Overall Rating
  Awesome: 66.58%
Worth A Look: 18.88%
Just Average: 6.71%
Pretty Crappy: 3.85%
Sucks: 3.98%
27 reviews, 643 user ratings
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| Matrix, The |
by desdemona
"WOW. Wait, let me try again--WOW."

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How often does a movie make you think that maybe our miserable little lives on this planet Earth are actually just a premeditated illusion created to keep us all docile and controllable? You're right--not often.Movies often try to pass themselves off as creative and intelligent, and because so many movies AREN'T, people buy it. The Matrix, however, is the pinacle of creativity in the movie business.
When I went to see it, I was expecting something pretty cool but nothing amazing. What an incredible surprise did I get. This movie stunned me with new (yes, NEW, never been done before) visual effects that were nothing less than shocking. People running up walls, jumping incredible distances, seemingly floating through the air--WOW.
So of course I thought that all the movie had were stunning visual effects and the rest just barely slid by unnoticed beneath the "Ooh"s and "Ahh"s. For the first time in my life, I was wrong again (and I don't take that lightly).
The plot was nothing short of brilliant, the writers are true artists. It was so imaginative, so creative, so NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE that I was instantly taken. Can this movie really be this good? I wondered. I kept waiting for a dissappointment: I never got one.
What is the Matrix? Our world, created for us by computers to control us and dominate us. We are all part of an orchestrated illusion. What is the real world? Chaos, somewhere at the ass-end of 2200. Who are the people flying through the air and running up walls? Freed minds, people the have been able to break free of the system. Morpheus (Laurence Fishbourne) is their leader, and he is searching for "The One." That "One" is the person who was prophesized to free all the humans from the matrix, and Morpheus believes it's Neo (Keanu Reeves). Neo, at first unbelieving, wakes up in the real world amid endless rows of human-sized pods, with plugs in his head and throughout his body, and he quickly decides that maybe he was wrong. These free minds venture into the matrix frequently, but they have to be careful--the matrix is full of "agents," which are computer-generated "bad guys" there to make sure everything is in order, and they want it to stay that way. The freed ones must be careful--if they die in the matrix, they die in real life. As for the rest of the movie...go see it.
Laurence Fishbourne was great, as always, as were many of the other actors. Keanu Reeves was once again nothing special, but he wasn't too bad, either. In my opinion, someone like Ryan Phillipe or Edward Norton could have done much better, but for some reason we just can't seem to get away from Keanu.
Allow me to reiterate: this movie is visually stunning. The writers/directors created an entirely new movie technology called "bullet time," which slows the entire picture down so the audience can see everything that's supposed to be moving at the speed of a bullet in seeming slo-mo. Now, obviously Keanu and crew cannot move quite that fast, but that's the general idea of what "bullet time" is supposed to be. Aside from that, the rest of the "normal" special effects were utterly amazing, all combining to form a darkly gothic, futuristic ride through the realms of technical genius. Wow.This is a visually and mentally stunning work of art. You will not be dissappointed.
link directly to this review at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=722&reviewer=86 originally posted: 05/01/99 01:41:54
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Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
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USA 31-Mar-1999 (R) DVD: 07-Dec-2004
UK 11-Jun-1999 (15)
Australia 08-Apr-1999 (MA)
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