THE MATRIX
Written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski
Starring Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishburne
Classification: AA
Rating: * * *

For those who have been waiting for movies to catch up with the graphic possibilities for comic books, wait no longer: The Matrix is among us.

This is a visually astonishing sci-fi thriller that is all about style, and a little bit about ideas. It’s not at all about character, but the Wachowski brothers (the writer-directors who’ve given us such other essays in film style as Bound) would probably argue that mythology isn’t about character, either. So let’s leave the debate and jump into the Matrix, shall we?

The film’s first visual is a black screen with a square cursor blinking attentively in the upper left-hand corner, to signal that much of what will ensue takes place in cyberspace. We then cut to Thomas Anderson, a youngish wonk (Keanu Reeves) whose Web moniker is Neo. Neo has begun to suspect that the virtual reality inside the computer may extend out into the everyday world. He teams up via Internet with someone named Morpheus, who warns him that a particularly sinister police force will do anything to stop their investigations.

And how. When Neo, taken into police custody, demands the right to phone a lawyer, the fearsome Agent Smith raises a finger and causes Neo’s month to vanish. He then implants an electronic insect in Neo’s gut -- which is removed shortly after by Morpheus’s sexy sidekick Trinity, using a fabulous machine whose provenance, like the titanium bug’s, is never explained.

Then we’re off into comic-book land, complete with tormented camera angles, viscous fluids and parallel universes where the post-holocaust ruins of our civilization are viewed on a handy retro 1953 RCA Victor television set.

We learn that the actual year is 2199, long after humanity lost the final battle with the Artificial Intelligence machines it unwisely created early in the 21st century. The human legions went so far as to scorch the planet and permanently blacken the sky to deny the AI creatures access to solar power. alas, the critters found another source: the bioelectric energy of human beings themselves, who were bred thereafter in vast pod farms and permanently wired with electric plugs.

The everyday life we humans experience -- the illusion that we are still walking, wenching and dining out in fine restaurants in the year 1999 -- is implanted by the AI “folks,” familiar with the 200-year-old philosophical notion of esse est percipere: that we, who receive all our information about the world through our senses, cannot a priori prove that an external world exists.

In explaining this, Morpheus leaves out the Latin but loads up the visuals: Neo gets to see his real self, a hapless body afloat in green (*red actually) fluid and nurtured by spider-like AI machines. Morpheus’s commando team has rescued it from its pod because he believes that Neo is The One -- the saviour who has been endowed with the superhuman kick-boxing techniques necessary to defeat Agent Smith and his confreres, who are AI machines in human form.

Still with us? Reservations aside, you have to admire the producers’ shrewd guess that a computer-aware generation of teenagers can follow a complex setup of this sort. Behind it, equally shrewdly, lie a set of old and familiar archetypes: Neo as culture hero, “the one” who will save his people, with Morpheus as his prophet. We learn this from a woman called The Oracle. Humanity’s last rampart, a city hidden in the earth’s interior, is called Zion. Pretty much all the cultural echoes are punched up on screen, for whatever they’re worth.

Then they’re packaged in reliable teen neuroses: disgust with bodily fluids (pods), fantasies of limitless physical prowess. To disguise the hackneyed nature of all this, the Wachowskis introduce a layer of retro-stylish irony -- amid scientific wonders, the heroes are obliged to rendezvous in old tenements and subway stations, and to call headquarters on black rotary telephones.

Visually, we see Keanu Reeves and his svelte sidekick Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) dodge bullets by walking up walls and revolving in mid-air, techniques borrowed from Hong Kong martial-arts films. The dialogue is quick and moderately witty. The acting -- well, what to say? Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishburne (Morpheus) spent months training in martial arts, and you gotta admire ‘em. But the actual performances are strictly first-level comic-book.

And the concept? Well, in a full-bore ironic mode, I’d say that if you wanted to get rich, you’d create a film where the characters appear to inhabit a trendy whizz-bang cyber-reality. Yet, unbeknownst to the filmgoing audience, this apparently

And yes, sorry. The article abruptly ends here!
* indicates correction made by Heather
Retyped by Heather on April 27th, 1999. Printed exactly as previously printed by the Globe and Mail.