The Matrix Reviews
Top CriticA must-see among genre fans, especially guys in their teens and 20s, for whom the script's pretentious mumbo-jumbo of undergraduate mythology, religious mysticism and technobabble could even be a plus rather than a dramatic liability.
There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome.
Another slice of overlong, high concept hokum.
For those who have been waiting for movies to catch up with the graphic possibilities of comic books, wait no longer: The Matrix is among us.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Matrix soars with its feet in the air -- the rest crash-lands.
The Matrix did not bore me. It interested me so much, indeed, that I wanted to be challenged even more.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The movie is kinetic, atmospheric, visually stunning, and mind-bending.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A more technically dazzling synthesis of action choreography and cutting-edge computer graphics has not been seen since James Cameron's T2.
The Matrix is the coolest -- a journey into a genuinely original vision of our cyberfuture that will have you checking your own reality by the time it's over.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Matrix is mainly also an exercise in outrageous style over substance featuring flowing trenchcoats, sunglasses at night, and LOTS of guns.
There's a kind of liberating, almost transforming energy in this film; it lights you up and sends you out all giddy with silliness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The most salient things any prospective viewer need know is that Keanu Reeves makes a strikingly chic Prada model of an action hero.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
It doesn't do anything interesting with the futuristic vision that it takes forever to explain!
The only things energetic about The Matrix are its special effects.
The Matrix is too much of an outer-limits head-trip to resist!
A blast of Holly-Kong glitz that never approaches the stylistic cohesiveness of, say, John Woo's Face/Off or the charisma of that film's propulsive star John Travolta.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Given a budget that encourages their kinesthetic skills, the filmmakers tend to go on a bit, but it's mostly a kind of quick, glancing hipness that's being indulged here.
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Special kudos to the mysterious Wachowski tag team, who have created a lurid, splashy nightmare for the end of the millennium.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The Matrix flings around enough imaginative ideas and digitized bodies to make it a definite check-out-this-one for all science-fiction fans.
Keanu Reeves makes a lean, strikingly beautiful tabula rasa hero, twisting out of the way of bullets that elongate like silver beads of mercury, and he's partnered by the equally hard, blank, and androgynously gorgeous Carrie-Anne Moss.
The Matrix serves up so much visual wizardry and thought-provoking ideas that even the inevitable Silver touch -- a finale with more bullets than the opening of Saving Private Ryan -- can't destroy the magic.
It may bore you to death or blow your mind -- and it's long and convoluted enough to do both -- but it holds nothing back!
It's astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in the service of something so stupid.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
The Matrix is really about filmmaking style rather than context.
