It uses flawlessly integrated special effects and animation to visualize regions of cyberspace.
It's great-looking, both in its design and in the kinetic energy that powers it. (I am reminded of the animated kid's film " Doug's 1st Movie," which has a VR experience in which everything is exactly like in real life, except more expensive.) Still, I must not ignore the movie's virtues. The paradox is that the Matrix world apparently resembles in every respect the pre-Matrix world. What happens then to the billions who have just been "unplugged" from the Matrix? Do they still have jobs? Homes? Identities? All we get is an enigmatic voice-over exhortation at the movie's end. It's cruel, really, to put tantalizing ideas on the table and then ask the audience to be satisfied with a shoot-out and a martial arts duel. "Matrix" is more like a superhero comic book in which the fate of the world comes down to a titanic fist-fight between the designated representatives of good and evil. Of course, for a program, running is its own reward-but an intelligent program might bring terrifying logic to its decisions.īoth "Dark City" and "Strange Days" offered intriguing motivations for villainy.
#The matrix movie#
The movie offers no clear explanation of why the Matrix-making program went to all that trouble. The Agents function primarily as opponents in a high-stakes computer game. In "Matrix," on the other hand, there aren't flesh-and-blood creatures behind the illusion-only a computer program that can think, and learn.
"Dark City" was fascinated by the Strangers who had a poignant dilemma: They were dying aliens who hoped to learn from human methods of adaptation and survival. The notion that the world is an artificial construction, designed by outsiders to deceive and use humans, is straight out of "Dark City." Both of those movies, however, explored their implications as the best science fiction often does. "Jacking in" like this was a concept in "Strange Days" and has also been suggested in novels by William Gibson ("Idoru") and others. (You can still get killed, though: "The body cannot live without the mind"). The movie's battles take place in Virtual Reality the heroes' minds are plugged into the combat. Arrayed against them are the Agents, who look like Blues Brothers.
Morpheus believes Neo is the Messianic "One" who can lead this rebellion, which requires mind power as much as physical strength.
#The matrix free#
It's actually a form of Virtual Reality, designed to lull us into lives of blind obedience to the "system." We obediently go to our crummy jobs every day, little realizing, as Morpheus tells Neo, that "Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over your eyes-that you are a slave." The rebels want to crack the framework that holds the Matrix in place, and free mankind. They've made a fundamental discovery about the world: It doesn't exist. He's recruited by a cell of cyber-rebels, led by the profound Morpheus ( Laurence Fishburne) and the leather-clad warrior Trinity ( Carrie-Anne Moss).
#The matrix software#
The plot involves Neo ( Keanu Reeves), a mild-mannered software author by day, a feared hacker by night. Here, with a big budget and veteran action producer Joel Silver, they've played it safer there's nothing wrong with going for the Friday night action market, but you can aim higher and still do business.
#The matrix how to#
The directors are Larry and Andy Wachowski, who know how to make movies (their first film, " Bound," made my 10 best list in 1996). "The Matrix" recycles the premises of " Dark City" and " Strange Days," turns up the heat and the volume, and borrows the gravity-defying choreography of Hong Kong action movies. Too bad, because the set-up is intriguing.