Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne Director: Andy and Larry Wachowski Rated: R, with profanity, graphic violence and nudity Length: 130 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(March 31, 1999) -- "I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my own life," Keanu Reeves, who plays a hacker named Neo, says at one point early in The Matrix.

Yeah, well, take a number, pal.

Still, in The Matrix, that sense of angst is rooted in a rip-roaring reality: Not only is he not in control of his own life, but he's plugged into a giant machine that's telling him what to see and think.

It is only when he breaks loose and confronts the nature of reality that Reeves finds just how much freedom he can have. But it will take many, many gunfights and a whole heaping of special effects for him to realize that vision.

The Matrix is a synthesis of elements into what -- at least until the Star Wars prequel comes out -- has to be the most eye-popping and imaginative movie of the year. Writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski (who previously directed the kinky thriller Bound) bring together everything from the futuristic paranoia of Philip K. Dick to the cyberspace notions of William Gibson to the simple-storytelling thrills of The Terminator, while creating a story of savior as action hero.

Neo doesn't think of himself as a savior. He's just a guy who works for a software company, who does a little hacking in his spare time. But then he starts getting strange computer messages and phone calls -like the cell phone that arrives by FedEx and rings as soon as he takes it out of the envelope.

The message he keeps receiving: He is in danger and there are people who will help him escape, among them a well-known fugitive called Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne). At first resistant, Neo finally allows himself to be seduced into taking a pill that will, in Morpheus' words, help him enter "the real world."

When he awakens, he's aboard a retro-grunge spacecraft 100 years in the future, which Morpheus says is actually the present. Neo has just been sprung from the Matrix, a colossal computer construct that feeds imaginary virtual lives (that mimic the world in the late 1990s) into the brains of every human on the planet.

The machines, which took over after humans created artificial intelligence, now use humans as living energy packs. They grow humans in giant, gel-filled pods; the humans live whole lives in a virtual world that looks exactly like 20th-century reality, fed to their brains by the computer.

But a small group of human freedom fighters have escaped the Matrix and developed the power to enter and exit the Matrix world to fight the machines. An oracle has forecast the coming of someone to fight the machines on their own terms, a single hero capable of defeating it.

As he trains Neo, Morpheus keeps telling him that he -- Neo -- is the One. To prove it, he takes Neo into the Matrix to meet the Oracle. But a traitor betrays the mission, stranding Morpheus in the Matrix and forcing Neo and Morpheus' No. 2, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), to make an all-out assault on the Matrix to rescue him.

The Wachowskis dare to be dense, piling layer upon layer in the storytelling, creating a future reality that is plausibly scary. If it's all a little hard to absorb, well, we're learning at the same rate as Neo. There's a lot of material for the audience to take in, but the Wachowskis make it seem absolutely vital to keep up with a movie that seems to be moving at the speed of light.

Oh, they give in to a number of Hollywood conventions. Even though they've engaged the beatific Reeves for the role, they manage to keep him from seeming too Christlike, despite the Messianic overtones of the character.

Reeves has the right tabula rasa quality as Neo, an unprepossessing sort who can't quite figure out why so many people think he's special. Fishburne's laser glare works in his role as Morpheus and Moss, as the lethal freedom-fighter, is physically impressive within the confines of a stoic role.

The Matrix is the coolest -- a journey into a genuinely original vision of our cyberfuture that will have you checking your own reality by the time it's over.