# Matrix, The (1999)

### reviewed by
Susan Granger

http://www.speakers-podium.com/susangranger.

Susan Granger's review of "THE MATRIX" (Warner Bros.)

Aimed specifically at a young, male audience, this challenging sci-fi adventure is big on visuals and short on story. Bland, androgynous Keanu Reeves plays a 22nd-century computer hacker who is recruited by Carrie-Anne Moss to join a band of cyber freedom fighters led by Morpheus - that's Laurence Fishburne - in a struggle against the scary, menacing machines that control mankind. Powerful computers keep their oblivious human slaves passive by literally plugging them into a virtual-reality universe that appears as the 20th-century world we know. Written and directed by brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski ("Bound"), the complex, pretentious script combines mythology, mysticism, and technical mumbo-jumbo in a kinetic blender and concocts a dazzling but illogical, incoherent head-trip in which specific public telephone booths are the only conduit from one reality to another. According to the Wachowskis, "We began with the premise that every single thing we believe in today and every single physical item is actually a total fabrication created by an electronic universe. So, if the characters can have instantaneous information downloaded into their heads, they should, for example, be able to be as good a kung-fu master as Jackie Chan." Sci-fi genre aficionados will spot familiar elements from "The Fifth Element," "Virus,"" Dark City,""Terminator," and "Alien," and the stunt work was supervised by Yuen Wo Ping, one Hong Kong's top specialists in both kung-fu and wire-stunts. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "The Matrix" is an eye-popping, deafening, mind-numbing 3 - unless you're a guy who's gung-ho for the muddled mayhem and dizzying arsenal of ammunition of a weird, big-screen video game.

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