The Matrix

So I rewatched The Matrix last night for the first time in 10-12 years. I'd seen the movie opening weekend, and multiple times over the next few years, but it had been a long time. The wife has called it her favorite movie but she hadn't seen it in a long time either and we'd been meaning to watch it together for years but didn't get it done until last night.



I'll start with some of the good. The beginning of the movie is pretty terrific. Trinity escaping from the agents especially. Running over the rooftops (sets reused from the great Dark City, shot on the same studio lot in Sydney), it's exciting, intriguing, and Carrie-Anne Moss is badass and wonderfully balletic and awesome to watch. When we are introduced to Neo, there's still a mysteriousness that really works well, and then seeing Trinity rope Neo into her world with such effortless sexiness and intelligence. I was beginning to think I'd been wrong about the movie all these years because this was truly terrific.



The Wachowski's set up the plot beautifully in letting Neo go down the rabbit hole into finding Morpheus and taking the red pill. Then comes the introduction of the machines they will rage against, and the training Neo undergoes to combat the machines. Unfortunately, this is where the movie starts to go off the rails as it abandons the philosophy and mystery and becomes the big dumb action movie it was setting up to be all along.



This is also where the movie forgets about Trinity being a certified badass and shushes her to the background for Morpheus and Neo to take over as the lead characters (it's a big dumb action movie, after all, and we can't have a woman taking center stage too much). The training sequences go well, the action scenes throughout are all very well made, but there's nothing there outside of the surface level action. The movie still keeps its endless referencing of other works of art, but forgets that there are characters it had been introducing and needing to deepen. Nope, any and all character development is done by this point. Barely sketched as archetypes, the characters end up as nothing but plot points. For example, why is Trinity in love with Neo? We are given no interactions with them that would suggest any sort of connection, much less a world opening kind of love. As my wife said, their relationship arc is essentially "you're pretty, I love you." Yeah, fuck it, they're both tall, thin, dark hair, light skin, pretty people (honestly they look so much alike they'd pass better as siblings than lovers). Yeah so they're in love. Why? Because plot.



The second half of the movie is just dumb action. And it's well shot, the VFX are good (though dated and obvious in many cases, they're still visually used well and work in context), and the actors are all committed to their non-characters. But there's nothing there to make me care about it. There's a lot of shots that tell us the filmmakers were thinking "isn't this shit blowing up and getting shot in slow motion like super awesome?" Eh, it's okay. But it's mindless action in a movie that set us up with something on its brain. This is why it's even more disappointing than most big dumb action movies that have nothing on their mind. The Matrix is set up as a movie that has something to say, but ultimately says little more than "isn't this cool?"

Then there's the point of the plot of Neo being "the one". Why is Neo the one? Because the plot says so. What makes him different than the others? Because the plot says so.



It would've been a more interesting development of the plot if everyone in the crew had had the same God-like powers Neo eventually develops. And they then have to battle the super-villain baddies in the form of the Agents. All Neo does is "free his mind", why couldn't they all have done that? Why weren't they all already there before Neo ever showed up? They know The Matrix isn't real, there's nothing to keep them from the God-like powers Neo possesses except that the plot wants to make Neo into computer Jesus. But the group all do the big jumps (or I guess we only see Trinity and Morpheus do that, but still), it's just that Neo has more of that ability? Why? The rest of the crew have obviously freed their minds enough to bend the rules of reality, why don't they just out and out break them?



This lends all the action scenes an inherent idiocy and pointlessness. Why doesn't Neo just wave his God hand and swipe away the agents and the bullets? Why does Trinity get scared about people chasing them? It's not real, they could fly away, or just imagine the biggest guns. For that matter, the bullets aren't real and they know it, so why bullets at all? When battling hand to hand in the subway fight between Neo and Agent Smith, Smith punches Neo in this video game-esque hurricane like punches. Why not punch that punch all the time? When you set up a world that isn't real and put superhero-like characters in it who then don't use their superpowers, it just causes confusion and frustration to the viewer.



So The Matrix introduced a ton of interesting concepts and thoughts into pop culture. Sure, none of the ideas are original but how many ideas really are? Expecting originality from a big blockbuster movie is too much pressure to put on a movie. And the ideas were taken from various philosophical and classic sci-fi sources the world over (Plato, William Gibson, Phillip K Dick, the animes Akira and Ghost in the Shell, among many others). Isn't that what good artists do? Take from a multitude of influences and repackage it through their own lens? The Wachowski's introduce these things into popular culture and use them well in the movie until they abandon them completely for Michael Bay-isms of big dumb action and stuff getting blowed up real good.

But I still can't rate the movie anything above a 5/10 because it just squanders all of the good will it had built up inside me in the first act. It's not bad otherwise, just dumb and pointless. But what a first act!