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Katz vs. Taco: The Matrix
"Guys we've got a movie, and it needs a Messiah Figure. A guy who can save the world. Who can you think of that would fit the bill?"
"Charleton Heston?" "Bill Maher?" "Ted Nugent?" "Keanu Reeves?"
"You mean Ted? Excellent."
I figure this exchange has happened a few times in Hollywood. How Keanau keeps getting to be the guy that saves the world is beyond me. But he did a good job this time around. He's a little plastic, but thats just how he is. Fortunately, it doesn't matter, because the world that he is in is completely engrossing. You will sit down and for 2 hours and a few minutes, be completely entranced by The Matrix.
This is a great movie. I won't spoil it and tell you what "The Matrix" is, but you'll figure it out pretty early on. And its an interesting and convincing concept that actually works. Its ideas picked and grabbed from all sorts of sci fi, and it will appeal immensely to many of us.
The world is a strange mish mash of pseudo mysticism or spirituality. Lots of techno-babble stirred in. And the scary thing is that it works. And it works really well. Its a dark world, and a confusing one. But it all pretty much sorts itself out in the first half hour and then you can enjoy a pretty entertaining ride.
A general, non spoiler summary is that Neo (Reeves) is a slightly rebelious [h|cr]acker not happy in the system. He is lured around and eventually joins up with a rebelious band of cyber badasses out to save the world. They have mega technology. They have a space ship. They run from robotic spiders. They have unlimited weapons and virtual reality Kung Fu training simulators. And if you've seen the trailers: Super Powers. But it gets a lot crazier.
So some of the acting is a bit wooden. Some of the fx are a bit campy. Some of the jokes are sad. But these tiny flaws will slip by almost unnoticed because most of the fx are seamless. Most of the jokes are just right. And while some of the fighting is cheesy, other parts are quite exciting. This movie makes good use of many fx that we've seen in commercials for years, and somehow ties them together with a plot that is interesting. The philosophy and stuff gets a tad heavy at times, but not to badly, just a little bit fluffy.
2 hours, and I don't think I blinked.
I'd write a longer review, but frankly I don't want to spoil it for you. And I'll warn you that Katz's review will spoil some of the big surprises, so keep scrolling or hit that back button if you don't want to know...
JonKatz:Spoiler WarningIn science fiction, and in the mythology of computing science, it's believed - remember Ray Kurzweil and his "Age of Spiritual Machines" -- that as we race towards more powerful computers and machines with artificial intelligence, eventually there will be some cataclysmic Omega Point at which everything changes, especially the fundamental situation of people in the universe.
Engineers, scientists, developers and programmers don't dwell on Omega Point theory much, at least in public, but it's a staple in the literature of computing as well as science fiction.
And here it is again as the centerpiece of the "The Matrix," the stylish, highly entertaining new geek action thriller starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. The movie asks the question: what if the world were run by evil computers who bred humans only as an energy source?
What if only a handful of humans knew the truth, and the rest lived in a world where reality was altered by an artificially-brilliant monster which created a virtual dream world in which nobody could tell what was real and what wasn't, if people believed they were living lives, but weren't?
This is the Omega Point and it's the world Neo the hacker suddenly wakes up to. He's led to the now inevitable Leader of the Rebel Forces (Fishburne), and they go after the humanoid machines. Naturally, they are represented by agents, evil and powerful NSA-style Men In Suits (attention Hollywood: can we come up with some new bad guys?).
This movie is a geek feast, with echoes of "Terminator," "Alien," "The X-Files," "200l: A Space Odyssey," and "Star Wars." Maybe a bit of Jackie Chan and "Walker, Texas Ranger," too. Heroes and villains kick-box their way across the universe, driving each other through windows, walls and virtual space. This movie, made by the Wachowski Brothers, is made without apology by and for nerds and geeks. The real villain is a "neural interactive simulation," a concept familiar to computing types, therefore one the film doesn't even feel it needs to to explain.
"The Matrix" is a smart, strange, complicated movie, one that takes techno-cinematography to new and classy levels. The beginning of the movie has an almost gothic, truly creepy feel to it. "The Matrix" also has a truly dark premise, eerie, new, imaginative and startling special effects, and a pace like a high-speed download.
And for once, the familiar arguments about technology, humanity and the future are intelligently presented and argued. Artificial intelligence machines - AT's - have gone to war with humans in the 21st century and won, and are setting about to literally suck the life out of humanity (Neo is shown the skeletal remains of civilization hidden beneath the virtual ground). Neo, the Everyman hacker is cast as the messiah, called upon to save the earth with the help of various raggedy geeks, nerds and a battalion of laptops with high-resolution monitors.
As Neo, Reeves is a well-meaning mono-man, likeable but almost one dimensional. All his life, he's known something is wrong with the world, but he could never put his finger - or keyboard - on it. Now, he gets to know. This movie is a very knowing geek fantasy. Neo, a software programmer, had a dual (but no social) life. By day, he's a programmer, by night a lawless hacker. He and everyone else speaks in the stuffy language of the future, which is to say nobody uses contractions. Carrie-Anne Moss plays Trinity, the equally grim and business-like super-hacker babe who guides Neo to his'yes!?destiny.
Whenever the movie tilts towards the clunky and heavy-handed ("I can show you the door," intones Rebel Leader Morpheus to Neo at one point, "but you have to go through it yourself" it self-corrects with real wit and dazzling effects.
There are some fun geek fantasies: the only time Neo smiles is when martial arts programs are being down-loaded into his brain. Later, a rebel hacker and fellow geek generously offers him some intimate time with a virtual blonde in a red-dress he's created as a software training program.
The mysterious Zionist Oracle, the source of all wisdom to whom every good guy and human must trek, turns out to be a chatty, grandmotherly black lady baking cookies in her kitchen.
For most of the movie, Neo doesn't believe this Messiah stuff and riddled with the expected self-doubts and unwillingness to use his powers, a/k/a, his "Force." But once he does get religion, it's with a vengeance: in one of the campiest scenes of any recent sci-fi movie, he and Trinity download an arsenal of black weapons, along with superhuman powers, floor length leather jackets, a black chopper, and enough Kung Fu moves to take out a battalion of humanoids.
Bullets, bodies and shell casings literally rain from the skies (even bullets are stylish in this movie), buildings blow up, humans and androids both die and resurrected with regularity; and everybody goes back and forth between the real and virtual world so rapidly and fluidly that the movie very nearly invokes the experience of being online. The martial arts stunts approach choreographed ballet.
"The Matrix" is a sci-fi thriller, and a great one. Since it takes care not to take itself too seriously, it's not a good idea to give it more weight than it deserves. It doesn't explain itself to nerds, geeks and computer users - it's made for them. And any movie that leaves you disturbed, riveted, entertained, and then thinking when you leave the theater, is well worth the trip. jonkatz@slashdot.org
Actually, the term "Omega Point" comes from the French Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, and was popularized in recent SF by Dan Simmons's Hyperion books. It is a theological, not a technological, term.
Unlike many other theologians of his time, De Chardin accepted the scientific theory of evolution. However, his philosophy (being, as it was, theology) went beyond what can be considered scientific. He added to Darwin's theory the idea that evolution has a telos, or end-point to which it aspires. He called this telos "the Omega Point" and considered it to be the same thing as union with God. That is, according to de Chardin, humanity is presently evolving towards literal Godhead.
Naturally, this is not reconcilable with modern evolutionary theory, which considers evolution not to have a telos. However, it does make for good SF every once in a while; the first, second, and fourth books of the _Hyperion_ saga are really quite good. (The third, _Endymion_, reads like a Star Wars novel...)
The Matrix is one of the most fun movies I've seen in a theater in the past several years. I agree pretty much wholeheartedly with Rob's and Jon's reviews.
I'd also like to note that it had a lot of similarities to Dark City, another movie I enjoyed a great deal. Not that this is a bad thing.
When I saw it, it had a trailer for a movie called The 13th Floor, which has a similar, and likewise interesting concept to The Matrix and Dark City, but looks like it's not carried off nearly as well--an interesting juxtaposition.
Pancakes is the better part of valor.
When he famously sits down in that easy chair by the fire, and starts thinking about what he actually knows about the world, Descartes decides that everything he has ever perceived might be an illusion foisted on him by an "evil genius"/devil who is lying to him.
It's interesting how many of these technology-as-the-root-of-evil films come out of Hollywood. Are they merely mirroring our own fears of replacement/domination by machines?
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Gnosticism is the essential religious idea in The Matrix, as it was in The Truman Show - the idea that day-to-day phenomenal reality is a lie and illusion perpetuated by a malicious pseudo-God, and that knowledge (Gnosis), rather than faith, was the key to liberation. It's a religious tradition that appeals to a more scientific temperment, even if its metaphysics are somewhat, let's say, complicated.
Truman show is more of a Indo-Hellenic gnosticism - Truman, by dint of his own determination and overcoming his own fears, achieves total doubt and walks away from his world of illusion. The Matrix is more of a Christian Gnosticism - there is a messiah who is chartered with liberating all of us, and it is ultimately faith, rather than doubt, which saves, although doubt is still the conduit to salvation.
I suspect that there's some historical reason for the proliferation of the idea that our day-to-day experience is a lie, that our phenomenal experience is a malicious or mercenary construct. Perhaps it has to do with the "end of history;" without the oppositional tension of Communism, the only engine of public truth is American/Western media. The apparent victory of American capitalism is so absolute, that it seems to dominate the landscape of thought itself, and the only resistance is doubt.
Normally I don't mind these Katz vs Taco review fests, but honestly, I think mine was better than either and gave away less important detail. Yer too fluffy, Taco - throw some substance in. We're not reading a review to have everything glossed over like that... Katz has ya beat here. ;)
But while I'm posting: Hey, JonKatz! The technological runaway you describe is not an Omega Point, it's a Singularity, a point at which our current models of technological progress cease to apply. And that occurs once a posthuman/superhuman intelligence is created, not just an artificial one. I wish they'd hashed that out slightly more in the film.
For clarification: The Omega Point is a concept debuted by Frank Tipler in his book The Physics of Immortality : He claims that at the end of the Universe, during the Big Crunch, there will be an Omega Point at which time all that the Universe has ever experienced will exist once more, and all the consciousnesses that ever graced the Earth will once again be active. I think he's a crock.
Vernor Vinge was the first to really express the Singulairty concept well. This is the text of his thesis on the subject:
I agree with almost everything said in the the two reviews.This movie was cool enough to almost make up for other movies such as "The Net". One thing that noone mentioned was the soundtrack, which was also better than expected. The cinematography was truly amazing in this movie, many of the scenes were done with 2 motion cameras and hundreds of still cameras so that they could pan around a stopped scene. I was also amazed to see Reeves not kill a movie. I don't usually like him as an actor, but he was awkward enough to work.
Even the martial arts were good ( I'm a second-degree black belt ), the fight director for this film has done scores of other movies, but I believe this was the first one not done in Asia.
Sci-Fi has been so bad lately, The Matrix is very much the exception. You won't be able to make it through without thinking over and over again, "Cool!"
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
Wing Commander...
Don't avoid it. Lots of us went to see it, and had to physically restrain ourselves from throwing things at the screen. Sharp things, with pointy ends.
Sci Fi movies lately have been terrible. Absolutely godawful. The Semi-Sci-Fi Enemy of the State was one of the notable "coulda been but wasn't" sci fi movies of late.
Thus, to be sitting half an hour into Matrix, have them reveal what the Matrix is to us, and to have a little light bulb go on in the back of my head that says "Damn! I wasn't expecting that!" was pure delight.
Between the Matrix, and the Phantom Menace (which, for the sake of argument, I'm going to pray to whatever gods exist in the place a long time ago and far, far away that it's as good as the original holy trilogy) perhaps we're now coming out of a long drought of palatable sci-fi/geek movies.
Examples? In order of their release: Disney's Inspector Gadget, Cronenburg's eXistenZ, Burton's Sleepy Hollow, and Disney's Fantasia 2000. Let's hope we've seen the last of Wing "Gosh I don't think I once saw anything resembling a worthwhile plot" Commander type movies.
you mean
1) the apocolyptic future (maya say world to end Dec 25, 2012)
2) the art (those robots remind me of sculptures of mayan gods)
3) the dual dependance that man and AI (gods) have on each other... man gives up his blood (in the form of heat) to feed the gods, while they are fed and thus provide man with a world to live in...
yes, allegorical, both literally and symbolically
The Matrix didn't go far enough.
For me, the most disappointing part of the movie (don't get me wrong; the movie as a whole totally rocked. But.) was when Laurence said something to the effect of "You think that the year is 1999, when in reality, it's probably closer to 2199."
What I was kinda hoping for, and what woulda been very cool is if time as we know it didn't exist at all! Or... the world "as we know it" never existed.
That would mean that this whole thing is a total farce. That "we" (as humans) were not merely living out our collective past, but living out a total lie. Maybe "we" existed in some form that would be totally unrecognizable to a human.
When Neo first woke up in his little "bubble" with more such cells going on and on into infinity, I was totally freaked out. The thought that this could be the "real" universe, and all the universe had ever been, and all the universe would ever be, all but blew my mind.
When Morpheus explained that that was just the universe "now" (ie: the year 2199, or whatever), it was a big letdown.
Besides, if time also goes on inside the Matrix, then what happens when "matrix time" reaches the mid-21st century, or whenever the point is that the machines take over? Do we then have a Matrix inside the Matrix?
Hmmm... maybe the Matrix as we saw already was inside another Matrix... that would be cool!
(Oh... BTW: The best way to see it is on an IMAX screen...:-)
Anyway... just a bit of nonsensical rambling on my part... pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I'm probably too late to the thread to post anything anyone will read, but, when you've got something to say, sometimes you gotta say it anyway.
David Foster Wallace has a great essay on the idea of special effects porn, which completely describes the Matrix.
How have special effects movies become like porn? Just subsitute F/X for intercourse. The plot is almost non-existant, and is only there to provide a sort of mental scaffolding on which to hang these sensuous, explosive payoff scenes -- the only reason you really go to see the movie in the first place.
Wallace says special effects porn started with Terminator 2, but I say it goes at least as far back as Disney's awful awful Tron, which was, in its own way, quite visually exciting. This movie is merely Tron v. 2.0 , updated with all the latest special effects patches. Unfortunately, the plot of the new version, like most new versions of software, is radically expanded without providing any new utility.
It's darn fun to watch -- it's porn, ain't it? -- but afterward, you might wonder what's wrong with the world, and why you're stuck with masturbation instead of a real relationship.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.