CineBad!!!

Cube. The Matrix. Yes, Technology is the new threat. Everyone’s making films these days about people being menaced, or otherwise swallowed by technology. Maybe it’s because of the incredible popularity of Internet porn these days. Or maybe it’s just because of AOL.

This is a movie about computers evolving into a life form which ultimately takes over and enslaves humanity. If you think I’m “spoiling” the movie by telling you this, think again. It’s all spelled out for you within the first half-hour of the film. Then the movie becomes one long action scene, with many un-dramatic plot twists.

Our hero is Keanu Reeves (his name in the film is “Neo,” but let’s just call him Virtual Ted.) Virtual Ted is spending all of his free time in front of his ergonimically designed keyboard, searching for an Entity online known only as “Morphius.” (Larry Fishburne.) Morphius is also searching for Virtual Ted, so it doesn’t take very long for the plot to develop in that respect. VT encounters a variety of action-adventure scenes in which he’s abducted by weird governmental dudes, and a cybernetic jumbo shrimp is implanted in his belly. This part of the film was actually pretty cool, since I had no idea what was going on, and I was still under the impression that I’d have to work hard in order to understand what the film was about.

Unfortunately, not so. Once Virtual Ted hooks up with Morphius, we learn that the entire world is just one big computer simulation, invented by computers to keep us occupied while they use our physical bodies as electrovoltaic cells. You see, there was this big war, and the computers won… now they farm us as a natural resource. We find this out way too soon. You see, the computers need us for power, since we nuked the sky to keep them from getting solar energy. There’s a cute little computer animated shot of a dead urban skyline with black nuked-out clouds roiling over it. It’s all very twee.

Anyway, I started to get irritated with this film, and then I liked it again. Why? Because it became obvious to me that it’s a total cheesefest. When Neo (OK, I got tired of typing “Virtual Ted” all the time) and his friends download themselves into the computer simulated New York, they want to be as inconspicuous as possible. So they dress like pimps and hoes. My favorite character was Trinity, who wears a black vinyl dominatrix outfit replete with tube-top. Neo also gets martial arts downloaded into his brain so that he can fight the evil computer cops. There’s a great scene involving him and Laurence Fishburne in a virtual dojo. I’m actually giving the filmmakers credit here, since I assume they were trying to be campy.

ANYWAY… the other thing about this film is how much it borrows from other futuristic dystopia films. I think just about every film that I like was ripped off by the Matrix. A few of the early scenes are straight out of Brazil, and the entire storyline is completely Twelve Monkeys in effect… (which movie was seriously scary and thought-provoking) there’s also a visual reference to THX 1138… basically, you name it, and The Matrix rips it off. I could go on and on, but you’d better just see the movie yourself to completely understand.

All in all, I had fun at this movie, once I stopped taking it seriously. It wasn’t the seriously scary cyberpunk epic that I thought it would be. If you can deal with watching Keanu Reeves for two hours at a time, and you like action-adventure flix with lots people getting shot, then you’ll probably get a kick out of this one.