The Matrix

Damn your pathetic floundering species. Damn you all to heck. I've got a good mind to destroy civilisation right now, and if I did there wouldn't be a court in the land would convict me. I've tried warning you 'people' about this entertainment media thing. It all looks jolly enough but the intrinsic truths about your cinema bely the fragile web of deceit that protects you all from the truth about yourselves. But do you ever listen? Noooooo.

That of which I speak today is something which has gnawed away like a splinter in my mind, driving me mad for many years now. For a long time I have tried to contain my rage in the hope that truth would out, dreaming that perhaps the dark cloud would pass. But there it is still, looming like some great persistent loomy thing.

This 'film', this overblown TV pilot for a crap show that can't even pass for an overlong music video because of its sheer inanity and stylistic incompetence, it pisses me off. It pisses me off, this film, not because it resembles the sort of trundling old eighties ten-a-penny Rutger Hauer tax dodge vehicles, those six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style Bladerunner rip-off of a Bladerunner rip-off that plague the rental shelves and late night cable - but because it does so in such an enduring glow of critical reverence. After three years this epic venture in derivative mediocrity still persists in being about the most highly acclaimed piece of God damned crap in the Universe.

I speaketh, of course, of The Matrix.

For the duration of the millennium thus far, not one day has passed in which I have not been subjected at point blank range to one proclamation or another that The Matrix is the most innovative, original, ground breaking, boundary pushing and all round ingenious action movie or sci-fi film of the millennium. Pushing back the boundaries of what? THE EIGHTIES? And as for original? Don't even get me started. Oh, you have got me started.

Numbered amongst your unconvincing faux society there are those of you who seek out interesting and mind expanding materials, those who watch, read, listen to and generally try to consume and surround themselves with valid media products that help move the world forward and introduce new ideas and lines of thought. Passionate people who care deeply about the things that they adopt into their being or into their work. These people, through no fault of their own, through no particular desire to be elitist, and with no particular desire to be alienated, are forced to live on one or another of society's fringes or lesser sub-cultures. From these distant outposts those that care, those with passion, have long cried out the virtues of their favorite band/movie/whatever from these outposts, but their cries have been met with silence from a disinterested world.

Until IT happens. The same thing that always happens, over and over. Someone, some evil Californian FUCK hears their cries from atop his ivory tower. "What's that?" he exclaims "a fascinating and innovative comic book with wonderful artwork (for example), I better have a look at that" So the evil Californian bastard flies down from on high and sees the comic book. He decides that it is indeed wonderful and that he wishes to buy it and use his power and influence to bring its virtues to the wider world. "This is great" he says "but I don't like the main guy, he's too dark, and it needs a girl, and it's too colourful. It should be black, there should be lots of black leather everywhere. And it needs more galvanised steel. But it shouldn't be too dark. And it needs a dog." At which point the owner either sells the comic book for a phenomenal amount of money and a hideously bastardised version of the original product supersedes the original as the perceived face or the product, OR he tells the Californian to fuck off. In which case California Man responds with "Well, I'll just rip it off then."

Which brings me back to The Matrix.

Have you people never seen Ghost in the Shell? Bladerunner? Akira, Star Wars, Bill and Ted, Death Machine, Max Headroom the series, War of the Worlds Season Two, Seven, The X-Files, Terminator, Aliens, the old Smirnoff advert? Are you not aware of the many hundreds of ill conceived chicken-in-a-basket style 'black is the new black' pseudomanga Image comics that have been causing Mamoru Oshii, William Gibson and Masamune Shirow to rollover in their beds these last ten years or so? Have you not seen just about anything I could mention produced by Squaresoft or released on the Playstation? No?

Well, okay then. We can't all be media junkies and it's probably for the best if you HAVEN'T seen half of those things. If the Matrix is really the first thing you ever did see that looks like the Matrix then count yourself lucky. God knows I have no choice in the matter. I'm sworn to protect your crappy species and besides, I'm a giant insect and I live in a big well. What else am I gonna do all day?

BUT THERE'S STILL NO EXCUSE! I mean have you people never turned on your televisions? Have you never read a book? Have you never been outside? Listen, I don't want to have a go at you but there's a few things that need straightening out. For one thing, it's NOT the Eighties. Wearing black shades and a long black coat is NOT cool. It hasn't been cool for a long long time, and even when it was cool, it still wasn't cool. You know as well as I do that if you saw someone in the street wearing a long black coat and black sunglasses that you would mock and deride them and point out their foolishness to your friends. And rightly so. So please, for the love of cheese tell me this. By what stretch of reasoning is it that dressing like a pretentious jazz-goth mong who can't see where they are going and falls over their own coat is suddenly the height of style? Maybe I'm just bitter because so few stores stock for the larger insect, but I doubt it. This is not the crux of my dilemma however. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a piece of ill-conceived lack-of-style over content. We've all done it. But what really gets my goat (and I DO have a goat) is the persistence with which it is insisted that this codswallop is genuinely any good. Thought provoking even.

Before the silly film even came out, during that six year period over which they seemed to be advertising it, you monkeys were already suckered into its mystery and enigma.
'What is the Matrix?' they used to ask. 'Nobody can be told what the Matrix is' they continued. And you danced their dance. "ooh its very mysterious" you all muttered. "I wonder what the matrix is, it must be very profound"
What is the matrix? It's that thing off Transformers the Movie isn't it, it's an old Atari game.
Jesus, it's a FILM. Of course you don't know what it is. Of course you don't know anything about it. You haven't frigging SEEN IT YET. Just because they keep TELLING you that you don't know anything about it doesn't make it some sort of profound conspiratorial secret. No one knows anything about any film they haven't seen yet, but here we see some perverse logic at work by which constantly telling you you know nothing about it makes you think you want to know more. So by the time the film rolls around and you find out that all 'the matrix' ever was was a retread of that tired old plot about reality being a computer game, you all lap it up like eager tongue-wielding lappy things.

The Matrix is no more and no less than a tired generic Hollywood-by-numbers rip off of a million other better things from a genre of storytelling that died out with the Garbage Pail Kids and a desire to wear three waistcoats with leg warmers and a set of bangles. Its not only old and tired, but its crap as well. It's not like it breathed new life into an old genre. It uses all the old traits of TV cyborg wrangling. The leather, the fog, the walking in slo-mo, the derelict warehouses, the suits, the so on and so on and so on. The editing's crap, extolling the sort of icing-on-a-cake style approach to graphics where by the CGI shots burst into the scene, announce themselves loudly like some vulgar gatecrasher, then piss off as quickly as they appeared. The few but not infrequent enough bursts of glory-shot herding and inappropriate time bending sequences are strung together by an endless warble of TV midshot madness and an extravaganza of mastershots that belay the films syndicated-scifi style roots. And the script? The script is the most ill-advised mishmash of self contradictory mixed metaphors and pretentious warblings misquoted, misplaced and removed of all validity I ever done saw.

Anyway. The film.

So the film starts and there's these cops strutting bow leggedly about the corridors of some ridiculous prefab, supposed to look run down, pissed up the wall style apartment block that might look like something out of Se7en if it weren't framed like such a TV movie. You know the sort of building, the type with rusty concrete, like in Candyman. Outside are a bunch of other cops who have parked their cars in that sort of skew-wif fashion that cops always park their cars in in movies, especially when forming a blockade. Minimum parking symmetry for maximum efficiency. Makes sense to me. This is also shot like one of those moments in television where a show tries to look cinematic but doesn't pull it off. Two sinister FBI sorts get out and start annunciating in that way that only evil can annunciate, and make comment to the effect that the Oirish Newyoikan police man's men are all fucked, on account of how hard the woman they are trying to nick is.

It is now that we get to the nitty gritty of the Matrix, the fascinating boundary pushing and innovative never-before-seen style kung-fu antics and fly-mo camera wrangling. Trinity, for that is her name, chooses not to be nicked and so beats up the policemen. Distracted by the zany screensaver antics of her laptop, the first policeman is kicked across the room, but not before young Trinity has engaged in that ridiculous spinny-round camera malarkey off the old Smirnoff advert. There follows what is possibly the worst ever application of a technique which is, contrary to popular belief, as old as some really old hills I could mention - placed in the scene not only without the luxuries of context or precedence, but at completely the WRONG moment.

A woman kicks a man, the man flies across the room. It's happened before and it'll happen again. Its happened before in the context of slowing down and subsequently speeding up action devised to emphasise the impact, but in all previous acts of on-screen kicking or punching that I have bared witness to - good or bad - the director has always had the good sense to emphasise the IMPACT. Fight scenes are about impact. They are by definition a series of impacts. Fight scenes are not about the grace of balletic movement, they are about the impact. Gymnastic grace contributes to the impact of the impact, but is not in its self a substitute. Why then (why oh why oh dear God why) do the Wachowski's choose to stop in the middle of a fly kick and go for a stroll around the room while Trinity is in the air about two seconds BEFORE the impact.

Do they freeze the action at the point when her foot contacts with his head and his spittle is floating through the air? Noooooo. They freeze it while she is looking like a Yogic flyer and he is looking at his watch. Why would anyone do that? I'll tell you why. BECAUSE THE KICK DOESN'T CONNECT. That's how fucking great that scene is. She does her poncey floaty rotatey thing then they cut MID KICK to a close up of some other fucker's foot. It could be the foot of a stunt midget standing on a ladder for all I know. But what I do know is that the Wachowski's, in spite of their power to 'wield time' feel they have to cut to a close up mid-kick just to show that it IS a kick like the TV-movie fucks they are. Is this innovation, or in fact downright idiocy? You decide.
I just got three paragraphs ranting about one kick and the fight's not even over. Can you even imagine where I'm going with this?

Anyway, following that stunning display of aerial showing off, Trinity throws a chair at another cop like the kung-fu master she self evidently isn't. A third cop starts shooting and, realising that she has lost the element of surprise, Trinity decides to engage in another mind bogglingly ill-conceived act of crap would be Jet Li-ism. This time she runs up the wall. The remarkable thing, however, about this particular run up the wall is that it takes place in a room about the size of a portaloo. Thus, she 'runs' or strolls up the wall almost immediately without any sort of a run up and without any thought for physics, then 'strolls' equally slowly about the perimeter of the room at a ninety degree angle. If this is supposed to look like an impressive but believable stunt, it doesn't. If it's supposed to be an example of Trinity manipulating the computery world of the matrix then I suppose you can excuse all sorts of things, but the fact of the matter is it just screams out 'Mike and Angelo'. And it's not a patch on that bit in Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Anyway. I tire of yammering on about this fight. There's some more kicking and punching. It looks shit. Fight ends.

The chasing, the shooting, the fire escapes. Everyone persues trinity across a preposterous Friends style roof top studio set. They have to use a studio set because real roofs just don't have that 'real rooftop' look.

"I've seen things on rooftops that you wouldn't believe. Dry ice in fog horns drifting through clothes lines. Neon signs advertising long unavailable products in places where no one would ever see the bill board. All those memories lost like pigeons in a giant rotating ventilation fan" - Rutger Hauer, Bladerunner.

I digress. So Trinity is being chased along when she comes to a massive gap between two buildings. She contemplates jumping it in a way that might look convincing, or might have some baring on the laws of physics, but her ridiculous shoes won't permit such a leap so there is only one thing for it. She goes from a leisurely jog into a ridiculous looking floaty sort of a jump at a forty five degree angle like so many Neil Armstrongs. Presumably this again is supposed to demonstrate Trinity's fantastic ability to arse around with the matrix program and not represent an act of raw physical prowess as such, but does that really mean it has to look shit? Apparently so. I'm not even going to START on what's wrong with the following jump through a window. I think you get the idea by now.

The FBI types try to run Trinity down in a truck but she escapes down the phone ala Bill and Ted. Presumably by way of warning that Keanu Reeves will be in the next scene. This little scene may or may not have been shit. I honestly cant tell you as I was too busy being appalled that it was filmed by THAT DAMNED BRIDGE. You know, the one they keep passing in Repoman. The one EVERYBODY films next to. You cheap fucks.

Scene2: Keanu Reeves is having a kip while his computer flips through a montage of newspaper clippings for its own amusement. Presumably he was rendered unconscious by staring for too long at his monitor, which is so powerful that it actually projects an image of its self onto the users face, like wot computers do. That's gotta be healthy. Keanu is also listening to Massive Attack. Well isn't he such a fucking neo-bohemian.

So someone in Keanu's computer is trying to tell him he's in the matrix and blah blah blah by way of a reference to Alice in Wonderland (that's a book, by the way), when the sinister conspiratorial antics are interrupted by a knock at the door. And guess who it is. Why, it's a bunch or preposterously dressed eighties style cyberpunks including, so far as I can derive, Catarina off Heartbreak High.

It transpires, you see, that Keanu (or 'Neo') is a hacker and a seller of dodgy computer wares - and its at this precise interval that the true intended core audience is revealed. Now as a Giant Insect I don't have a lot of use for computers. I in fact have a highly trained Bear write these rants by my dictation. However I am not completely alien to these matters and have often dwelled myself upon that age old riddle 'Are people in I.T boring because they are in I.T, or are they in I.T because they are boring?'
Apparently, though, we have all had it all wrong. APPARENTLY the world of illegal hardware purchase is not pathetic and unglamorous, but populated by stunningly attractive thin clean people with sexy wardrobes who get invited to parties by Australian actors. So what do we derive from this? Is the film (a) a slick stylish return to thoughtful conceptual sci-fi - or (b) a wet dream fantasy for thousands of wanker boy computer nerds that we are all buying into it like suckers? Hmmmmmmmm.

So they all go to this club and remarkably its a completely realistic club exactly like wot clubs are like. I honestly expected it would be filmed in that bloody club they always go to with the big posh ceiling and that they would fill it with TV screens and stuff and have sexy fetish goth types lurking about listening to The Prodigy circa 'Fat of the Land' but behaving like they are in a jazz club. Oh no wait. That's exactly what they HAVE done. Who knew.
In this club, Neo meets Trinity and the most remarkable thing happens.
"I know why you're here Neo" she whispers seductively
"I know why you live alone and why you spend each night in front of you computer" or words to that effect. And this is the remarkable bit. She DOESN'T conclude
"because your a wanker"
but in fact concludes
"your looking for HIM"
So THAT'S it. All these people running up these huge internet bills are looking for Laurence bleeding Fishburne. It's so clear to me now.

So Neo is at work at omnisuperhypercorp, or some such, and he receives a huge eighties phone in the post from Laurence Fishburne. Laurence then proceeds to guide Neo away from being arrested by those FBI types in a scene that is by no means reminiscent of the same scene in Bill and Ted. In fact there are no similarities between this film and Bill and Ted at all, especially not really bizarre and perverse ones. Laurence tells Neo to climb out of the window by way of escape. Its a very big window. A fully opening man sized window about a foot off the floor and at the top of a skyscraper. "NO-WAY" exclaims Ted, er, Neo. Indeed not.

The film blithers on its merry way. Neo gets captured then escapes. Blah blah blah. And in all honesty the next fifteen to twenty minutes or so aren't that bad. Not particularly amazing, but not offensively bad either. Granted that 'sealed mouth' make up is a bit crap and the bad guys use a seti eel. Granted the music that accompanies removing said eel is remarkably similar to the chest burster music off Alien and granted, they are filming under that FUCKING bridge again. But whatever. Of course the film STARTS alright. It follows the structure of all superhero movies ever. And superhero movies always START alright.

But then America kicks in. Neo is driven to Laurence Fishburnes vampire castle, where the great annunciating one describes to us at last the nature of the matrix. But it is here, of course, that the movie becomes confused and collapses, because it is a film in denial. The ideas behind it are at odds with the nature of the film its self.

So they have this chat...

LARRY: "Let me tell you why you are here.You are here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has bought you to me. Do you know what I am talking about?"

TED: "The way that Hollywood and the media cynically cushions us from practicing free thought through the clever use of a reverse psychology that makes us think we are questioning things when we are in fact pandering to the precise lines of thought they wish us to take?"

LARRY: "No. The Matrix"

TED: "oh. That."

The Matrix is, it transpires "The world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Like everyone else you (yes, you) were born into bondage. Born into... a prison for you mind!" Which, ironically, is precisely the truth. The Matrix, this here film called 'The Matrix', is precisely a construct of the self same prison that it would have you believe it is unmasking. Think about it.

America owns the Earth (and don't think it doesn't) and yet is a country that happily allows for products such as, say, The X-Files to exist within its walls and be broadcast to it's people. Programs and films in which the Government, the current actual American Government, is accused of lying and covering stuff up and all sorts. Why do you suppose that is? Do you suppose it is because America is the land of the free? That because it is not a communist dictatorship that left wing anti-Government ideas are permitted in the name of freedom of speech? Or, is it because through reverse psychology these sorts of films actually validate Governmental authority?
Now don't think I'm trying to instill conspiracy theories into your mind here. I'm not. There is no direct connection between Hollywood and the Government. The American film industry receives no government funding and everyone in Hollywood has to pay their taxes same as you do. In fact they have to pay MORE taxes than you do. But at the same time everyone in Hollywood is an American and Hollywood is IN America (as much as it's anywhere on Earth) and everyone there is living the 'American Dream' - you know, the one about wiping your ass with money. So they, more than anyone else, are going to have a vested interest in putting across the idea that the system is working, if only out of blind stupid naivety.

Thus. Which of these two ideas are you more comfortable with? (a) America is the new Roman Empire and its stranglehold on the third world and Middle East kills and starves millions of people each year and that its President is a cow wrangling hick who only got in because your democracy is a sham and the voting process a ridiculous circus act. Or (b) the Government have aliens and they won't tell you. Ooooh. How naughty of them.

Equally, which frightens you into submission more? (a) Policing authorities are a sham and only thick people ever join the military, or (b) the FBI have a vast army of invincible crack ninja supersoldiers with full black body armour who are hiding in your wardrobe RIGHT NOW and will slam you to the floor with the end of an assault riffle if you even THINK about lighting that spliff?
Oh please. No one is out to get you. There are no conspiracies. No secret plans to get YOU. To control YOU. Don't be so paranoid. Don't take it so personally. It's just that the whole thing is all a big fucking mess and if they can KEEP you thinking about yourself that way, then maybe you won't get in the way

The Matrix works the same. Is it more frightening to contemplate that (a) mankind has allowed itself to become so distanced from its own society, and that that society has in turn become so distanced from nature that you rely upon huge corporations to bombard you with media to protect you from reality? That everything you see is a tenth generation bastardisation of something original or something real or something true so that you don't have to think too hard and that you only have your self to blame? That right now you are watching a crap hollywood action film that occasionally contemplates the notion of free thinking so that you are fooled into thinking that you have that option, when you are in fact being specifically diverted from doing that right now by what is essentially the 'smiling corporate face of questioning'. Or (b) that the world is just fine and dandy, but the reason you weren't comfortable is that it isn't actually real and we are all the prisoners of not ourselves, not our own elected rulers or even society its self, but of robo-spiders in the future?

The same argument can also be applied to the internal workings of the media. Is the Matrix (a) An discourse on the nature or reality designed to make you question your surroundings, or (b) a loud mouthed Hollywood movie designed to save you the bother of watching a better film or reading a book?

Your bored of this aren't you? You want to hear me slag off the film more don't you? Okay then. That's easy, cos it's crap from now on. So it turns out that reality isn't real. That's a bit of a mind bender eh? That's a bit depressing. You might not be here right now, you might be in a barrel of Vimto in the future. Spooky stuff.
Fortunately, it's not YOUR reality that isn't real. Its a super stylised turquoisey green Tim Burton looking reality where everyone's a crack addict that isn't real. So no threat there then. God forbid we should CONFRONT the audience.

So what's reality then? Well, in reality it's the future. And what does that mean boys and girls? It means everything's BLUE. How original. It also means that everyone is in the costumes off Twelve Monkeys and lives in a submarine in an HR Giger painting populated by the spiders off Ghost in the Shell.

Having built Larry Fishburnes character up to biblical proportions as the film has gone on, we now begin to find out that he doesn't actually know 'more than you can imagine' but is in fact a bit of a Qui Gon Jin, a crap Jedi in charge of a bunch of Sea Quest throw backs who all live on an awful open plan syndicated TV show style ship. Furthermore, it transpires, everybody on board has a patently ridiculous G.I Joe nick name.
"This is Epoch, this is Hudson, this is Laundromat, Betamax, Megatron, Snowjob. This is Axel, and his inevitably doomed sidekick, Foley. They're all pirates don't you know"

Well yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Meanwhile, earlier, said giant spiders are using human beings for batteries. Neo is shown vast fields where thousands of humans are being made to wear bunny suits and bang drums over and over and over. Oh the horror. There's only one thing for it. Learn crap American Kung Fu.

"Whoah. I know Kung Fu" drones Keanu. I think not.

Now, who knows why the martial arts in Hong Kong films are always good regardless of budgetary limitations, and diametrically, why fights in American films are always crap? Anyone? You at the back. That's right, its the cult of the individual again. The frigging star system. Jet Li can do kung fu, he is a kung fu star. Donnie Yen can do kung fu for the same reason. KEANU FUCKING REEVES CAN NOT DO KUNG FU. Nor can Laurence Fishburne. Unfortunately Hollywood cinema is terrified of taking its stars' pretty faces off the screen for more than two seconds, and hence is forced to use said stars during would-be Hong Kong sequences. Were this not the case and competent stunt doubles employed (or Asian actors to begin with) then that mind bogglingly awful scene in the Dojo might be any good. As it stands, it isn't.

Nor, for that matter, is the following scene in which Neo is taught to jump in that crap way that Trinity does near the beginning. This is a crap scene. Even the Wachowskis have realised that it is crap because otherwise they wouldn't keep cutting to those guys in the submarine TALKING about how exciting it is. If this action (that's action) sequence were any good they wouldn't need to talk it up, they would just DO it. But they don't.

So everyone then puts on their best inconspicuous designer leathers and ponces off to see the Oracle, who lives inside the Matrix, which doesn't make much sense but there you go. The only significantly good thing about The Matrix, the only thing or any particular note worthy merit is that when they get to the Oracles house, Night of the Lepus is on the telly in the background.

BALD KID: "Do not try to bend the spoon. That would be impossible, instead try to realise the truth"

TED: "Which is?"

BALD KID: "That I am a particularly bad child actor who some foolish Californians perceive as conveying a certain amount of mystery because I have a British accent.
Then you will realise that it is not the spoon which is bent, but this film."

Now here's a thing. If those blokes in suits and the giant spiders control the Matrix and its every facet, and if Neo and his mates can mess with its physics, then why does everyone (the bad guys in particular) keep changing really crap inconsequential things to prevent our heroes escape? Why would you change a window into a wall and not, say, turn the stairs into a banana - or turn their guns into cakes? I don't suppose it matters any as the villains successfully kill off half of G.I Joe anyway, and capture Laurence Fishburne.

" The first matrix program" Elron tells Larry in the interrogation room " was filled with fairground rides and fluffy kittens, but your cynical monkey brains rejected it. Instead we created your present reality. The one you see around you. It was dead easy really. We just got the sixties, seventies and eighties - mixed them up arbitrarily, called it the nineties and declared it a decade. And you actually believed the world hadn't ended. Oh you silly sausages."

He then continues to the end of almost forwarding an interesting and challenging thesis about the nature of humanity. He explains that on the basis of your resource-dilapidating type ways that you are in fact an infestation. A disease upon mother earth. There is of course a great amount of truth to this and the film presents a challenging thesis at this point. "Human beings are a cancer of this planet, a plague. And we are the cure" he states. A bold and challenging proposition until you remember that it has come from an evil robot spider that lives in a Giger painting, thus making the argument redundant and making everyone feel much better about things ("Well at least we don't go around building veiny phaluses everywhere", you cry). Once more Hollywood doubles back on itself and cowers away from saying anything interesting. Hurrah.

The rest of the film from this point is almost entirely taken up by action sequences. You might argue that its quite an achievement for an American film to finally try to compete with the sheer volume of action in Asian entries into the genre, as opposed to conforming to the 'one at each end and two in the middle if you're lucky' structure set up by the Bond movies. But I would argue by contrast that it's ABOUT FUCKING TIME SOMETHING HAPPENED. The rest of this Rant, as you might imagine, is therefore going to be consumed primarily with slating said action sequences. For this duration I shall be making various references to the Hong Kong film industry and I want it to be quite clear to you why I am doing this. The Matrix spends the rest of it's running time trying to BE a Hong Kong film. End of story. It is not trying to take elements from Asian Martial Arts cinema and combine them with its own unique style and Hollywood sensibilities to create some new and unprecedented hybrid. It is just plain trying to DO Hong Kong. Its a bunch of Americans trying to be a bunch of Chinamen trying to be a bunch of Americans. No more, no less. And to this end, it fails hilariously.

So everyone kits up like the Men in Black and marches off to save Larry Fishburne lead by Keanu Reeves, who guides their way into the building wearing a pair of his best Terminator 2 'bell chime in time with yer feet' boots. There follows yet another reiteration of that joke out of the Mad Max films/The Blues Brothers wherein Neo passes through security carrying loads and loads of guns - and then there is a wideshot of the forecourt. The reason this shot of the forecourt is here is because the Wachowski's seem to think they are building us up for a really TIGHT action set piece. You know, like the nightclub scene in Full Contact, or the end of A Better Tomorrow 2, the sort of scene where every bullet counts and every fallen bad guy or splintered wall is accounted for. But it is, of course, nothing more than the traditional arbitrary running around and firing directly forwards school of gun fighting established by Saturday morning cartoons and already thoroughly mocked in various episodes of Police Squad.

Neo and Trinity execute the security guards with, in fairness, a reasonable amount of efficiency and professionalism. I could point out that these bumbling security guards are not quite faceless or unpleasant enough, and that their deaths betray the blood lust and contempt for human life that Hong Kong films more often than not manage to avoid, but which is always so evident in American action films - but I won't, because this part of the film more or less works. As a result, back-up is called for (super efficient armies of black clad soldiers who appear from nowhere again.) providing a far more suitable source of body count than a bunch of fat security guards. The forecourt is lined on each side by a row of columns and our two heroes take a side each while the FBI types spread throughout.

Suddenly there is firing from all directions. Instead of weaving carefully about the forest of concrete, however, Neo chooses to run blindly forwards with both guns blazing. There are bullets coming from both in front and the sides, but apparently these are all of no concern. This is clearly supposed be an emulation of the Chow Yun Fat school of confidently strolling forward knowing full well that you are a better shot than your opponents, ala The Killer. But it actually reads as the 'hundreds of enemies are firing straight at me but I don't get hit cos I just don't' school of agrivatingly unfair battle wrangling invented for 60s TV cowboy shows with no budget. Earlier on, when Neo asked if he would be able to dodge bullets, the response was "when you are ready, you won't have to." This is apparently the case, but it hardly makes for dramatic viewing. The point I am making is that our heroes do not get shot in this scene NOT because they have traversed the field and executed their nemesis with samurai efficiency, but because they just don't HAPPEN to get hit despite the fact that there actions (or lack of) should have got them mowed down several times by now. This is precisely the same thing that has been happening for years in all sorts of straight to video efforts by failing eighties muscle mountains like Stallone or Van Damme, so the idea that this scene in any way represents a furtherance of the art form is ridiculous.

More to the point however, once about half way across the room, Keanu Reeves starts leaping out from behind columns doing a sort of bow legged duck dance. Its not enough that he can't do Kung Fu, he can barely even walk properly - the great willowy twat.

This duck dance is followed by yet another slo-mo kick, like that one Trinity does right at the start. But like that kick, they fuck up the editing once again in precisely the same way. To be fair to the talentless hack, Keanu Reeves actually performs this stunt perfectly well. They have trained him up and he has done the job. He kicks the guy once, uses that kick as a foothold and essentially 'walks up' the guy and then boots him in the face. Fair enough. I mean, can YOU do that? But then in spite of this, in spite of the fact that this actor has actually managed to perform this fairly complex stunt in one take, the Wachowski's feel some unexplainable need to break up the shot with a close up of the foot hitting the face. The reason this occurs is because, as I believe I have already noted at several points, the Wachowski's are a bunch of TV-movie hacks. And in cheap crap action films, the fact that the actors can't fight properly is always masked by lots of closeups of punches and kicks. Editing little snippets of impact rapidly to mask the fact that no noteworthy stunt work is occurring (Like in Buffy, when it cuts from Buffy's butch stunt double back to Sarah Michelle Geller twatting a fellow starlet in the face with a rubber steak). But in this case the pretty actor HAS performed the stunt so there's absolutely no need. Further to which, Keanu doesn't ACTUALLY kick his fellow actor in the head, this is of course one of those 'shot from behind' shots in which the actor kicks NEAR the other actors head and a sound of a kick is added. Consequently, by topping of this contemporary action stunt with the oldest shitest trick in the book, the Directors completely devalue their own stunt, their own star's achievements and the scene itself. Well done boys.

Meanwhile, later. Neo and Trinity are in an elevator. They climb onto the roof and sever the cord that supports the lift sending it hurtling down the shaft and they, on the other end of the cord, hurtling upwards. This is bollocks. I don't care if it is 'just a movie' This is bollocks. The precise sort of bollocks that happens in films all the time but has no precedent in reality and which causes me to wonder whether you stupid monkeys can even tell the difference. Word of note. Next time you are in an elevator and you are worried about it plummeting - DON'T. It won't happen. It CAN'T happen. It can't happen because elevators are not carried up and down on a BIT OF STRING. That would be fantastically stupid and is not the case. Their functionality is infinitely more complicated than that and the cars all have brakes that automatically make falling impossible. The laws of physics prevent the brakes from failing, so stop letting movies dictate your understanding of the world around you you stupid shadow-fearing fucks.

I digress. A moment later, our heroes are on the roof doing playground kung fu as a bloke in a helicopter watches on. This young man, who talks with the same drawl that all people in helicopters or over intercoms use in movies ("stay on target") is unfortunate enough to have an 'Agent's face appear out of the side of his own face at this interval. Strange that this happens in a helicopter, because practically the same thing happens in a helicopter in Terminator 2.

This is then followed by one of the only three or four bits anyone ever really remembers from the 'action packed' Matrix. That bit where the camera spins around and the bullets leave a weird wobbly residue. "You mean I can dodge bullets?" "When you're ready. you won't have to." But he does anyway. I could point out that without this residue effect the sequence would be incomprehensible, but I won't. I also won't point out that said residue effect is only even present because the entire aesthetic of this film is lifted primarily from Jet Li's The Black Mask (which is also shit) in which the bad guy uses a sonic weapon that leaves the same trail. What I will point out instead is that in the following sequence Neo attacks the Agents in a helicopter and a textural ballet of raining bullet shells and slow motion water splashes ensues. However, this obviously very expensive and time consuming sequence, which is very pretty, is immediately followed by a shot of an Agent dying - which is represented by one of the worst applications of drawn-on-lightning ever seen. This tupence ha'penny effect looks like the sort of scratch-on-film animation usually reserved for old Hammer Vampire efforts (or the end of Hellraiser) and drags down the tone of the rest of the sequence. Yet again. This seems to be a recurring trend of The Matrix, that for every little thing it achieves, it does something else crap to undermine it. This, in a nutshell, is also the history of Hollywood.

Eventually, our heroes rescue their friend via that helicopter sequence in Darkman, Neo and Trinity arbitrarily but inevitably fall in love, and everyone goes to bed. What we come away with from his whole sequence is the the clear impression that the Wachowski's have watched a lot of Hong Kong films. They have figured that action sequences should be tight and specific. They have picked up on the dubious artistic merits attached to combining gun fights with flowing water, towering smoke and fluttering birds and they have tried to employ dynamic angles and compositions. But they don't seem to have figured out for themselves that there is indeed a difference between 'knowing the path and walking it'. Which is why the second to last confrontation with the main bad guy, that fight in the subway, is such a ridiculous fanboy mishmash of bits and pieces from other peoples movies. Keanu seems to have assumed Jet Li's signatory come on, and his stances from Donnie Yen, while the bad guy appears to have picked up his moves from watching Fist of the North Star.

So blah blah blah. Rant rant rant. Lots of running around. Lots of Aliens type music and klanging noises. They have the audacity to do that thing where sparks actually fly as the two main characters kiss. Keanu Reeves turns into Jesus-Superman-Luke Skywalker guy and flies off into the distance. He ACTUALLY flies off. FILM ENDS.

Thank God.

I'm going to end this Rant now. I have shown you people what you did not want to see. I have shown you the truth. I have shown you what ACTUALLY HAPPENS in this silly film and cast judgment upon it exclusively upon its own merits instead of pandering or contributing to the orbiting NOTION of what it represents, as dictated to the public, academia and the media by its own all-saturating self promotion machine. That there is a world out there without rules and controls, without borders and boundaries - and that that world is about a million miles away from Hollywood, that you will never find the way there if you allow your self to be guided by the loud mouthed bawlings and machinations of huge media magnates, that you will have to look a lot harder and further than here for the way into the light and that it has absolutely SWEET FUCK ALL to do with The Matrix. Where we go from there, is a choice I leave to you. You silly bastards.

Mantis flies off into the sunset. Cue obnoxious Nu Metal. Green text on black.