April 1–8, 1999

movie shorts

The Matrix

Written and directed by the Wachowski Brothers
A Warner Bros. release

recommended

by Sam Adams

If your ears could penetrate the deafening mix of gunfire and futuristic whooshes that accompanies the eye-popping combat scenes in The Matrix, you might hear something surprising: laughter. Not the kind of laughter that follows a punchline, but the kind that comes halfway round the long turn on a rollercoaster, when you've been on long enough to realize you have no idea what's coming next, but it's going to be good.

There's a certain kind of visceral, straight-into-the-brain joy that only really good action movies provide. It's easy to pooh-pooh their easy formulas, but action movies are, more than any other Hollywood genre, about the sheer art of filmmaking, the thrill of visual stimulation. A movie like Face/Off, or like The Matrix, exhilarates you with its self-topping, if-you-thought-that-was-great-then-watch-THIS energy. A master of the form like John Woo knows that audiences aren't coming to the theater for realism; they're coming to get their socks knocked off, and off again. Action movies that don't admit to and exploit their own outrageousness are just wasting their — and more importantly, our — time.

A futuristic allegory set in the year 2199 (or thereabouts), The Matrix concerns a hotshot computer hacker who discovers that the world he lives in is merely a figment of his imagination. Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) punches a clock as a programmer for a software company, but he only truly comes alive as the hacker Neo, whose delving into the vast network of computers that control his world has yielded only two things: the name Morpheus and a question, "What is the Matrix?"

The Wachowski Brothers, who wrote and directed The Matrix, don't waste a lot of time setting up Thomas Anderson's humdrum life. He's barely been in his gray-looking office for two minutes before a trio of black-suited men with matching sunglasses and tie clips start heading his way. We've already seen them chasing a woman with superhuman speed before the opening credits, but Thomas has to rely on a surprise telephone call (on a just-FedExed cellular) from Morpheus to tell him to get the hell out. Telling him when to dodge to the next cubicle, when to dart for the corner office, Morpheus knows everything before Thomas does, but Thomas can't quite follow instructions, and is nabbed.

Thomas is interrogated by the men in black suits — called Agents — who rather nastily demonstrate their powers by removing his mouth and implanting a creature under his skin that looks like a cross between a scorpion and a metallic sperm. His mouth regained, Thomas is then spirited away by a woman named Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), a fellow hacker who's already introduced herself as his ticket to meeting Morpheus. Like the Agents, Trinity too favors the dark end of the color spectrum, although her taste runs more to PVC pants than Brooks Brothers suits. What is it about dystopian futures and the color black, anyway? Don't bad guys like pastels? There hasn't been a movie this dark since, well, Dark City.

Morpheus turns out to be Laurence Fishburne in full badass mode, overcoat and pince-nez sunglasses included. The Matrix, he tells Neo (as Thomas is called henceforth), cannot be explained, only shown. Morpheus, contrary to his name, offers Neo a chance to wake up from the dream he's been living his whole life, and a warning that once he knows the truth, there is no turning back.

Morpheus offers Neo two pills, one red, one blue — one the key to understanding the Matrix, the other a prescription for blissful oblivion. (Thankfully, that's the script's last Alice in Wonderland reference, although there's a groan-inducing "not in Kansas" line still to come.) Post-red pill, Neo finds himself in a metallic nightmare in which human beings are plugged in like so many Christmas lights, their minds fed pictures of a false world while artificially intelligent computers feed off their energy. The Agents are essentially antiviral programs, designed to find and destroy intruders. No one, Neo learns, has ever gone up against them and won.

Against them is a small group of heroes, a ragtag bunch who have only their unpredictability to keep them one step ahead. With spiffy names like Switch (Belinda McClory) and Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), they're every bit your Humanity's Last Hope cliché.

It's to the Wachowskis' credit that this middle section (totally absent from the TV commercials) never seems boring or extraneous, despite the fact that we know the film's just marking time until Neo and Co. head back into the Matrix and start to whup some computer ass. Since all who were once part of the Matrix retain the brain-plug in the back of their head, their minds are trained to receive computerized information, which means that, given the right program, it's a snap to learn Jiu Jitsu in a few minutes, as well as any other fighting style you might name. (This of course sets up the film's climactically awesome martial arts battles, for which the cast spent as long training as they did filming the movie.) Taking advantage of their virtual reality playground, the Wachowskis stage Neo's training in a host of different locations, from a blinding white field to a virtual dojo where Neo and Morpheus get to some serious sparring.

The trick, Neo learns, is to stop thinking that the Matrix is real; gravity, limitations of strength and speed, are only rules of a computer program, and Morpheus tells him, like all rules, "some can be bent, and some can be broken." Which is a fancy way of saying that if Neo feels like punching through a brick wall or jumping 50 feet in the air, there's no reason he can't. (Although it doesn't really explain why he can't turn himself into a big dinosaur and eat all the nasty black suit guys.) It's a brilliantly tidy concept, because it turns our merry band into superheroes without any of that tedious born-on-Krypton garbage. Maybe that explains Neo's billowy black overcoat; it's just his version of a cape.

And then, it's all over but the fighting — and what fighting it is. Part video game, part anime, part Hong Kong bulletfest and (as anyone who's seen the TV ads knows) part Gap commercial, they're riotously intense; it's hard to believe how much you're enjoying yourself. Where their first feature, Bound, came straight out of the Coen Brothers' playbook, The Matrix's cartoon intensity owes much to Sam Raimi; Bill Pope, who shot Raimi's Darkman and Army of Darkness, gives The Matrix a hyper-real gloss. But Raimi's outlandishness is a goof, and the Wachowskis' is pure wow. The sustained pace of their cleverly constructed battles would be exhausting if it weren't so exhilarating.

The Wachowskis' trick is to bring tangential details into the frame without disrupting the flow of action; when Morpheus sweep-kicks Neo, his ankle ends up in the lens, and the gun battles are punctuated by the sight and sound of hundreds of shell casings falling to earth. The filmmakers' supreme gimmick is the use of computerized stop-motion, which allows them to freeze an object in the air and give the camera the appearance of rotating around it; to give us the sense of the characters' superhuman perceptions, they may freeze a figure in mid-jump, spin the camera around and then shift the action into hyperspeed as a half-dozen kicks are delivered before he touches ground.

Unfortunately, the Wachowskis' writing isn't nearly as inventive as their images. The problem is their plotting skills, which at times are perilously threadbare. From the traitor in the ranks to the contrived romance, every crusty plot device is trotted out like a show horse, but there's no conviction to the film's emotional storyline. Where the lesbian romance was (amazingly) the strongest part of Bound, here the interactions between characters frequently make no sense at all.

It's not the actors' fault; even Moss, whose biggest previous credit was Models, Inc., acquits herself well. Pantoliano is his usual lovable weasel, and Fishburne can do the Hip Daddy thing in his sleep, although he doesn't seem to be trying too hard here. The real surprise is Keanu, who hasn't been seen since the abysmal Chain Reaction. For the first time in his life, he looks like an adult onscreen; his thin, pale face looks haunted instead of confused. He's never seemed so confident, so assured, so intelligent as he does here. (And boy, did I never think I would say that.) Reeves has never had a problem looking serious onscreen, but he always seemed like the pretentious drama major who roamed the halls in college, too full of his own majesty to concentrate on actually acting. In The Matrix, he actually seems worth taking seriously.

But to borrow a phrase Keanu made famous, it's Hugo Weaving who is most excellent of all. An Australian previously seen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the magnificent Proof, Weaving plays Agent Smith, the baddest of the baddies, the one who gets to tell Morpheus: "You are a disease, and we are the cure." Brits and Aussies who try to fake American accents invariably go extra-nasal, buzzing their r's like braying mules, but here Weaving makes that annoying edge work for his character, a computer program in human form. Every line is clipped and overdeliberate, the speech of an intelligence which loathes the inferior form which it has been condemned to imitate. For all Keanu's intensity, Weaving is like a pillar of fire next to a Bic lighter; his eyes burn inhumanly through the screen, perhaps the scariest effect of all.