The hero, trenchcoat flying behind him, sprints towards his enemy. At the last moment he pivots, runs up the wall and performs a somersault. As he inverts in slow-motion, he lets rip with his machine pistols, whose bullets seem to punch holes through the very fabric of spacetime itself. Still airborne, he delivers the coup de grace with a roundhouse kick, and the guard crumples to the floor in a broken, bloody heap as the hero lands on his feet. The hero turns, and spies another opponent. Again he runs at the wall, but this time he bumps into the concrete nose first and bounces off. Suddenly he appears to teleport a few feet back to the ground, where he lands in an instantaneously new stance. A few bullets thud into him, but that’s okay, he’s made of super-hard jerky teleporting rubber or something, his nose is miraculously unharmed, and he can try it over again. Free your mind.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Glitches in the Matrix reveal themselves in elegant ways, such as the double appearance of a black cat; the glitches in Enter the Matrix just look stupid. But even without the unintended teleportations and the raggedly visible seams in the motion capture, the game’s fighting somehow manages to suck out all that is beautiful in the films. It’s an issue, as Neo so philosophically intones in Reloaded, of control. The films’ wire-fu is blessed aesthetically with exhilarating grace, because we know it to be, and it looks to be, dependent on mental effort rather than sweaty physical graft. In Enter the Matrix, every failure to perform a cool move, resulting in jerky recovery animations, reminds you that you are pressing buttons. By the time you are getting it right most of the time, on the other hand, it has become routine. In another over-large and under-detailed generic warehouse/facility area, you are doing the same thing you did hours ago. You are, you sadly realise, playing Max Payne with celebrity scriptwriters.

Well, you say, what did I expect? This is a film license, after all. Thousands of Atari ET cartridges still buried somewhere in the Nevada desert remind us that the marriage between Hollywood and videogames is usually doomed. But Enter the Matrix had everything going for it. This wasn’t some rip-off generic blaster/racer with a popular movie’s title attached, or so we were told. This was a game scripted by the Wachowski brothers, with huge amounts of extra data from the same mocap studio as the films used, with an hours’ worth of live-action cinema footage. It was an authorised, independent part of the Matrix universe. And yet with all this in its favour, Enter the Matrix clangingly rehearses all the old problems about “convergence” between games and movies, and even invents some new ones of its own.

One of the old ones is the familiar problem of watching versus doing. That distinction may be split into two parts: the visual and the temporal. Visually, the fight scenes in The Matrix and Reloaded create a sense of space by cutting through a collage of camera angles, zooms, pans, close-ups and so on. This kind of kinetic montage creates an almost cubist vision, albeit arrayed linearly through time rather than presented simultaneously, of a new truth in every new point of view. Enter the Matrix, on the other hand, necessarily lacks such freedom, because in order that your character may be controlled successfully, he or she must be more or less always centred in a chase-cam view so that you can see what you’re doing and what is going on in the immediate environment. Regardless of the technical quality of imagery, it’s just not as interesting to look at.

In temporal terms, meanwhile, the problem is that the videogame fights necessarily lack anything like the rhythmic variation you can see in the films; everything proceeds at an average, predictable pace. This too is necessary, since no human can react quickly enough on a joypad to recreate a well-rehearsed exchange of four punch-blocks within a second between two actors on screen. Dumbly pressing one button several times and enduring the small delay before your avatar decides to unleash a flurry of blows is a poor substitute, but what else could be done? Videogames can play with tempo on a larger scale, but it seems that necessarily they cannot compete with the extremely rapid and granular temporal variations available to filmmakers.

Meanwhile, Enter the Matrix’s mixture of engine-generated cut-scenes and specially shot live-action footage has none of the absorbing style of the game of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, whose beautifully managed segues between footage and bittage set a new aesthetic benchmark for dealing gracefully with the rival entertainment form. Shiny’s game still suffers from a jarring disjunction between the different modes of representation. (So does Reloaded itself, of course: the transitions between live action and pure CGI pseudo-humans boinging around the screen are cringingly obvious. Such aesthetic dissonances only reliably go away when everything is represented in the same mode, as in the truly stunning CGI short from The Animatrix, The Final Flight of the Osiris.)

The most worrying new precedent that Enter the Matrix sets, though, with its massively hyped synergy and narrative overlap with Relaoded, is that it seems the film itself has been deliberately made to suffer, to donate some of its lifeblood so that its vampiric brood can feed on it. In Reloaded, Niobe and her crew go to blow up the nuclear power plant, a feat of security-bypassing which would presumably require something like a lobby scene squared. Instead, we see nothing until they are already in the control room. Why? Because that’s what you get to do in the game instead. The film’s sense of rhythm and victory over threat is compromised just so we can bash buttons on our consoles at home. It’s as though James Cameron had cut footage out of Aliens so that it could be rendered in blocky 2D graphics in the 1987 Spectrum/C64 tie-in game released by Electric Dreams - which remains, actually, a superior film-to-game conversion.

If this is convergence, give me divergence as fast as possible. I’m sure the Wachowski brothers, great videogame fans as they are, were originally excited at the prospect of overseeing a game set in their own fictional universe. But I wonder if now they still think it was really worth it.

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