The Matrix

You might think, if you have watched the previews and television advertisements for "The Matrix," that it is a barely comprehensible, overly pretentious action movie which stars Keanu Reeves. The truth, though, is that it is pretty easily comprehended, it wears its pretension lightly, and it is more of a movie about Keanu Reeves discovering the potential locked in him, and realizing that its limits are self-imposed, by old habits of rote thinking and wisdom passed down by supposedly infallible generations past. Of course, the potential Keanu Reeves is discovering is his potential to kill vast numbers of malignant, overlord, godlike artificial intelligences who have imprisoned humanity in pods to harvest their electrical energy, so perhaps an action component to the movie was necessary. Indeed, it is a joy to see Keanu kick his first ass, because he is realizing the potential that we, the moviegoers, knew he had all along.

Well, it's also a joy because it has been so incredibly long in coming. "The Matrix" does not attempt to buck the trend of increasingly longer movies that seems to have descended, unwanted, upon the innocent moviegoer, and as a result we are treated to what are seemingly endless exposition scenes before we get to the good stuff. Moviemakers seem to think that if we get a little bitty bit of action at the beginning of the movie, we won't mind (and so, here, we get the ass-kicking female presence in the movie doing her thang at the movie's outset), but this is just not true. The AMC City Place audience's desire for something to actually happen as we neared the halfway point, and Keanu was still saying "What?" to everything that appeared before his uncomprehending eyes, was palpable.

And let me tell you, no one in movies today does incomprension like Keanu Reeves does incomprehension. He really seems to inhabit the noncomprehending characters that he plays. I hope he has a good lawyer read over his acting contracts. Since this is what he is being asked to do, I have a hard time impeaching pauvre Keanu for it, but someone should have realized that exposition is the action movie's enemy, not its helpmate. Lawrence Fishburne, as usual, is good at providing gentle gravitas, with the subtext that he can really kick ass left unspoken but undoubtedly perceived. The kick-ass female is played by Carrie-Anne Moss, who does it right. Visually and musically, this film is incredibly stylish, and the special effects are everything you would expect them to be from the commercials. Indeed, some might consider these worthy of a trip to the cineplex by themselves. And, one must say, when the kick-ass sequences start coming, they come with a vengeance and with verve.

But the real reason to go is this film's basically uplifting message. You may have noticed from reading other reviewers who actually bother to summarize plot that this movie is quite similar to "Terminator 2: Schwartzie's Payday," in that they both involve the future defeat of humanity by artificial intelligences that get a bit too smart for us, which can only be circumvented by adroit action by humans in the present to preserve our future chances. Also, the "agents" of the AI matrix owe severe royalties to their obvious antecedent, shape-shifting, implacable Robert Patrick, the T-1000 from "T2." But that film was won by Schwartzenegger, who as I explained earlier (see "Mercury Rising") is not an actual human being, and its main message seemed to be that we can change our fates if we are only aided in doing so by time-traveling cyborgs.

Keanu "Huh?" Reeves, however, is human (all too human, for most of the exposition), and the method he uses to change humanity's fate is to awaken the same potential in each and every human being that Keanu has been able to discover within himself. Keanu has no superhuman powers, and indeed, he is called "not too bright" by at least one character in the film. In the end, however, he is able to discover one simple truth: the limitations he has felt all his life (like, you know, gravity, and not being able to dodge veritable flotillae of bullets) are actually artificial constructs imposed from without. By acknowledging the fictions that govern his life and dismissing them, therefore, he is able to do what neither he nor almost anyone thought him capable of: save the universe. We may not all want to save the world, but I think this is a useful lesson for a movie to teach nonetheless. If a movie can teach it while showing a bunch of cool fights, hey, even better.

Attractive Man Count: 2, I guess. Keanu I'll give one to and Mr. Fishburne also.

Attractive Woman Count: Moss is a 1.

Overall Grade: B+. It takes a long time getting there, but the result is worth the wait.

I'm still wondering why all the "Alice in Wonderland" references Lindemann

Not to sound too elitist, but the reason I didn't talk about the nature-of-reality discussion in this film was because I'd read Descartes and Hume about eight years before I saw this film, and I just assumed that these philosophers were part of everyone's idea collection and that there was no further need to discuss something we'd all undoubtedly pondered for many hours already. I was wrong. When I began attending Maryland, I stopped making these mistakes.

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