If you take a Honk Kong martial arts flick, switch it to sci-fi, add a little philosophizing, add quite a few more visual effect techniques, add a lot supernatural abilities, and add loads of guns, you will have a movie called The Matrix. Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, The Matrix is one of those films that is so good and so entertaining in so many ways, you could not care less when its flaws pop up. It is a pseudo-cyberpunk action film with adequate smarts, stunning cinematography, and extreme action.

(It is impossible to write thoroughly about The Matrix without giving away a crucial twist that occurs about a quarter of the way through the film, so if you like your movies totally unspoiled, skip the next three paragraphs, and read them after you have seen the film.)

Thomas "Neo" Anderson, software programmer by day, hacker by night, wakes up in his dingy apartment, and someone somehow is sending him messages via his computer screen, claiming to have the answers to a question he cannot crack: What is the Matrix? Unfortunately, the authorities are on to him, too, and they do not want him to know the answer. After a series of nightmarish events, including having his mouth fused shut and receiving an insect-like robotic tracking device through the navel, Neo is rescued by a group who will take him to the man he knows has the answers--Morpheus. After another series of even more nightmarish events, Morpheus shows him exactly what the Matrix is. It is our world. It is a computer construct that emulates the world as we understand it. All humans are actually perpetually asleep with their brains hooked into the Matrix, so they believe they are living normal lives. It would take at least one more full paragraph to explain fully how and why, but just know this--after accomplishing mankind's ultimate technological achievement, a sort of artificial intelligence, we sparked and lost a war with the robots of our own creation (actually, the robots of our own creation's creation). The renegade humans that have been awoken into the real, hellish, world are striving to free mankind from the Matrix and take back the Earth. Here's the kicker: those who understand that the world is just a facsimile in cyberspace can break and bend its rules--particularly rules of physics, such as gravity--when they plug themselves back into the Matrix, just as any hacker can break the rules of a traditional computer program. This, as you can imagine, makes for quite an entertaining piece of cinema.

The questions that this film asks, almost didactically, are the questions of reality: Do we really live in reality? How do we know? And just what is reality, anyway? Is there some harder reality beneath our lives? This film suggests there is--perhaps not literally, like the Matrix, but metaphysically. What is the deeper truth beneath the lives we live day-in, day-out? How would we know if there was? This question is actually answered with unapologetic earnestness: we wouldn't know it; we would feel it. Throughout his life, Neo has felt that something is wrong, that there has to be some basic, undiscovered truth about the world. It seems that that is how he came across the idea of the Matrix, even though he did not at first know what it was. He questioned the world persistently, and by doing so he found the answer. It is an answer too powerful at first to accept, but it is true.

The Matrix often gets either significantly more or significantly less praise than it deserves. Specifically, this relates to its meaning. Many fanboys and -girls give it too much credit for intelligence and originality. On the other hand, there are those who pass it off as unoriginal and, therefore, boring. The former ignore the film's many influences. The latter give it too little credit for its ability to entertain. I will say here that this film's questionings, and even much of its action and imagery, cannot be classified as original (wait for the "but"). This movie draws from many sources, some explicitly (particularly Alice in Wonderland), some implicitly. The very idea of the Matrix (including the term "the Matrix") is taken right out of William Gibson's revolutionary cyberpunk novel Neuromancer; we had already seen humans existing within computer programs almost twenty years earlier in TRON; many of the film's more grotesque visuals are unquestionably influenced by the Alien series; and when Morpheus tells Neo during a training fight, "Stop trying to hit me and hit me," the phrase is unavoidably reminiscent of Yoda's famous "Do or do not; there is no try" in The Empire Strikes Back. The reality-questioning itself is not original either; indeed that is what postmodernism itself is ultimately concerned with. Many elements of The Matrix are indeed borrowed from other sources.

Here's the "but": The ideas of the film do not exist alone, and to view this film purely as an intellectual exercise would be a dumb mistake--one you would almost have to try to make. Does not a film consist also, indeed more so, of visuals? In this movie, characters run along walls, leap impossible distances between buildings, punch through cement, and stop bullets in mid-air. Combine this action with bullet time and time slice (see next paragraph), and you have one kick-ass action movie. I am not, generally speaking, an action film lover, but every once in a while one comes along that is so original, so slick, and so undeniably awesome that it's impossible not to love (unless, of course, you try to separate its ideology from its style). One of these was the Kill Bill. A few years earlier in a different style, it was The Matrix. And yes, there are explosions, too.

What are more impressive than its philosophical pondering, though, are the film's special effects and action sequences. The Matrix was a milestone in the use of two related visual effects: bullet time and time slice. Bullet time is essentially ultra-slow motion, wound down so far that even bullets move at a crystal-clear crawl. These are not real bullets, of course, but that does not matter because the effect is laudable not for any technological superiority but for the astonishing visuals it creates. Watching a bullet fly through the air while space ripples behind it is simply too cool not to enjoy--then add the facts that the camera itself is moving while we watch the bullets' journeys, and the characters, in the meantime, are performing impossible physical feats, and you have one heck of an visually inventive movie. Time slice is bullet time taken to the extreme, a camera movement occurring while the live image is frozen in time, creating the effect of a scene being paused while the camera moves--without cutting--to a different angle before the scene begins playing again.

The action alone is capable of carrying an entire full-length feature, and it is the perfect place for these special effects. In just the first fight, four police officers are dispatched in a matter of seconds, and the fight consists of wall-running, levitation, chair-kicking (much cooler than it sounds), and hyper-extensive over-the-shoulder kicks to the face. In a later scene you will see Neo doing a one-handed cartwheel through a hail of bullets while, with the other hand, firing an M16 (every bit as cool as it sounds) as well as perhaps more spent bullet casings than you ever have. Add the super-slow-motion techniques, and you have something dangerously capable of wearing out your remote's "back" button (no one has rewind anymore, right?). This film has as much fun with gun battles and hand-to-hand combat as the aforementioned Kill Bill does with knives and samurai swords.

But the impressiveness of the visuals does not end with the technology used. The film otherwise has an unforgettable look about it as well. To begin with, life in the Matrix is dominated with an eerie green hue. Green in cinema tends to make people attach a dreamlike quality to the screen, and this is an important theme of the movie, since the characters basically exist in a dream world. Furthermore, this film enhances that feeling by opening with digital green alphanumeric characters on a black background, forcing the viewer also to feel, along with Neo, that the world is in some way a computer-related construct, even though this feeling is not consciously realized. Then, in the real world, the darkness is so oppressive that one almost longs to return to the Matrix, even though the light there is not real. It is a good way of expressing how "reality" does not necessarily mean "more pleasant." In fact, this question of whether it might be better to let ourselves wander obliviously through the Matrix is given thorough and honest treatment throughout the film, through both dialogue and one little plot twist. If you could become enlightened at the cost of entering a world that, though real, is miserable, would you?

Despite its many virtues, it is true that there is a bit of a cheesy, self-important side to The Matrix. Sometimes this can be slight, as in unfortunate pauses and intonations ("Welcome . . . to the real world"). Other times it can be painful. When Neo meets Morpheus in a dark room, for instance, he sees Morpheus' back, lightning strikes, and Morpheus turns around with sunglasses (yes, I did say "a dark room"), a full-length leather jacket, and his arms behind his back, to say dramatically, "At last." Even cell-phone answering becomes exaggerated. To make a phone call in one scene, Morpheus puts the phone up to his face, pops it open switchblade-style (no flip-phones in this movie), and with an exaggerated gesture pulls his other hand up with one finger sticking out at a perfect ninety-degree angle and presses a single button, all while staring straight forward. The character names also fall victim to these failed attempts at cool, as many of them sound like they would fit better in a Power Rangers show: Switch, Cypher, Tank, and Apoc are just a handful of examples. Finally, for some reason, the Wachowski brothers think it's uber-cool for everyone to wear emo-black outfits with near-perpetual sunglasses. If it were not for the many other areas in which this movie goes above and beyond the call to be merely good, these aspects of it would surely be sinking forces. As it is though, they are but minor annoyances in a stellar film.

The Matrix has a few flaws, but it excels ninety-nine percent of the time. Its thought, its special effects, its visuals, and its are executed as if each were the one element upon which the whole film depended. This film is jam-packed to the breaking point; you can tell it is stretching, but it never bursts. As long as you do not blind yourself to what is actually on the screen in front of your eyes, you will enjoy this movie.