The phone rings. It’s February nineteenth, nineteen hundred and ninety-eight, or is it? Welcome to The Matrix where all questions revolve around the central issue of what is real and what do you believe is real? So, for instance, is it 1998, and for that matter, is the phone really ringing, and is there even a phone? If you follow this, then you can get what The Matrix is trying to tell you.

As I already stated, the phone rings (is this déjà vu?) and it is 1998 when we hear voices talking on the phone while a number is being traced. Soon police are busting in on a woman in a lonely apartment, preparing to arrest her when we get a glimpse of the kick-ass action and special effects that permeate the movie as this woman totally thrashes on the four cops. Unfortunately for this woman named Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss, Terrified), an Agent (I’ll explain later) arrives and hunts her down, but she eventually escapes into a phone booth before disappearing. Next scene: Another lonely apartment where a hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves, The Devil's Advocate) sleeps by his computer when words start appearing across his screen, talking to him, telling him to follow the white rabbit (a reference to Alice In Wonderland, though that isn’t the correct title). Neo decides to follow the white rabbit, which leads him to Trinity, where we discover that Neo has been searching for an associate of Trinity’s, a person named Morpheus. Trinity also informs Neo that he is being watched by the authorities and that Morpheus would be in touch. The next day Neo, known as Thomas Anderson in ‘real’ life, goes to work at his software company where FedEx delivers him a cell phone that rings as soon as he opens the package. On the other end is Morpheus, who tells Neo that he needs to leave because the authorities and their evil Agents are about to arrest him, but Neo isn’t willing to follow Morpheus’ instructions quite yet, so Agents Smith (Hugo Weaving), Brown (Paul Goddard), and Jones (Robert Taylor) arrest him and take him for interrogation. During this interrogation is where we see that these Agents are not what that appear to be as they make it impossible for Neo to speak just prior to inserting a bug with a tracking device into his abdomen via his bellybutton. Next Neo awakens in his apartment thinking everything that just happened was a bad dream when the phone rings and it is Morpheus again asking Neo to meet. Neo says yes, and he is brought to Morpheus by Apoc (Julian Arahanga), Trinity, and Switch (Belinda McClory), but before meeting Morpheus the two ladies remove the tracking device from Neo in a procedure that reminded me of a scene in Total Recall. Finally, Neo meets the legendary Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne, Event Horizon) and is told that Neo’s reality is not what it appears to be, and that he can either choose a blue pill and forget everything and go back to his old life, or he can take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole is. This just wouldn’t be a very good movie if Neo were to take the blue pill, so he takes the red pill. Soon Neo finds himself on Morpheus’ ship the Nebuchadnezzar, built in 2069, with a small crew fighting for survival. It is here that Neo begins to discover what exactly The Matrix is, an artificial computer world that almost everyone lives in that was created by machines that humans once created and controlled. However, the artificial intelligence that we developed became so good that the machines were able to take over and enslave the world (not exactly an original idea, see The Terminator or even 2001: A Space Odyssey for earlier examples), using people as a power source stored in huge towers of individual cells where people are hooked up to The Matrix. Now back to the Agents (I said I’d explain later): these are machine controlled entities inside The Matrix world that are in charge of keeping the humans enslaved, and they have super-human abilities since they are just programs. At this point we also learn that many in the ‘real’ world (especially Morpheus) believe that Neo is The One, a prophesized individual that will set humanity free from being slaves to the machines. The rest of the film involves betrayal, love, and a whole shit-load of more great special effects and heart-pounding action sequences.

I can not overstate how cool the special effects are in The Matrix, nor how awesome the action sequences are (which is partly due to how good the FX is). But in the end it is the story that drives this film and makes it as good as it is, after all the freeze frame camera shifting shots from the first fight sequence, I first saw in The Wallflowers ‘Josephine’ video, so not everything in the FX department was groundbreaking.

Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:45:49 AM

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