April 2, 1999
By Ted Anthony
AP NATIONAL WRITER
Cubicle-bound software programmer by day, computer hacker by night, Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), aka Neo, lives a twilight sort of life. He knows something isn't quite right with the world, and there is one man who may hold some answers: Morpheus, the online handle of Earth's master hacker.
So Neo seeks out Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to find out what's up. And he learns what's at stake: the very nature of reality itself.
``The Matrix,'' an intriguing, sometimes muddled grasp at understanding the essence of human experience, offers a high-tech version of a modern ``Alice in Wonderland'' in reverse - one in which our world is the one found down at the end of the rabbit hole.
What Morpheus shows Neo is the truly real world, a 22nd-century wasteland where human-built artificial intelligence machines have vanquished mankind. People are kept in suspended animation in fluid-filled pods, and their consciousnesses live out lives in a vast artificial reality called ``the matrix,'' which approximates life on Earth in 1999. Every experience - sex, ambition, even the most succulent steak - is fake.
Sound complicated and convoluted? It is. But behind the techno-babble, ``The Matrix'' is equal parts Luddite polemic and seeker of truth. And, surprisingly, it really works.
Morpheus, through an elaborate series of invitations, brings Neo back into his physical body in the 22nd century, where he awakens in the pod where he's slept since birth to find a scarred Earth dominated by the machines. ``Welcome to the desert of the real,'' Morpheus says.
Only pockets of human resistance remain, one of them being the ship run by Morpheus and peopled by such characters as Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Cypher (Joe Pantoliano).
The rub: Neo may be The One, the savior of post-human Earth, capable of stopping the machines and returning the planet to organic life. And he must go back into the matrix, into the life he left behind, to meet the enemy on its own proving ground.
What could be heavy-handed or just plain corny ends up as good science fiction should - provoking thought and eliciting questions about our Now by handing us a Future unthinkable but at the same time quite plausible.
Much of this is achieved through crack cinematography and editing that demonstrates what Morpheus says - that the physical laws of the matrix, essentially a vast computer program akin to a ``Star Trek'' holodeck, can be bent. People who master this ``bending'' can dodge, perhaps even stop, bullets.
Reeves, not the most expressive of actors, manages to come through this without besmirching his reputation, though he always appears vaguely Bill-and-Teddish. Fishburne is appropriately intense, and Moss makes a forbidding femme fatale. The always refreshing Pantoliano lends his usual oily exuberance.
But it is Australian actor Hugo Weaving who steals the movie as the Serling-cadenced Agent Smith, the man in black who is an agent of the machines and trolls the matrix trying to do Neo in. Smith's diatribes crackle with insight: He considers humanity a virus that pollutes the Earth rather than elevating it. Machines, he's certain, are the efficient and logical wave of tomorrow.
``You had your time,'' he spits at Morpheus. ``The future is our world.''
This is not entirely new ground. ``Star Trek'' has covered both the idea of a machine-dominated world and the concept of Earth as a controlled zoo, as has ``The X-Files.'' Story inconsistencies sometimes slow things down, and at times ``The Matrix'' plays more like a video game than a movie.
But those are not fatal problems. Here, the journey is what's fascinating, and the notion that our world is not only emotionally elastic but physically elastic as well is a memorable one. The questions ``The Matrix'' asks are all relevant: What is reality? Does our world have borders? Are we living our entire lives asleep?
And, though its reach may exceed its grasp, isn't that what science fiction is all about?
``The Matrix,'' a Warner Bros. film, is written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski. Bill Pore did the cinematography and Zack Staenberg the editing. It is rated R.
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