Keanu Reeves stars as a world-class computer hacker named Thomas Anderson who becomes the target of the proverbial "men in black." But instead of giving us Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as benevolent space-age police detectives protecting the earth, the dark-suited detectives in The Matrix (led by actor Hugo Weaving) have a more malevolent purpose. Anderson is guided from the clutches of the dark-suited, dark-shaded detectives by a mysterious man named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), who promises to reveal to Anderson the great truths about the nature of reality: "The world has been been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth," says Morpheus. Morpheus' co-horts compare Anderson to Alice in Wonderland and joke that he has fallen down a rabbit hole. Through his eventual alignment with Morpheus and Morpheus' fellow soldiers (including Carrie-Anne Moss as a high-kicking, no nonsense solider named Trinity and Joe Pantoliano as a shifty-eyed solider who can't be trusted), Anderson slowly moves toward a better understand of the universe.
The Matrix gets off to an uneven start with an okay but undistinguished first 15 minutes. In particular, the stop-motion camera tracking shots, where the action freezes and the camera moves around the combatants, look slick, yes, but they have the effect of completely knocking you out of the movie's world. However, once Anderson, Morpheus, and Trinity get together the movie moves to another level entirely. This is a near great movie of operatic intensity, but it's such an unusual movie that I'm guessing it will largely mystify American audiences, who usually prefer their action movies to come in predictable blockbuster packages. For viewers looking for something different, though, The Matrix will seem like a revelation. It has "cult movie" written all over it. This is the kind of movie that fans will discuss and argue about for years to come.