Well folks, this review may have a few spoilers, but damn if this thing doesn’t sound cool as all hell. My biggest worry about Keanu in the film was whether or not he could handle the balletic hallucinatory action that the script called for. From this review, it seems they got around that by doing some groovy effects and wire removal. Cool. I know a lot of you have that Johnny Mnuemonic and Speed fear working in ya, but the brothers directing this thing direct Coooooooooool Movies (or at least one so far, BOUND rocked!)
I wrote you once before, a review of "Carrie II" published under the name of Kyrios Georg. Anyhow, I just saw "The Matrix" ($100-mil next-summer megapic) and I thought you might like a review. If you post this one, could you do it under the name "Dr. Jensen"? Thanks. Feel free to edit for content; this has a lot of spoilers, even by your liberal standards.
By the way, it looks like I'm about 14 months away from shooting my own feature. Hurrah! OK, down to business --
THE MATRIX
Starring Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fishburne, Joe Pantiliano, Hugo Weaving, and this hot chick in the Famke Jansen school of muscle, brains, and wit.
Exciting virtual reality thriller where the weakness of acting and dialog is totally overwhelmed by the consistent execution of a world slightly different from our own, balls-to-the-wall extension of imagery to its logical conclusions, and hyperkinetic action sequences that had the preview crowd clapping and howling with pleasure. Marred by talky sequences, not enough effects, and not enough action, but I saw an early cut (a lot of the digital was incomplete) and I think they'll be tweaking the pacing a lot before next summer.
On the whole, this movie ROCKED. It was a blast pretty much all the way through, and so much more individual and fun than last summer's "Armaggedon" and "Godzilla." I look forward to paying to see it again in a complete form.
WARNING: Massive spoilers follow. You have just read enough to get the general idea. If you want to save the surprise, and you may well want to, avoid the rest of this review.
Movie starts with a beautiful woman in black leather exchanging gunfire with creepy government agents in black suits and sunglasses, led by Hugo Weaving ("Proof"). Fight descends into meelee, where we first get the sense that things are strange: the balletic martial arts style includes staggering mid-air leaps, wall-walking, and flying. She flees the agents by rooftop, jumping from building to building. Finally, she runs out of buildings, so she jumps to the next building -- across the street. The camera tracks on her from above as she leaps acoss the street eight floors below, traffic passing in the eerie distance. She lands successfully more than 100 feet from where she started. Weaving does the same. She runs across the rooftop and dives off the building. We follow her bulleting through the air and crashing through a window across an alley. She rolls, again impossibly, down a flight of stairs and out into the street. A payphone is ringing. The lead agent appears again, behind the wheel of a garbage truck. He guns it for the phone booth as the woman sprints toward it. He crashes into the booth just as she picks up the phone; but when the rubble is cleared, she is gone.
Immediately, we are digging this movie. The digital is nothing new, but its use as an extension of athletic grace into the superhuman is perfectly executed, leading to beautiful imagery of flight. And the fight sequence fucking *rules*.
Now we go to Keanu Reeves, programmer in a big boring company by day, hacker under the name Neo by night, where he is searching for legendary uber-hacker Morpheus. A little backstory on him, and then he is captured by the same government agents. During the interrogation, Weaving reveals himself to have an odd hissing diction. Then Keanu demands his phone call and the agent says it won't do him much good if he can't speak. Ropes of flesh grow out of Keanu's lips and his mouth rapidly seals itself shut, then dissapears.
All is clearly not right in the world.
Soon, Neo hooks up with the woman, named Trinity, and with Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne), and we find out that 1999 is actually a massive virtual reality -- The Matrix -- run by malevolent AI's in 2199. Almost all human beings are wired from birth into The Matrix and never awaken, except a select few freedmen and natural born humans living far underground in a city called Zion.
The AI's apparently conquered mankind sometime in the 21st century, but they were solar powered and in a last gambit, humanity wreaked nuclear winter on the world. So the computers captured all the people and harvest them for neural electricity in vast pod-columns, bla bla bla. The explanation doesn't make much sense and it's not physically sensible, but it sets up the plot: man enslaved, machines bad, Morpheus good.
Morpheus is very interested in Neo as a possible messiah ? a man with a brain that can interact directly with the programming of The Matrix and therefore effectively work miracles in 1999.
If this sounds familiar, it is -- "Truman Show," "Dark City," bits of "X-Files," Philip K. Dick's "Time Out of Joint." Target marketing for millenial anxiety seems to be spawning a lot of messiah/reality-paranoia projects out of Hollywood. Hokey nonsense, but still kinda cool. Reality paranoia (the real world is an illusion) is a nice way to tie in conspiracy paranoia, consumer values ennui, archaic end-of-the-world motifs, and technological anxiety.
What makes "The Matrix" special is the limits to which it pushes its imagery, the near-flawless execution of an engineered 1999, and its magnificent fight footage.
In the first category, the portrayal of the pod columns and of their effects on human physiology is grotesque and wonderful. The engineered 1999 seems both slightly too bright, imperfect in that perfect way computers tend to do, and tense and slightly depressing. But the movie really comes alive when fights break out.
After the first battle between Trinity and the agents, with all the flying around, we have to wait about half an hour until Neo goes into training with Morpheus to hone his talents for manipulating The Matrix. He gets martial arts downloaded into his brain, and we cut to VR, where he does battle with Morpheus. These sequences are shot precisely like Mortal Kombat, Bushido Blade or any good playstation martial arts game, with all the crazy zooms, wild tilts, tracking, and cutting. But we're seeing real people move superfast, walk up walls, flip overhead, and so on. The impeccable cinematography and choreography of this section is both hilarious and exhilarating, and the fact that Reeves's and Fishburne's faces are on top of these super-real bodies makes it awesome.
Later the heroes decide to storm a military building in 1999, for reasons we don't need to get into, and they stock up on weapons in a holding program. They call out "guns" to their techie. From the white limbo come roaring endless racks of weaponry, and we go, "YEAH! The mothafuckin' GUNS!" Gleeful joy. Then we go back into VR 1999 and the gunplay with the agents (AI avatars, it turns out) begins. THIS SEQUENCE IS INSANELY AWESOME. It being VR, everything is just a little *too much* in a way that is not quite right -- but perfectly so. Bullets *everywhere.* Hails of bullets. More rubble in the air than you have ever seen. Balletic movement that is impossible; Reeves cartwheeling while firing two guns, things like that. Like a sort of hallucination of Woo. Shots from below of shells raining out of choppers. Bombs. All kindsa stuff.
Again, we have seen all this before. But we have not seen it with this kind of verve since "Face/Off," and like that film, the bulky Hollywoodized filmmaking still bears the stamp of a distinct personal vision and impulse. This is not in the same genre with "Con Air," "The Rock," "Enemy of the State," and other recent cookie-cutter action films from the Bruckheimer school. It makes use of the same hyperbolic violence and streamlined (read: stupid) characterizations, but it is its own thing; the same tools bent to a different purpose. I didn't recognize the name of the brothers who directed this film, but they rock and I'll go to their next project.
The ending, I suspect, will be tinkered with, because it is sucky and preachy right now; a film like this can not sustain explicit, half-assed moralizing.
Anyhow.
A word on references in "The Matrix." It has become de rigeur to include "canny" in-jokes and references to sources of inspiration in a motion picture, and "The Matrix" handles that convention with a panache too little seen elsewhere lately. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," which indirectly inspired "Terminator," more directly informs this film, and is made graceful reference to in the sealing shut of Neo's mouth. During the training sequence, when the techies are downloading fight techniques into Neo's brain, one program seen briefly on a monitor is labelled "Drunken Boxing." A good laugh. The casting of Hugo Weaving as a vicious AI is a funny bit of symmetry with Russell Crowe, his co-star from "Proof", getting cast as a vicious AI in "Virtuosity." Trinity, played by the aforementioned hot-actress-whose-name-I-forget, is the first successful portrayal of William Gibson's "Molly" type of black-leather-clad athletic intelligent kickass heroine. Ripley doesn't count because "Alien" is not cyberpunk. In general, this movie, in tone if not content, feels like the first successful bigscreen presentation of a Gibsonian universe. Where "Johnny Mnemonic" was self-conscious and stiff, this movie appreciates the radical fluidity of a VR story, has terminally cool stuff (like a morphing metal bug that likes belly buttons), and doesn't dawdle over all that.
In addition, Keanu has gracefully allowed to be continued the by-now six- or seven-movie-old tradition of having a character onscreen refer to him as stupid.
While this review is largely very, very positive, the film is nowhere near great. The dialog is stiff and at times laughable, the directors have nowhere near the facility with acting sequences that they do with fighting, and not only the final scene (which will inevitably go) but the entire resolution of the story is weak in a way that finite funding induces. Nevertheless, I believe the balance of boring chatter and over-the-top action will have been perfected by the time "The Matrix" is released. An imperfect film, yes, but a breath of fresh air for next summer.
Assuming you haven't gone into oxygen shock on Episode I, of course.
Yours,
Dr. Jensen
