How long has it been since you've seen The Matrix?
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 at 1:12PM Last weekend I decided it was time to burn through the DVD queue instead of sitting wordless at my computer. But when I opened the latest rental, The Good Fairy (1935) -- no, I can't remember why I rented it -- the disc was broken. We ended up watching The Matrix (1999) instead because when a black and white Willam Wyler / Preston Sturges comedy starring Margaret Sullavan is denied you, what other movie will do? LOL.
Warner Bros had sent the BluRay and The Boyfriend remarked that we hadn't seen it since opening night in 1999. It seems like one of those movies we've all seen a million times but in my case that's only because it became such a pop culture staple. Not even its gobsmackingly terrible sequels could shake its grip on the zeitgeist.
The Matrix's modern blend of Alice in Wonderland, gun fetish porn, visual effects bravado, and technophobic dystopia was just what people craved in 1999 when the internet was so obviously and rapidly changing the world. It's tough to even think of a world without the web now but in the early 90s it was still something like a strange and unusual toy... unnerving even if you were hopelessly analog. Watching the movie now in 2012 is kind of a retro shock.
Six observations while watching the movie in 2012...
1. The movie is badly dated by its nineties understanding of computers. If there's one single object that most defines and dominates the movie (besides the gun) it's... the telephone. Just 3 years later Steven Spielberg's Minority Report would prove remarkably prescient and predict that computers would go completely wireless and touch screen. The Matrix won four Oscars including both Sound awards and in scene after scene the now antiquated sounds of landline phone rings and modem connections dominate the sound mix in nearly every sequence.
2. The movie is very very green though it was clearly blue that won the color wars at the movies. I feel like cheering every time an action movie doesn't use blue filters. It's so rare now.
3. The visual effects are still pretty spectacular, even if the instant "wow" of those three dimensional frozen in space camera spins have been all but drained of energy by their sheer abundance in everything from commercials to infotainment shows to countless movies in the subsequent 13 years. For me the image that was most (literally) impactful was the helicopter sequence which features a dangling Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), weirdly rippling buildings, and spider-web like glass shattering.
"There is no spoon."4. The actors are super fun: Hugo Weaving is sublimely inhuman as the the computer program known as "The Agent"; Keanu Reeves unique status as the most enjoyable, beautiful, and loveable of all Terrible Actors makes him a bizarrely perfect choice as the blank slate techno geek "Neo" (an anagram for "The One" because few sci-fi movies ever dare go without a Neo-Christian Salvation Myth); Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss are both appropriately stylized, minimizing their inflections in their line readings to adapt to Keanu Reeves vocal limitations and the movies own concept of humans who aren't exactly emotionally expressive once they "wake up" in a dead world ruled by Artificial Intelligence.
5. The violence porn leaves an especially sick aftertaste, given that we're told again and again that mankind is trapped and imprisoned and innocent (we don't know that the world we live in is a false construct) and yet the "heroes", who The Agent queasily correctly labels as "terrorists", are constantly slaughtering other humans even when they don't need to in the action sequences. The Wachowski Siblings film each death and the bullet fallout with loving "violence is so cool!" detail and slo-mo hipster posing.
6. The Matrix's action sequences won Zach Staenberg the Best Film Editing Oscar at the time and that was a smart move on the Academy's part. Of all the ways in which The Matrix is now dated his editing work is the most pleasurable and, alas, bittersweet. You can actually follow and understand all of the action sequences! Imagine it!!! It's one of the great failings of the modern cinema that action sequences are now virtually incomprehensible (unless James Cameron is directing them) with their insistence on intense closeups and supersonic shard-like cutting. Here in The Matrix every beat and movement is blissfully choreographed and legible, and the camera allows you to see the movements of the lithe actors in all their sleek costumed glory.
...they know kung fu.
Would love to hear your personal experiences with this movie in the comments. Have at it.
Reader Comments (21)
Probably haven't seen it in four or five years. Saw it opening weekend, by myself, at a near empty theater in my home town. My friends had seen it without me a couple nights prior while I was stuck in rehearsals for a school play, but that was fine - I liked going to moves by myself even then. The Matrix blew me away, of course. When I watch it now it is definitely a time capsule experience. 1999 was a really meaningful year for me, in movies and in life. Because I lived in a small town, I had to wait for video (yes, VHS!) to catch up with late 1998 movies like Rushmore, Happiness and The Thin Red Line, so I remember The Matrix being the movie that really signaled to me that something exciting and special was happening in American movies, that the indie darlings of the mid-90s were stepping up and doing really incredible, ambitious work. I remember later in the fall going to the movies week after week and seeing a virtually unending run of masterpieces, near masterpieces and - at worst - flawed, hyperambitious failures that to this day blows my mind. I still think of roughly 1996/7 through 2006/7 as being the best period for American filmmaking since the 1970s. Grateful I was the age I was during those years, because they were exciting times to be a young movie superfreak.
The Matrix is a time capsule movie for me. Seeing it immediately takes me back to 1999, when I was fifteen and my best friend and I begged our parents to give us permission to see it - we had been dying to ever since those stunning Super Bowl commercials (WHAT IS THE MATRIX?). Both of us were a bit put out when the theatre management told my mom that she actually had to see the movie with us (as opposed to buying the tickets for us and giving her permission), and at first she was too. She ended up sitting in the last row, far away from us, and when it was over, she was possibly even more excited by it than we were. It was by far the coolest thing any of us had ever seen (and my mom had seen Star Wars multiple times in theaters!).
Then high school happened and my friend and I drifted apart. When the sequels came out, I was there, with my just-as-excited mom in tow, on opening night. Whenever I've seen The Matrix since then, I always think about my friend, even though it's now an experience I share more with my mom. I don't think there's been an action movie that has been able to touch The Matrix since. Possible exceptions: Avatar and M:I 4.
...fell in love with a guy who loved The Matrix. Saw it over and over and talked about it endlessly as if it were a sacred text...don't talk to that guy anymore...don't really have a desire to see the movie again, at least for a couple of decades or so...
I love this movie. I went to the movies with my sister to see this and I remeber it vividly because it was also the day that I bought my first car. I did not know anything about The Matrix, but my sister wanted to see it because of Keanu Reeves. I remember that they were also showing Never Been Kissed and (since I am from Puerto Rico, a Spanish speaking country) the person right in front of us at the line to buy tickets misspronounced the word Kissed. My sister and I looked at each other and began to giggle. Those were the innocent days.
I think this movie deserved its 4 Oscars. As you mentioned, Nathaniel, the editing is superb because you know what is happening, where and to whom. You rarely see that nowadays.
Have not yet seen The Matrix. Saw the first half hour a year or two back, but was booted from the lounge room for some reason. In no rush to see it, but if it's sitting on the library shelves I may borrow it.
I think the two awful sequels have soured me on the original. Starz or one of the premium channels did a "Matrix" weekend recently, and right after I saw the listing, I flipped past it in disgust. Not dealing with those films again for a very long time. But at the time, I went bonkers over the original. Couldn't get enough of Keanu Reeves as I recall, and I think I actually wanted to be Trinity b/c Carrie-Anne Moss was so badassed and cool. Neo posters on the wall (yes, plural). I even had a "Matrix" screensaver on my computer (the green codes cascading down a black screen . . . so effing awesome). That program wasn't included in the factory settings for my screensavers, so I had to download it from some sketchy web site, which then in turn crashed Windows at least once daily. But it was worth it! LOL! I was so awful as a teenager. Haven't seen any of those films since.
Just as a side note, the movie's color has, depending on who you ask, been touched up with additional green to match the sequels. Originally it was far more brown in tone; the DVD are like this.
I liked Carrie Ann Moss better in "Memento" :-)
It's not absolutely terrible (looks good, well edited, generally visually well put together), but is terribly hypocritical in it's treatment of violence (shouldn't they be closer to Batman than a John Woo hero?), the unnesscary off-shoot philosophical questions are the DEFINITION of the insult term "navel gazing" and the film is based around the dated idea of dial-up internet being important. However, the implanting scene is pretty good, the role is one of maybe three roles where Keanu managed to actually be good (others are Point Break and Something's Gotta Give) and it has a decent base philosophical question. Overall: B-.
Funny enough, I watched the Whole Trilogy on Blu-Ray Last Monday and Tuesday. The first time I saw The Matrix I was thirteen. I was blown away and saw it again a few days later with my brothers and my mom. I've seen it countless times since then and it's even in my Top Thirty Favorite films. In saying that, I wouldn't necessarily call it a great film. It's really good, to be sure, but something was missing.
The only thing that held it back from ever getting the type of love I gave LOTR and SW was that it didn't have a strong emotional core (the love story felt completely shoehorned and is my least favorite thing about the movie). The sequels tried to go in that direction but failed quite significantly.
As for being dated, It's certainly a product of its time but like Superman: The Movie, it still works. I do admit that the constant rip offs and imitations diluted it a little but I think the sequels were more affected by that than the original film.
Since Nat and Volvagia brought it up (though I'm not sure it was intended as a criticism in Nat's case), I don't understand why the phone featuring dial up internet prominently is a flaw. In 1999, most people were rocking dial up internet. Shocking, but true. Do you all hold it against movies in the 70s that people aren't talking on cell phones? Yes, it's dated, but so is every other movie made in the 90s, 80s, 70s and so on. In short - so what?
Weird how this movie strongly evokes freshman year of college for me and evokes nothing of what was actually in the movie. To the extent I remember it, I remember the cool action sequences. I didn't get the hype, so what I remember was the everyone else absolutely loved it. I think like you I was turned off by the "One" storyline, which seemed so cliché. I wonder if everyone would remember it so fondly if it hadn't caught the year's zeitgeist.
I find it so weird that it seems the people who direct action scenes well are the ones who don't make action movies all the time. Has there been an action scene as perfect as the one in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Even Taratino in Kill Bill managed to make what could have been easily incomprehensible easy to follow
Just today we discussed this in an Ethics class (this movie seems to pop up in a lot of lessons). I'ts veen maybe a decade since I saw it and I don't recall much of it,
I was blown away when I first sawt it - will have to take a second look now- the stupid sequels ruined what should have been a landmark series- maybe it's time for a reboot.
Ugh, 1999 was SUCH a crazy amazing film year. My personal opinion of the film? It's slick and stylized in a cool way and it still massively entertaining. I agree with you that the Trinity helicopter sequence leaves more of a lasting impact. Now, those are some amazing visual effects at work, appropriate for that world and everything.
And I love that this one walked away with four deserving Oscar wins in the end too.
The thing I always remember about the matrix is the fact that it was filmed in Sydney. I loved sitting back and playing Where's Wally? with the marks that give it away: The fountain in Martin Place during "the woman in the red dress" sequence, the Dymocks in lower Pitt Street when Neo is talking in a phone booth and I think you can even see a Commonwealth Bank sign at some point (can't get more Australian than that). There's more but it's been a while...
Loved it then, and love it now. I don't so much care about the dated phone technology. I guess I can look past it because I know it when it was made and dated phone technology isn't as irksome or disturbing as dated social norms (like actors speaking racist or homophobic dialogue so nonchalantly).
I'm still not entirely sure if I've seen the entire thing. I know I've seen at least part of it, but not in the theatre. The first movies and its sequels all blur together to me. I think I'm just bored with it all.
Matt - Doesn't Yuen Woo-ping deserve a lot of the credit for that? His list of credits, as an 'action choreographer,' 'fight choreographer,' or, in the case of the first Matrix movie, specifically 'kung fu choreographer,' include all Matrix movies, the Kill Bill movies, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Kung Fu Hustle, among others.
Neo has arrived.