| In the opening
scene of The Matrix, a foxy,
vinyl-clad woman named Trinity
(Carrie-Anne Moss, Models, Inc.)
is surrounded by four beefy cops intent
on taking her down. She doesn’t go
down. Instead, she beats the snot out of
them so quickly and so effectively that
you could actually hear jaws hit the
floor in the theater. Who is she? How
does she run up the sides of the walls?
How does she defy gravity? How does she
seem to move four times as fast as the
blockheads that are trying to catch her? While
that amazing spectacle helps to draw you
immediately into the film, it’s just
the tip of the iceberg. Led by stunt
coordinator and four-time Hong Kong Film
Award nominee Woo-Ping Yuen (Drunken
Master), The Matrix boasts
some of the best martial arts ever seen
in an American-made picture. It also
features the finest slow-motion gunplay
not filmed by John Woo.
The story?
It’s not bad, but it definitely
takes a back seat to the astounding
visuals. Keanu Reeves (Johnny Mnemonic)
stars as Thomas "Neo" Anderson,
a corporate computer programmer by day
and a cyber-hacker by night. His life
changes forever when he decides to follow
the white rabbit to a gentleman named
Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne, Event
Horizon), tries to get Neo to believe
that the entire world is just an
elaborate computer program designed to
pull the wool over the collective eyes of
mankind.
It’s pretty
tricky to follow, due, in part, to the
distractingly dazzling special effects
(Matthew Ferro, Face/Off).
Writer/directors Andy and Larry Wachowski
(Bound) re-team with
cinematographer Bill Pope (Zero Effect)
to create a nightmarish vision of a world
where machines are king and humans are
cultivated as a natural resource. And
watch out for Hugo Weaving (The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert), who plays a creepy Robert
Patrick-in-Terminator 2-style
agent gunning for Neo and his new pals.
2:10 –
for violence, adult language and some
very disturbing futuristic scenes
|
