“Do not try to bend the spoon. That is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. There I no Spoon.”
Nearly twenty years ago today on March 31st, 1999, the Wachowski siblings release what is considered to be their magnum opus. The Matrix. A stylish and slick action fest which combined groundbreaking special effects with complex philosophical ideas and teachings to produce a unique and thought provoking…wait, what am I doing? Am I really going to give a synopsis of The Matrix? No, I’m not doing that. You’ve seen The Matrix, I’ve seen the Matrix, we’ve all seen The Matrix. You only care about one thing, so let’s cut to the chase. Does it hold up?
Eh, kinda.
On a purely technical level the effects have aged shockingly well, helped greatly from the fact that they were very ahead of time. The pioneer of what has been dubbed “bullet time” it’s still just as much goofy fun as ever to see Neo (Keanu Reves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) run up walls and shoot up rooms full of bad guys while set to early 2000’s synth. Likewise the martial arts on display is just as impressive as ever. Even the set design, especially for Morpheus’ (Laurence Fishburne) ship, is really nice. Cliché post-apocalyptic, cobbled together grunge aesthetic, but nice.
CGI isn’t terrible either. It’s not to today’s standards, but it’s not distractingly bad. That is except for one baffling shot during the opening chase with Trinity where she jumps from a building. The CGI, camera angles, speed and geography are so messed up that even to this day I’m not 100% sure what happens in that shot.
There’s also this odd green filter used over any scene in set within the Matrix. It’s subtle and is probably at its worst in early scenes, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making certain characters look a bit sickly.
No, the problem with the film is, and always has been, its story. More specifically its characters. We’re introduced to our emotionless lead (don’t worry it’ post-Bill and Ted, and pre-John Wick, it’s okay to rag on Keanu) waking up at his computer and are then treated to 20 minutes of exposition dump where his character, personality and backstory are told to the audience through lengthy monologues from other characters. It’s a seriously bad case of telling and not showing.
However, things do get better when we get out of the Matrix and into the real world. Even the performances get better. I know I hit on Keanu up there, but the truth is everyone’s performance is weirdly muted. Some of the cast like Fishburne or the wonderfully overacting Hugo Weaving are charismatic enough to overcome this, but there’s this weirdly stiff air to everything which can only be chalked up to directing. No one reacts to anything right. No one acts truly human, which for a film highlighting the difference between humanity and a soulless system is a pretty big problem.
What pulls the film through is it’s themes and ideas. While it’s not exactly subtle (Neo opens a copy of the French philosophical study Simulacra and Simulation, flips to the chapter on Nihilism which has been hollowed out to store electronic parts, and then turns to his friend who identifies him as “My own personal Jesus Christ”), it does attempt to tackle and explore some pretty big themes. It may not explore them all particularly well, or with enough nuance to really impact an audience, but it does do a pretty good job at its central one. That being free will and choice vs. destiny and faith. How those concepts depart and overlap provide most of the depth in the film, and to be fair actually do leave the audience with some interesting questions to think about.
Hugo Weaving’s portrayal of a programme which is beginning to gain independent sentience and hating its existence is one of the most fascinating ideas in the film, which sadly is really limited to only one scene. The Wachowski’s deepening of that idea in the sequels, and how that relates to Neo, is one of the true saving graces of those later train wrecks.
That’s ultimately what made The Matrix resonate with audience so much when it came out. It tried. It really tried to be more than the brainless action that personified the 90’s. It tried to be more, and that effort was appreciated by an audience that was ready for more.
The original Matrix ends with a message from Neo, saying that he wants to wake the people up and show them a world of new possibilities. In a way, The Matrix did the same thing for the film going audience and that impact is still being felt today.
Fusion Magazine 