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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
David Denby on the original "Matrix"
For the past four years, a lot of people have been obsessed with the movie "The Matrix."As the sequel, "The Matrix Reloaded,"arrived in theatres this week, it was obvious that the strange, violent science-fiction film, by the previously more or less unknown Wachowski brothers, had already inspired both a cult and a craze. (And had made a lot of money into the bargain, enough to fuel two sequels; "Matrix Revolutions"is supposed to be out in November.) There hasn't been anything quite like it since "2001: A Space Odyssey,"which had a similar mix of mysticism, solemnity, and mega-effects. Shortly after its mostly unheralded release, in 1999, "The Matrix"became an egghead extase. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek's latest work, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real,"took its title from a bit of dialogue in the film; college courses on epistemology have used "The Matrix"as a chief point of reference; and there are at least three books devoted to teasing out its meanings. ("Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in 'The Matrix' "is a typical title.) If the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose books--"The Gulf War Did Not Take Place"is one--popularized the view that reality itself has become a simulation, has not yet embraced the film it may be because he is thinking of suing for a screen credit. (The "desert of the real"line came from him.) The movie, it seemed, dramatized a host of doubts and fears and fascinations, some half as old as time, some with a decent claim to be postmodern. To a lot of people, it looked like a fable: our fable.
The first "Matrix”--for anyone who has been living in Antarctica for the past four years--depended on a neatly knotted marriage between a spectacle and a speculation. The spectacle has by now become part of the common language of action movies: the amazing "balletic"fight scenes and the slow-motion aerial display of destruction. The speculation, more peculiar, and even, in its way, esoteric, is that reality is a fiction, programmed into the heads of sleeping millions by evil computers. When we meet the hero of the "Matrix"saga, he's a computer programmer--online name Neo--who works in a generic office building in a present-day, Chicago-like metropolis. Revelation arrives when he's recruited by a mysterious guerrilla figure named Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne with a baritone aplomb worthy of Orson Welles. Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two pills, one blue and one red: "You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill . . . and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."Neo takes the red pill and wakes up as he really is: a comatose body in a cocoon, his brain penetrated by a cable that inserts the Matrix, an interactive virtual-reality program, directly into his consciousness. All the people he has ever known, he realizes, are recumbent in incubators, stacks of identical clear pods, piled in high towers; the cocooned sleepers have the simulation piped into their heads by the machines as music is piped into headphones. What they take to be experiences is simply the effect of brain impulses interacting with the virtual-reality program. Guerrilla warriors who have been unplugged from the Matrix survive in an underground city called Zion, and travel in hovercraft to unplug promising humans. Morpheus has chosen to unplug Neo, it turns out, because he believes Neo is the One--the Messiah...
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