movie review - Matrix
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Keanu Reaves played someone like himself, I think - he's got that Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise way of churning out the same character over and over. But it suits this flick to a tee. This is a sci-fi thriller set in a (somewhat) future where our boy is a coder with a sideline in some unspecified Bad Thing (software of some kind - it comes on 3.5" floppies).
The world our hero knows meets a hitch when strange characters start appearing out of the woodwork to enlist his help in a secret war. To make a long story shorter, he choses sides, and the shooting starts.
Before long, he realizes that his entire existence to this point has been a simulation while his body jacks in from a pod filled with breathable liquid, hanging from a giant stalk with thousands of other humans. Just like so many brussel sprouts, but each a little generator for the new master race - the intelligent software we created.
This movie borrows from everything from Schwartzenegger action flicks to the late Stanley Kubrick and on to William Gibson and Philip Dick, but comes up with some reasonable stuff of its own. The slick, seamless, and astounding special effects are blended into the film in an integral way that they support the story and its component scenes, rather than serving as annoying eye-candy or distraction (e.g. Star Trek). But more importantly, the flick is all about whether our boy can learn to think outside the box sufficiently (and in the short time he's got, natch) to save himself and the rest of his benighted people. It's an unusual struggle, and one that lends the movie just a touch of thinking to place it in the territory of real sci-fi.
While there is some Hollywood Syndrome (e.g. the principle character's struggle is defined largely through his relationship with flying pieces of steel, and there's a throwaway love story that takes all of forty-five seconds of the movie's time for no real reason!), in the end (and I always write these reviews some time after I saw the films) it's one of the better releases from '99 to date.
Recommended.