Movement is the message in the ‘Matrix’ series

Like billions of others -- though for different reasons -- I’ve followed the “Matrix” series, finding it the most ambitious and expensive choreography-driven project in motion picture history.

By choreography-driven, I mean that the elaborately staged sequences, involving stylized hand-to-hand combat, are the core of the three films. The character relationships and plot issues may interest you or not, but they’re essentially there to establish the contexts and deepen the implications of those fights. And the battles are grandly epic in their appetite for space, taking place on the move, on rooftops, in the air, in the rain and in imaginative interior landscapes.

Contemporary film musicals such as “Chicago” and “Moulin Rouge” give you only fragmented impressions of dancing, but martial arts dramas such as the “Matrix” trilogy are photographed and edited with a meticulous respect for shot-to-shot movement continuity that hasn’t existed since the great MGM dance features and a very few dance-oriented music videos. I particularly enjoy their subjective manipulation of time: slowed and speeded-up action in which quality of movement is in the spotlight.

I also admire the efforts of the stars to do their stunts as much as possible; it makes them quasi-dancers in my eyes. No, they can’t command the throwaway virtuosity and wit of Jackie Chan, but they own their action sequences in a way that doesn’t exist in films that rely on stunt doubles.

Some of you may protest that fighting isn’t dance, but the innovations of postmodernism have long nullified that position. With the incorporation of nontraditional movement idioms such as gymnastics into dance vocabularies, it’s generally accepted that anything can be dance if it’s shaped with choreographic intelligence. The “Matrix” action sequences qualify, and their emphasis on speed and sheer endurance may well condition what audiences come to expect from concert dance in the future.

We’ve had neoclassicism, neoromanticism and neoprimitivism. Next up: neo-Neo?