Lana and Lilly Wachowski make speculative science fiction work as exhilarating action, with Keanu Reeves an effective guide through the confusion. The explanations can be ponderous and the supporting characters thin, but the fights reward the attention the ideas demand.
The Matrix takes the familiar suspicion that something is wrong with ordinary life and treats it with disarming seriousness. Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, who write and direct, want the questions about reality to matter as much as the next fight. They mostly succeed: this is an excellent science-fiction action film, held back by solemn explanations and some underwritten people. Its considerable pleasure lies in watching ideas that could have stayed in the dialogue affect how bodies move across the screen.
Bill Pope’s cinematography makes the martial arts readable even when the movement becomes impossible, and the changing viewpoints do more than advertise technical cleverness. Slow motion allows us to study the movement instead of simply registering a blow. We laughed with pleasure at the gravity-defying fights, because their precision makes such extravagant nonsense feel convincing. The effects invite close inspection, and the choreography is good enough to withstand it without losing the sense of danger that makes a fight worth watching.
Editor Zach Staenberg deserves credit for how well those stretched moments sit within the fights; slowing things down rarely drains their energy. The gun battles have the same assurance, although their scale eventually becomes less interesting than the strangeness of the premise. Don Davis’s score helps the action feel consequential even when the effects encourage us to enjoy it as an elaborate trick. At 136 minutes, though, the film has room for more talk than its ideas always need.
Owen Paterson’s production design helps make the dystopian setting persuasive enough for the uncertainty about reality to take hold. His contribution is easy to overlook beside the effects, but the action benefits from surroundings that do not compete with every moving body. Keanu Reeves is similarly useful at the centre of it. As Neo, he makes uncertainty worth watching, giving us someone to follow when the writing grows too pleased with its own mysteries.
Laurence Fishburne gives Morpheus the authority the explanations need, though even he cannot make every piece of exposition sound like conversation. Carrie-Anne Moss makes Trinity’s physical assurance compelling, but the script leaves us wanting more of the person behind it. Hugo Weaving, as Agent Smith, finds a peculiar humour in severity, and is welcome whenever the film threatens to become wholly reverential about itself. The cast do much to distinguish characters whose functions in the story are sometimes clearer than their personalities.
The reservation is familiar from science fiction that wants to explain its thinking: people can become useful chiefly for what they tell us. The Wachowskis sometimes labour a point we have already understood, and the solemn delivery makes the delay harder to ignore. The shift towards extended action also narrows the possibilities opened by the earlier uncertainty about reality. We would have liked the film to keep troubling us a little longer before letting physical skill settle quite so much.
Yet by the standards of action science fiction, the fights repay unusually close attention. A change in speed or perspective keeps asking us to reconsider what a body can do, so the physical spectacle remains connected to the film’s questions. That is why the action never becomes as routine as the thinner stretches of writing threaten to make it. Give it your full attention, but be prepared for people who explain things more slowly than they fight.
