MIND OVER `MATRIX'; WACHOWSKIS' GOAL: MAKE HIGH-TECH ACTION FILM A QUANTUM LEAP ABOVE THE DUMBED-DOWN GENRE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

In many ways, ``The Matrix'' represents the next step in high-tech action moviemaking.

And, if its target audience of sensation-seeking young males can follow its convoluted plot, the film also might represent a new leap of intelligence for the notoriously dumbed-down genre.

``IQ? What IQ?'' jokes Larry Wachowski, who, with younger brother Andy conceived, wrote and directed the complicated cyberpunk allegory. ``Yeah, we were tired of dumb movies, that was sort of our starting point. We like action movies, like seeing kung fu, we like all sorts of genre films. We just want them to be smarter, to have some social or political relevance, to be about something more than just having a good time.''

Comprehensibility would be nice, too. ``The Matrix'' is designed to throw anyone who doesn't pay close attention, thereby calling into question both the movie's fictional reality and, at least metaphorically, a viewer's own.

Set in ... well, it looks like a contemporary city (Sydney, Australia, where the film reportedly was shot for a bargain $60 million, to be exact). Keanu Reeves plays a cog in a giant info-biz corporation who moonlights as Neo, a super-hacker who pirates and illegally distributes software programs. After coming in contact with a cyber-terrorist dubbed Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), Neo discovers that the world he thinks he lives in is a computer-generated illusion where only a handful of people can distinguish between true human consciousness and virtual reality.

It gets infinitely more complicated from there, with enough monster machines, automatic ordnance and Hong Kong-style martial arts acrobatics to keep a dozen movies from ever getting dull. But there are also reams of references to Judeo-Christian as well as Zen philosophy, mythic archetypes and quantum physics, among other popular escapist topics.

``I wouldn't want to be quoted as saying that,'' producer Joel Silver, the man behind such blockbuster blast franchises as ``Lethal Weapon'' and ``Die Hard,'' says when asked if he's made a philosophical action-adventure. ``But I think it has that working for it. I think `The Matrix' helps redefine the genre with innovative storytelling and really unique action elements.

``It's full of some of the most explosive action I've ever been involved with in my life,'' Silver adds producerishly. ``I mean big, exciting stuff. If people can't find their way through the story's different layers of reality, there are other things that they can enjoy in the picture.

``But I think it's all there.''

All and more. Reeves ticks off what he thinks ``The Matrix'' is about. ``Love. Evolution. Anime. Classic myth structure. Questioning - knowledge, authority, systems, order.''

Bruises?

``Nah, no bruises,'' Reeves says, despite the fact that he endured four months of intensive martial arts training before shooting even started, in order to convincingly perform ``The Matrix's'' balletic, wire-assisted, gravity-defying fight stunts. ``It starts with my character asking, `What is the Matrix?' and from there you're asking, `What is reality? What is around me?' The film also introduces themes of choice and what happens when you make choices. You can either learn about reality in answer to your question or you can go on living in ignorance.''

Providing, of course, you survive at all. Reeves claims to have come through the Kung Fu and wire-work training intensive, which was presided over by master Hong Kong fight coordinator Yuen Wo Ping (``Once Upon a Time in China,'' Jackie Chan's ``Drunken Master''), unscathed. But his co-stars Laurence Fishburne (``What's Love Got to Do With It?''), Carrie-Anne Moss (TV's ``Dark Justice'') and Hugo Weaving (``Proof,'' ``The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert'') all suffered sidelining injuries.

And even the stalwart Reeves admits that ``I couldn't walk a couple of times. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but there were scenes where I had to carry about 50 pounds of weapons. Standing around waiting for them to set up these special-effects sequences - bullet hits, etc. - the legs just gave out. Also, some of the triple kicks in the dojo sequences caused a lot of wear and tear.

``But I love that. I love that intensity.''

Intense to the point where Neo has to be fast enough to catch bullets.

Or slow enough.

We'll try to explain.

The Wachowskis wanted to film some of ``The Matrix's'' firefights in extreme slow-motion, but with the same kind of unhindered camera movement available at regular speed.

``Action in slow-motion is more beautiful, it becomes more graphic and is just more interesting to look at,'' says Larry Wachowski, 33, the more talkative of the brothers. ``We began with this idea that we wanted to move the camera at regular speed while we shot slow-motion, which is basically impossible. Our first thought was to build this giant rocket-camera, put it inside a special crash box and move it at, like, 250 miles an hour. It was going to come screeching right up to the actor, but the lawyers didn't like the idea of putting Keanu Reeves in the path of something like that.

`` `Are you crazy?' I think was their response.''

Then the Wachowskis met John Gaeta, who directs visual effects for a Northern California outfit called Manex. He helped develop a system that involved a series of up to 100 still cameras, set up along the path of a particular pre-filmed and -scanned action, that would snap single frame shots of the live actors and moving objects as they went along. The resulting photos then were scanned into a computer, which then virtually generated the missing movements between each shot to create a smooth visual flow.

That footage then could be run at any speed, slower or faster, that the filmmakers desired. The brothers dubbed the whole process bullet-time photography.

``It's like what they do with traditional, hand-drawn cel animation,'' producer Silver explains. ``The high-end animator will lay out the shot of, say, a character reaching for a drink, and then draw the shot of the glass. But they had people called in-betweeners who would do all those other shots to get that movement. In this case, the boys had the computer do the in-betweening. I guess that's logical, but no one ever thought of it before. Of course, there was no way to do that before the digitization of filmmaking.''

Bullet time photography is only the most innovative of an arsenal of CG and morphing techniques ``The Matrix'' employs. But as Reeves notes, the actual, physical production was often as mind-boggling as the post-production effects technology.

``Sirens going off. Waiting four hours with Carrie-Anne standing there in her wires, making sounds,'' the actor recalls of one elaborate scene he just had to watch being filmed. ``She's got one shot to do, with eight guys controlling wires, that she's been training four months for. She has to run up against a wall while 55 explosive squibs - that are the biggest squibs allowable by law for an actor to be around - and do a side cartwheel flip, 360-degree turn, four cameras going ... You're just like, `Awesome. Glad to be here.' ''

It does sound exciting. But what does it all mean?

``It's about systems,'' Andy Wachowski, 31, and bigger than his older brother, allows.

``It's not just computers; it's about anything you allow to think for you, systems of thought,'' adds Larry Wachowski, who with his brother wrote comic books and directed the lesbian noir thriller ``Bound'' before plunging into ``The Matrix.''

``If you accept a political or religious system of thought without questioning it, you are basically living in a stasis of consciousness. You are not attempting to evolve your consciousness.''

Glad they cleared that up.

``It is a redefinition of the action drama in many ways,'' Silver translates.

``Look, we made `Die Hard' for the young male, 18-to-35-year-old demographic back in '88; that's the audience we were hoping to excite and bring into the theater. Now it's 11 years later, and I hope the same audience responds to this in the same way that they responded to that.''

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) CYBERSPACE CADETS

Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne get real in `The Matrix'

(2) Keanu Reeves, left, and Hugo Weaving face off in a subway station in ``The Matrix.'' Says Reeves: ``There were scenes where I had to carry about 50 pounds of weapons. Standing around waiting for them to set up these special effects sequences ... the legs just gave out.

(3) ``She's got one shot to do,'' says Reeves of Carrie-Anne Moss' escape scene, ``with eight guys controlling wires ... She has to run up against a wall (with) 55 explosive squibs ... and do a side cartwheel flip, 360-degree turn, four cameras going. ... You're just like, `Awesome. ''