Whoa.
The blockbuster season of ’99 was an interesting one, wasn’t
it? We had quirky comedies like South Park and Galaxy Quest, dour reflections
of the zeitgeist such as Fight Club, and heavily advertised behemoths of mixed
reception like Wild Wild West and, yes, The Phantom Menace. Among these, at
that moment around the turn of the millennium, with fears of uncertain futures,
Y2K, and rising information superhighways, came what was at the time one of the
coolest fucking movies conceivable.
It’s hard to describe to people born since how hard The
Matrix hit. And it wasn’t necessarily set do so either—the 90s had seen cheesy
movies about hackers aplenty, including, well, Hackers. Keanu Reeves had
already been in a cyberpunk flick, Johnny Mnemonic, and, well, that was the
kind of film that had Ice-T talking to a cyborg dolphin. Most at the time still
probably thought of him as Ted Logan, so his attempts to be the serious stoic
badass we think of him didn’t land straight away.
But when he started doing kung fu kicks to a techno beat
against Lawrence Fishburne, that all
changed.
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| "Dude! I'm, like, going to be totally bogus to that guy from Event Horizon!" |
You probably all know the basic premise by now—office drone
Thomas Anderson, going by his super-cool hacker handle Neo by night, ends up
drawn into the fold of a mysterious techno-sage called Morpheus, learning
that—gasp—his whole existence is a simulation propagated by ruthless robo-squid
machines. It’s funny to think that was meant to be a big twist then, and a lot
of the marketing hinged on just what the Matrix was—much like Luke Skywalker’s
paternal revelation, it’s impossible to distance from the film itself.
In any case, Neo and a crew of resistance fighters launch
their counterattack into the Matrix, while seeing if the former is indeed the
One prophesized. Like everything, it’s all rooted in the MTV, grunge, ‘fuck no
I won’t do what you tell me’ attitudes of the 90s, as well as the uncertainty
of our looming tech-domination future. This neatly parallels with films like
Fight Club, also about the apathy of Generation X to crushing lives and fears
of soulless computer futures.
Much like George Lucas and Star Wars, the Wachowskis weren’t
purely original here—they freely admitted to borrowing shots, elements, and
ideas from anime like Ghost in the Shell, cyberpunk writers like William
Gibson, and of course, kung-fu flicks aplenty. But also like Lucas, it’s not
really about the originality of it, but how it was packaged and presented all
in one to be introduced to audiences of millions. Gibson himself congratulated
the film for being ‘the ultimate cyberpunk artifact’—and as the father of the
subgenre himself, that’s saying a lot.
And there’s the things the Matrix did pioneer. Let’s start with
the action scenes—these kicked so much ass back then, and it’s easy to see why.
Before that, your average scene of ‘guy mows down nameless goons’ was fairly
straightforward, like in Bond or Rambo—swing a machinegun at a bunch of guys,
they fall down. Here, we see slow motion in action, the environment being
destroyed in all too detailed glory, martial arts blended in, everything. The
problem is, like Shakespeare, all of this has been imitated so much over the
last twenty years that it doesn’t kick as much ass as it did then—but it’s
still nicely satisfying to see Neo and Trinity blow the living hell out of everything.
There were even small touches like the variation of color
palettes for shots—this is also harder to appreciate, especially after the DVD
releases washed over it more to make it blend in with the sequels. But the warmer,
bluer colors of the original still hold up, giving things set in the simulation
that ever so unnatural feel while not making it seem like pea soup was spilled
on the reel.
Now, no, not everything has aged well. The licensed music is
all very nineties—Rob Zombie, Rage Against the Machine, Marilyn Manson, tight
leather and chunky CRT monitors. It tickles the nostalgia of people like me,
but the kids today might find it more amusing. Likewise, some of the CG
affects, like the underground tunnels of the real world, the possessing of the
Agents, and even the infinitely-imitated Bullet Time, feel a pit passé.
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| Somebody somewhere gets off on this. |
But what does definitely
hold up are the other scenes—Neo waking up in his pod, choking with wires and
cables, still looks shockingly and awesomely disturbing, before he looks upon
the people farms of millions. In this digitized day and age, I’m damned if this doesn’t hit even harder,
in fact. The movie touches on body horror elements more than you might
remember, including the police interrogation scene. The same that gives us
perhaps the best part of the film—Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith. Smith stands out
from his fellow programs as one even more emotional than the human characters—you
see the other agents actively repulsed, so it’s definitely a deliberate touch. Weaving
sells oh so deliciously ice-cold fury, barely contained malice to the meatbags
that sometimes just spills out in full. His introduction to Neo still leaves me
with a huge grin on my face for that performance, and all the body-twisting
imagery that gets inflicted.
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| "Missssster Anderson...what the hell was up with that 47 Ronin nonsense?" |
As to the rest of the cast? Keanu hadn’t quite perfected the
zen-like badass act he would show off in John Wick, but I don’t think it’s as
comically wooden as some would have you believer. Lawrence Fishburne is
definitely the standout among the protagonists—I believe every word he says as
Morpheus, and like Weaving, the delivery is so cool, controlled, and memorable
that it does genuinely work. Carrie-Ann Moss as Trinity is admittedly slightly
more forgettable, but a more underrated character is Cypher, the Judas of the
group, whose opining on the simulated but welcoming confines on the Matrix is
actually the genuinely most interesting philosophical point of the film to me.
Some people like to be hip and opine that the film is overrated,
or bad, or what have you. No, it’s not perfect, and you can poke holes in the
structure, or some of the ramblings on the nature of reality. But, even if you
don’t like it, you sure as hell can’t diminish the influence it had, on action
movies and blockbusters to this day. And speaking of subsequent films, let’s
talk about the sequels.
Both came out in 2003—Reloaded upped the ante in action,
kicking things off straight from the gate. Here, the philosophy was generally
more bluntly delivered, with characters just rambling the same old thing about
the reality of things inside a simulation…but it cranked up the level of
kung-fu, and gave us a car-smashing, truck-flipping bonanza of a car chase,
that’s still all kinds of fun to watch. It’s definitely a weaker film, but has
enough spectacle to make up for it. Hell, I even like the Zion rave.
And Revolutions…hoo boy. Yeah, here is where the Wackowskis
screwed the pooch. The action just becomes tiresome CGI Dragonball nonsense at
the end, and not even an army of Hugo Weavings can make up for it. The twists
implied by Reloaded don’t really pan out, and though it does tie up the story,
Revolutions felt too gratuitous to really satisfy for me. I recommend just watching
the individual action scenes not involving Neo.
Oh, and there was also the anthology of animated shorts, the
Animatrix, mostly by anime directors. Some of these are pretty good—‘The Second
Renaissance’ is very blunt with its historical allegory imagery, but I’m damned
if it isn’t memorable, be it the scenes of nuclear-burnt warfare against
machines, humans being vivisected alive, and civilization itself falling. And
then there’s the lusciously animated short ‘World Record’ by Takeshi Koike, who’d
go on to do Redline, one of my favorite animated films ever—be assured we’ll
get to that. Some of the shorts are more forgettable, but there’s enough enjoyability in
there that I can say check it out.
All in all, while the Matrix is still a product of its time,
and has been imitated enough that it may not be quite as awesome as it was on
release, a lot of it holds up just fine, and it remains a decently interesting scifi
action film. In many ways, the theme of humanity being plugged into a soulless
digital realm under the purview of artificial intelligences and code just rings
all the truer, doesn’t it? The Wachowski’s subsequent career didn’t match their
initial heights, and has pretty much stalled these days after a series of
flops, but they can be content with kickstarting whole new action heights for
the new millennium—a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there
is a choice for us…
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