I remember blinking my eyes in April 1999 as I walked out of my small-town cinema. It wasn’t just that the sun hurt after hours in a dark theater, but I was also still absorbing everything The Matrix had spilled out in front of me. The TV ads led me to expect another brainless action flick, and the story depth and the special effects had caught me off guard.
What I had expected, in hindsight, was for The Matrix to barely live up to limp action/sci-fi flicks like its 1997 precursor, Crossworlds.
There are some substantial ties between the two: Both tell about a dude who discovers there’s more than the limited universe he knows. He goes on the run from suit-wearing agents and confronts a higher power who wields control over the very fabric of reality itself.
But only one of the two is done well.
It’s almost as though Crossworlds exists just to show how revolutionary The Matrix was, how it changed the whole game, how its innovations re-wrote the entire sci-fi formula.
Where The Matrix employs tech-head styling wrapped in black leather, sunglasses, guns (lots of guns), and the teachings of Immanuel Kant, Crossworlds opts for… well… Rutger Hauer, a hot chick, and a douchebag in the desert.
And where The Matrix seized on bullet time, morphing effects, and kung fu, Crossworlds went instead with crappy red camera lens filters, bargain bin foley sounds, and a smattering of digital effects that could easily, easily compete with Teletubbies in the quality department.
Its budget cinema essence made sense once I checked out writer/director Krishna Rao’s filmography. He’s noted for having his hands on various cameras for other fairly low-rent science fiction and horror endeavors such as The Fog, Halloween, Predator 2, Star Trek: Generations, and Species. He’s also credited with a very select number of episodes of Angel, She Spies, and The Pretender amongst others — none especially noted for being either high-brow or big money. So it’s easy to see why Crossworlds garners a whopping 5.0/10 on the IMDB.
Not to say it’s all rubbish — after all, there’s the appearance of an older, gruffer, more annoyed Rutger Hauer, legend of Ladyhawke, Blade Runner, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The rest of the cast is largely disposable, but Hauer’s dimension-trotting mercenary has an “I’m too old for this shit” charisma that makes his scenes bearable.
The problem — even with Hauer — is that we never find out why any of the characters act the way they do, and there’s very little in the way of metamorphosis as they jump from dimension to dimension (which happens surprisingly little considering the name of the movie). So much for development.
Add to this a truly garish villain who — for some reason — can use magic. This doesn’t necessarily jive with the whole sci-fi roots of parallel universes and reality-hopping exploits. Cross his bad toupe with the ability to hypnotize using glitter and (none of this is ever explained!) the power to levitate objects as well as to make his body insubstantial at command, and you can see where I’m going. Rao never tells me whether the evil Ferris is wizard, Agent Smith, Supreme Underlord, George W. Bush clone, Zombie Jesus, or the Super Devil.
It gets pretty silly.
Bottom line: The only reason to watch Crossworlds is to feel all smug and stuff the next time you load up Neo and the boys.
~ Jason
