The Matrix

Comment:
Since I still have some vague memory of Keanu Reeves in the ridiculous Johnny Mnemonic, I feared that The Matrix could be another badly thought cyberpunkish movie. Fortunately, the two movies have almost nothing in common and even Keanu Reeves himself seems to feel much better acting as the hacker Neo rather than the human 'hard-disc' Johnny. Actually, The Matrix reminds me of various other movies such as Dark City, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Men in Black from which it picks some details and mixes them together with a good overall result.

Neo, the main character, is a well-known hacker whose life starts becoming full of weird events: strange messages on his computer, bizarre phone calls, meetings with other hackers, interrogations with mysterious 'agents' and so on. He finally decides to follow the mysterious hacker Morpheus who promises to reveal him the truth about what he thought to be the reality. So, Neo is suddenly taken into a completely different world where he is believed to be a sort of messiah who can save humanity from slavery...

In order to make the story more interesting, the movie is organized in a rather cunning way so that, at first, everything doesn't make much sense and the audience is presented with unlikely events that will only be properly understood as the plot proceeds. This also means that there are no obvious plot holes, because various apparent inconsistencies are explained later on. Moreover, regardless of how unlikely the story actually is, it is both fascinating and even believable. In short, it does work!

There are a lot of details I enjoyed, mostly related to the peculiar 'interpretation' the movie gives of our reality. Hence, the feeling of deja-vu we sometimes experience is described as a 'computational error', people with paranormal powers are described as people who have a sort of knowledge of what there is beyond our perceived reality and so on. I also liked various ideas related to the story, such as the use of phones and cellular phones as a link to a different world. On the other hand, I haven't been positively impressed by the martial arts fights that looked too much like video-games action, I eventually preferred the gun fights that were similarly exaggerated but at least didn't look so ridiculous.

While every aspect of the movie have been thought and designed with great attention, the ending doesn't match the rest and left me partially unsatisfied. This is a real pity because otherwise The Matrix is an impressive science fiction thriller, with good special effects but also a good story, featuring intelligence and deep meanings even if it never gets too philosophical.