The Matrix. Millions of fools seem to love it. Even some allegedly tasteful reviewers gave it thumbs up. But not me - I'll give it to you straight.
The Matrix is an incredibly poor ripoff of Hong Kong movies, combined with a plot full of holes, and an unhealthy overdose of nerd wish-fulfillment, to wit, "I can be an ultimate badass[0] and be desired by a hot chick in vinyl pants, despite having no social skills, style, or personal hygeine, and getting no exercise but getting up to get another 1L bottle of Jolt!"
Okay, I've been spoiled by watching every Hong Kong movie I could get my hands on, but after their alleged 5 months of martial arts training they still looked like beginner's night at Kuni's dojo (Laurence Fishburne a little less incompetent-looking than Keanu Fucking Reeves, even with the bogus FX cheating for him), compared to guys who've been training since childhood, 20-60 years. The Matrix was an albino-pale imitation of a Hong Kong movie, brought to life from the corpses of good movies, on a mad scientist's table and left to shamble out the studio doors. The wire-fu sucked, they had to use slo-mo to do most of the stunts that competent martial artists could have done for real, and in the Making Of bit, they got all het up about the actress getting a hangnail or some such trivial thing during one of the stunts and carrying on anyway! As if we haven't seen Jackie Chan break every bone in his body and show the injuries and ambulance rides in the trailers. Buncha pansy-ass Hollywood poseurs.
Then there are the John Woo ripoff scenes, which looked like they'd been done by a suit with a checklist: "Slow-motion bullet casings? Check. Two guns? Check. Sliding behind cover just as the bullets eat it away? Check."
But of course, Keanu Fucking Reeves had none of the grace or style of Chow Yun Fat... Not to mention that he had less charisma, personality, and acting talent than the Thunderbirds Are Go marionettes, especially when he's competing for your attention with LF, who can suffer and rage like nobody's business, and Carrie-Anne Moss, who was so driven... and here's this lifeless walking corpse reading his lines flatly, with a glazed look in his eyes, and you're supposed to believe he's got the imagination and willpower to rewrite the Matrix from within. Oh, the humanity.
And the main plot point... Oh. My. Body heat as a substitute power supply. Uh. Huh. Look, just haul the writers out now and shoot them, so they can't ever perpetrate something like that again... (if you don't understand what's wrong with that, go back to grade school, you should have learned the basic scientific knowledge there).
Meanwhile, the basic idea is stolen directly from Simulacron-3, written by Daniel F. Galouye in 1964, which has been made into several movies, including The Thirteenth Floor. You might also want to see Dark City and Virtuosity, and read Greg Egan's novel Permutation City, too. Watching a bunch of real Hong Kong cinema helps wash that nasty incompetent-martial-artist taste of the Matrix out of your brain.
If there'd been an actor in the main role, instead of the cardboard surfer standee, and they'd ripped off the truth from Hyperion (a novel by Dan Simmons) or Philip K. Dick instead, it could have been a decent movie, though weak on the fight scenes. Maybe they can make a "digitally remastered" version with Keanu Fucking Reeves edited over with Jar-Jar Binks.
The Matrix - Just Say No.
Last modified: 1999Dec29
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