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In the opening scene of The Matrix, a foxy, leather-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 – R for violence, adult language and some very disturbing futuristic scenes)
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