Overview

Enter the Matrix

There are a lot of choices to mull over when considering the lead paragraph for a review of Shiny Entertainment’s Enter the Matrix. I could look at a choice selection from the “Whoa!” oeuvre. I could use the tried-and-true “I know kung-fu.” Then again, I could try for something original with a few snarky words about Keanu Reeves’ attempt to do Hamlet in Winnipeg a few years back. Or make a comment on the geeks currently turning over every last line in The Matrix Reloaded for evidence of Kierkegaard and Kant.

Niobe knows kung-fu, too

Focus!

Crazy climber

But seeing as Enter the Matrix is just another marketing juggernaut masquerading as a game—and I’m going to gulp down a bottle of Tylenol if I see one more red pill-blue pill-style Matrix reference in the media—I’ll cut out the fancy pants clichés and say that this is just another marketing juggernaut masquerading as a game. This is a property, not a slice of interactive entertainment. It’s more confection than anything else, another way for the oddball Wachowski Brothers to make money off their tissue-thin conceit about machines turning the planet into the ultimate reality show. It’s about as compelling as the official novelization, the official Neo keychain, and the official Todd McFarlane action figures advertised in the back of the game manual. Which is to say, not at all, unless you’re a completist who scours Wal-Mart for every last tie-in product to toss into the closet in hope of finding a seller’s market on eBay a decade or so from now.

There are so many problems here it’s hard to know where to begin. What the hell, let’s start with the story, since Matrix fans are so into the Wachowski Brothers’ drop-out take on philosophy. Plot here was designed to weave in and out of The Matrix Reloaded, showcasing what a couple of the minor characters were doing while Neo was playing Jesus and trying to save the human enclave Zion from those nasty computers. The biggest name character here is Niobe, the Jada Pinkett-Smith ship captain introduced in the new film as some kind of hardass love interest for Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus. Yet she gets little meaningful screen time in the flick, and is hardly much of a drawing card here.

Phone sex is a boom industry in Zion

Niobe does a Neo

Call someone who cares

Neither is the other character you can portray, Anthony Wong’s Ghost. He’s even less of a player in Matrix movieland, a walk-on grunt who looks a little like Reeves while wearing the dark glasses in Neo mode. You just know he’s in the game for this reason alone, although you only get to portray him in certain situations. Both characters are so anonymous, even to Matrix fanboys, that the game might as well be starring complete unknowns. Maybe Shiny could have given Mark Hamill a role, seeing as he’s done so few game parts since Wing Commander 4.