By Russell Baillie
****
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving
Director: The Wachowski Brothers
Rating: M
From the outside it looks like a no-brainer. The Matrix appears to be yet another flick getting excited about where the whole wired world will lead us, complete with Keanu Reeves charged to do the movie's deep
thinking.
On past performance that's a potentially worrying software-hardware combo. The last time Reeves played cyberguy was in the howler Johnny Mnemonic. Much of Reeves' screen time in that inept adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk thriller was spent having disks loaded into and ejected from his skull.
In The Matrix, Reeves is again suffering more flinch-inducing grey matter-to-digital interfacing, care of a metal whatsit which does to the back of your skull what dental nurse drills used to do to the front.
But there, thankfully, the comparisons end and the compliments start.
Because from the inside, The Matrix really is quite a movie, an imaginative blast of hand-me-down style and kinetic and ballistic action. It also manages more than enough substance in the -fi department to keep up with all that sci-.
Yes, it does go on a bit and has as its often amusingly stolid centre, Mr Reeves. He's anonymous programmer-by-day Thomas Anderson/ace hacker-by-night Neo. One night he has his worst fears that all is not right in the world spectacularly confirmed.
It seems the machines are running things. Everyday life is merely a vast virtual reality projection. It's not really the late 90s, apparently the apex of human civilisation. Our real selves are elsewhere playing bio-batteries for our artificial intelligence masters.
Or is it all a dream?
Yes, about then it gets complicated ... and out come those skull plugs. Oh, and guns, lots of guns.
Neo is liberated by a group of rebels led by Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus and piloting a ship through the Earth's underworld tunnels.
It seems that this mild-mannered lonely hacker may be The One - mankind's only hope.
Yep, chalk up another superbeing for Keanu, having already played the devil's spawn in The Advocate, and Buddha in Little Buddha. Clearly his employers see something deeper in Reeves that escapes much of us.
Neo's saviour status is, however, always in doubt. That's but one smart twist of many from directing and writing brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski (who debuted with the taut table-turning neo-noir Bound).
And in a contrary way another smart move was casting Reeves in the first place.
His lumber-like presence just kind of reassures the audience: Yes, it may get a little complex in here but if he can get it, surely you can ....
Around their leading man the Wachowskis have constructed a plot and production design which is a minor riot of boys' own movie nerd-dom.
It bears the mark of Hong Kong action flicks delivered with a bunch of spectacular speed up, slow down, stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off visual effects. There's debts to Alien, Terminator, Brazil, Blade Runner, with thematic echoes of sci-fi scribes Gibson and Philip K. Dick.
All this along with a possible influence a little more lowbrow and contemporary.
It is, after all , about an everyday guy who turns cyberwarrior at the flick of a switch who must complete a series of missions against increasingly tricky foes - it may be the influence that role-playing computer and video games has taken from movies is now feeding back the other way.
Reeves gets some solid support, especially from Fishburne and Australian Hugo Weaving, clearly enjoying the truly virtual reality of his role as the head of the Matrix's evil henchmen.
Filmed mostly in Sydney, the city's skyline and streets make a suitably askew backdrop to much of the action. And as for the participation of "our own" Anthony Ray Parker and Julian Arahanga among the rebel crew ... well yes, that's them over there and they do die particularly well.
Its stylistic flourishes can get a little taxing and it is unintentionally funny in what are meant to be profound moments. But The Matrix is smarter and fresher than it might look on first appearances, and all the more fun for it.
It's also coolly paranoid enough to wind your pre-millennial tension that bit tighter.
By Russell Baillie
****
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving
Director: The Wachowski Brothers
Rating: M
From the outside it looks like a no-brainer. The Matrix appears to be yet another flick getting excited about where the whole wired world will lead us, complete with Keanu Reeves charged to do the movie's deep
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