THE MATRIX: Science fiction. Starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving. Written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski. (R. 135 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

The Keanu Reeves cyberspace opera, "The Matrix," is a wonderful movie to chew up and spit out.

Larry and Andy Wachowski, the hotshot- brothers writing and directing team, clearly set out to astonish with this one, and they certainly do.

It's astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in the service of something so stupid.

Folly on such a monumental scale is almost exhilarating.

So this is what more than 100 years of cinema history has come to: special effects with no movie.

"The Matrix" is about nothing less than the nature of reality, heaven help us. The Wachowskis have discovered that there is a real world behind the apparent one. This may be a tremendous subject in the hands of somebody like Plato, but when the Wachowskis get their mitts on it, watch out. Somebody ought to adjust their medication.

If anybody ever wanted to see Reeves shaved naked and covered with slime, now is the chance.

He plays a computer hacker who stumbles into a vague awareness -- with him, everything is vague -- that this world is but the dim reflection of a controlling cyberworld "out there."

"The Matrix" is the film that asks the question, "Ever had that feeling you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?"

Frequently.

Characters have names like Neo, Morpheus, Trinity and Cypher that take us into the quagmire of allegory, and the unfortunate actors attached to these names have to deliver speeches accordingly.

"It's like a splinter in your mind driving you mad," someone says. Splinters in your mind will do that.

This movie is so pretentious that it invites speculation in kind. The neo-Wagne rian soundtrack score falsely raises hopes that "The Matrix" has aspirations of becoming the all-encompassing multimedia philosophical artwork that the German genius might have created if only moving pictures hadn't waited so long to be invented.

In fact, the Wachowskis seem to be masters of the Wagnerian art of transition. In one stunning shot, the camera closes in on a static TV monitor view of Reeves in an interrogation room. The camera seamlessly merges into the shot on the monitor and then independently moves about the interrogation room.

It is breathtaking, and there are other displays of visual virtuosity that almost equal it, including a shot into a fiber-optics cable. To say nothing of the insect-like monsters, among them one that enters Reeves' belly button.

As he moves back and forth between this world and that, Reeves materializes at one point as a kung fu artist. After the audience gets though digesting that one, he flies through the air like a refugee from some Hong Kong fantasy, more empty technical razzmatazz.

Maybe the DVD version will have an option to eliminate the dialogue, but in the meantime we have to put up with oppressive acting here.

We know that Reeves is puzzled about which reality he currently occupies because he squinches up his eyebrows. Laurence Fishburne has the chore, as a mysterious cyberworld overlord, of making absolute nonsense sound like he believes it. He does this by e-nun-ci-a-ting every syllable.

In a throwback to the Wachowskis' "Bound," Carrie-Anne Moss in black leather plays the Gina Gershon ambiguous lesbian character.

Australian actor Hugo Weaving ("The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert") is a "Men in Black"-style special agent. His mannered performance is briefly fun until it becomes apparent that's all there is and he intends to go on and on with it.

As one of the overlord's underlings, Joe Pantoliano ("The Fugitive") at first seems to be the actor who will rescue the honor of the profession. He is the only one who has a spark of wit, but even he is eventually swamped by the hopeless muddle that "The Matrix" becomes.