run-of-the-mill zealot beyond his rank as Captain. The whole subplot with the traitorous Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) I could've done without, serving as an excuse to get Morpheus caught (so that Keanu can rescue him despite all this shit with the Oracle - all this bad shit comes back to the Oracle) and to provide Keanu's Jesus with a Judas. His motivations don't even make any sense; I understand that he'd rather be back in the Matrix and living a cushy life, but I simply don't buy that he hates all the people on the hovercraft enough to kill them all himself, but not enough to want to remember his, uh, "revenge" for when he's taken back to the power plant. But yeah, I hate all the religious shit in this movie. Keanu even dies and comes back to life at the end. It was to my great satisfaction that a lot of this appears to be getting torn down in its first sequel - which made me consider that maybe I'm being a little hard on this movie, but I don't think so. For one thing, I didn't buy "We always envisioned it as a trilogy!" then, and I don't buy it now that they waited four years to continue it. The Matrix has to stand on its own. As an action movie, The Matrix would be without peer if it weren't trying so hard to set off all my "goddammit!" buttons. The famous "bullet time" effects are skilfully employed to show just how close close calls can be; imagine an episode of The A-Team where we saw the path of every single bullet that doesn't connect with its target (that would be all of them). The first action scene has Carrie-Ann Moss kicking the tar out of a room full of police, even killing a few. We don't know yet that she's one of the film's heroes, so we're not asked yet to cheer for her - for that matter, the point of this scene isn't that she kicks all of their asses, but that she does it by running on walls, and we don't know why yet. This gives the character of Trinity an aura of dangerousness that hangs with her until her ultimate usefulness to the story is revealed, when she whispers to Neo's jacked-in, presumably unaware body how she really figures into things. Then that aura goes up in flames. Moss delivers this scene with a hurt, shamed look. Her character has gone from ass-kicking action chick - not exactly a stretch for her as an actor, but by most reports an enjoyable and non-degrading role to play - to the woman who's here to provide the movie's hero with the lovin' (otherwise known as a Bruckheimer Special). In fact, it's the fact that she loves Neo which confirms that he is The One. You're here to love Keanu, toots - thanks for playing. Not to mention that it's at this point he dies and is resurrected (goddammit!!!). The world of the Matrix is filmed with a sickly combination of urine-yellow and snot-green. The "real" world is sort of a metallic grey-blue; the CGI effects are excellent in these scenes, but they suffer a bit from being so monochromatic, with the occasional touch of red. I liked the Gigeresque nightmare of the baby-farms, though it keeps bringing me back to the still-unanswered question of, where is this race of thinking machines? We see a few tending the farms, or are these just tractors being operated? Are the AI's hanging out in their own wild n' crazy AI-Matrix, or are they actually lumbering around out there in the "real" world? Do even the people in the movie know? The costumes seemed cool amongst some quarters for a time, until the whole "trenchcoat mafia" thing hammered home to the world what I'd already figured out: trenchcoats and sunglasses on skinny guys is how nerds dress when they want to look tough. This is "nerd macho" (see also Johnny Mnemonic). Thank you, I'd rather have my tough guys look more like tough guys than nerds in disguise. Most of the acting in this movie is the Joel Silver standard of really bad. Carrie-Ann Moss is good, until that terrible ending. Keanu is Keanu. Fishburne is stiff but at least seems convinced of his own profundities - no reason is ever given for his absolute certainty that Keanu is The One. The only real standout who holds his own throughout the film is Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith, who speaks very slowly, very deliberately, as if talking to a small child he doesn't like. I don't really buy his theory on how humans aren't mammals, but I do like his riff on Cobra's "You're the disease, and I'm the cure". I dunno. I can't swallow this movie as the first part in a trilogy, especially considering how all the religious stuff was thrown out the window in The Matrix Reloaded, so I'm not going to retroactively upgrade this movie thanks to its sequel. I have enough trouble swallowing it on its own. Goddammit I've been writing this review for too long. This has been in varying states of incompleteness for about a year. I'm too tired of it to give it a proper finish. It's over. I'm moving on BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE