In "The Matrix," the new Keanu Reeves sci-fi flick that power-surged onto screens last week, the actor dangles from a helicopter, fights with shape-shifting androids and sports a cool pair of Ray-Bans--all while wired into a computer.
In the movie's not exactly original but impressively rendered premise, virtual reality is not just a place where a man might meet his death--for the vast majority of the enslaved human race, it is the only reality they know. Borrowing from everything from Greek myth to "Alice in Wonderland," from the Bible to "The Terminator" (not to mention kung fu movies and comic books), "The Matrix" is so promiscuously allusive that it almost seems new.
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday April 7, 1999 Home Edition Calendar Part F Page 6 Entertainment Desk 1 inches; 27 words Type of Material: Correction
Sunglasses--A story in Tuesday's Calendar incorrectly identified the sunglasses worn by Keanu Reeves in the movie "The Matrix." The glasses were designed by a company called Blinde Optics.
It is one of a trio of science-fiction movies reaching theaters this spring in which it's not easy to tell where reality starts and stops: Computer simulations in the worlds these films create can be more real than fleshly existence, and perhaps even preferable.
The success of "The Matrix" (the Warner Bros. film grossed $37.4 million in its first five days in release, the best opening of '99), and the coming of the other movies in quick succession, suggests that the cyberpunk subgenre that first appeared in theaters with the influential though commercially disappointing "Blade Runner" in 1982 finally has come into its own--just as its antithesis, the highly anticipated latest installment in the "Star Wars" saga, is about to open.
When "Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace" opens May 19, we'll be presented with two competing visions of the future. And it's a foregone conclusion that the less gloomy picture, the one in which heroes zip through space in the equivalent of souped-up race cars and have furry creatures and robots for sidekicks, will prove the more popular, even if "Matrix" turns out to be a major hit.
" 'Star Wars' is its own phenomenon," says Tom Maddox, a science-fiction writer who doesn't consider George Lucas' saga to be a part of the genre. "It's fantasy for children and adolescents, dressed up in science-fiction clothes," he says while nevertheless predicting it will blow the socks off all competition at the box office.
From the atomic-energy-sired giant bugs of the 1950s to Hal, the willful computer of "2001: A Space Odyssey," science fiction has served as a mirror of humankind's greatest fears; by looking to the future, the genre explores the gravest concerns of the present. So what do the new crop of sci-fi movies tell us about the now?
