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It’s Time for a Reality Check

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

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:

12:00 a.m. April 7, 1999 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.

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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?

To Come: ‘eXistenZ’ and ‘Thirteenth Floor’

“The Matrix” is set 300 years in the future, after computers have taken over the world. Director David Cronenberg’s new film, “eXistenZ,” which opens April 23, looks to a near future in which computer games have evolved almost into a religion. The Miramax movie, above all else, is a disturbing epistemological investigation in the guise of a sci-fi thriller.

“The Thirteenth Floor,” a murder mystery from Columbia set to open May 28, combines science fiction and elements of vintage noir. Where movies such as “Blade Runner” and much cyberpunk literature exploit the conventions of hard-boiled detective fiction to anchor the otherworldly settings and plot and to provide ironic counterpoint, this movie--about characters who lead double lives on parallel worlds--actually sets part of the story in Raymond Chandler territory: 1940s Los Angeles.

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All three--along with the other cyberpunk movies of recent years, such as “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Strange Days” (both from 1995)--suggest that our technological fears have evolved since “2001” was released in 1968. We no longer only fret that machines will get out from under our control and threaten our existence; now we seem to fear that technology threatens our very conception of what it means to be human and that it may also take over our dreams.

Such concerns have long been at the heart of some of the more interesting science-fiction literature. “The movies tend to lag from 10 to 20 years behind what is being written,” Maddox says. With the spate of movies in the last several years that deal with these issues, Hollywood is catching up with a movement that began to flower in print in the early 1980s and that some science-fiction aficionados already say is dead.

Two elements are central to cyberpunk, says Larry Wachowski, who with his brother Andy wrote and directed “The Matrix”: speculation about the effect of technology on people and explorations of alternate worlds. In the writing of William Gibson, the man most responsible for creating cyberpunk, and other earlier writers such as Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison and J.G. Ballard, science goes far beyond transplanting an organ or creating life in a test tube; it alters consciousness, melds flesh and machinery, and raises questions about what it means to be human.

The Wachowskis, college dropouts from Chicago who directed only one movie before this (1996’s contemporized film noir “Bound”), can speak at length about their literary antecedents and the philosophy behind their work.

“The idea of ‘The Matrix’ is that it’s very easy to live an unexamined life,” says Larry Wachowski, 33, the older and more outspoken of the two. “It’s very easy to not be aware of what’s going on out there in the world.”

But their primary intent with their movies, they say, is to keep audiences guessing what’s coming next. If viewers catch all of their references and are moved to think about them, fine. “But we put that stuff in more for us,” he says.

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Science, Comic Books and a Bit of Religion

The Wachowskis, who wrote for Marvel Comics before they got into filmmaking, flaunt their debt to the comics. They even include comic-book stories on the movie’s Web site (https://www.whatisthematrix. com) that supplement the film by further delineating the world of the future.

“They are very similar,” says Wachowski of the movie and comic-book worlds. Both, essentially, are about using pictures and words to tell a story. Furthermore, he says, comics are no different from other literature, or from theology, mythology or mathematics--all are attempts to make sense of the world.

“It’s all connected,” he says. “It’s all coming out of the same place. . . . They’re all culturally important.”

Maybe so, but some writers try to differentiate their work from the less overtly serious sci-fi movies--movies like “Star Wars” (1977), “Independence Day” (1996) and “The Fifth Element” (1997).

But in the way “The Matrix” and some others of its ilk limn the line separating reality from illusion and in some of their quasi-religious underpinnings, they share an unexpected resemblance to “The Truman Show” from last year. Although not generally thought of as science fiction, in its themes and look, and in the way it extrapolates from current reality to explore a vision of a world in which freedom is devalued and human life is reduced to the level of mass entertainment, “Truman” reveals itself to be a close cousin of these works. Dick, who wrote the novel on which “Blade Runner” was based, once wrote a story about a Truman-like android who is shocked to discover late in life that he isn’t human.

Cronenberg’s new movie contains a sly homage to Dick, and his early movies were an acknowledged influence on writers such as Gibson, the dominant writer in the cyberpunk vein. (It was Gibson who coined the terms “cyberspace” and “the matrix” in his groundbreaking 1984 novel “Neuromancer.”) Still, Cronenberg quibbles with the characterization of his work as science fiction.

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“I’m not really all that interested in talking about technology,” he says, explaining why his movies wouldn’t fit into some people’s definition of the term. “And it’s not my interest to be predictive and anticipate things.”

Any movie dealing with issues of computer technology in what might be considered a science-fiction framework has to contend with the large shadow cast by “Blade Runner.” The Ridley Scott movie was not a commercial success when it was first released, yet its image of Los Angeles as a dank and dangerous place filled with giant, talking electronic billboards and mongrelized masses has become, as Cronenberg says, the look of the future in film. He fought against it by making “eXistenZ” look decidedly low-tech and non-urban. “Not only do you not get the ‘Blade Runner’ city, you’ve not no city” in “eXistenZ,” he says. “You get all countryside.”

The irony of comparing Cronenberg’s film to a Johnny-come-lately cyberpunk-inspired movie like “The Matrix” is that Cronenberg--like Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs--is considered one of the fathers of cyberpunk.

“Bill [Gibson] definitely went to school on Cronenberg, and so did I, starting with the early films,” Maddox says.

Intellectual seriousness aside, a childish fascination with fantasy has always been an ingredient of movie science fiction--at least until Stanley Kubrick made “2001.”

According to Maddox, the childish label is what all serious toilers in the science-fiction fields must battle. He mentions Cronenberg as one of the few science-fiction filmmakers who is doing serious work, adding: “And his movies don’t do so well [commercially].”

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