Twenty years ago this year we all had our minds melted open when The Matrix told us all that we were potentially trapped in a dream state, never to fully trust machinery or our surroundings ever again. At the time of writing, the fifth film in the franchise (if we include The Animatrix) is being filmed and will maybe become the second Matrix film to be any good. A Cyberpunk, philosophically driven homage to Kung-Fu movies, The Matrix has arguably been one of the most influential movies of the turn of the Century in inspiring parody, meme, and Elon Musk’s research into putting the Internet into our brains.
What’s the Matrix about
We all know what the Matrix is about, but in case you were born fantastically recently and you never heard of the internet until this article was published, I will recap. Thomas “Neo” Anderson is a computer hacker, who finds himself hunting tirelessly for Morpheus, another famed computer hacker who is rumoured to have the answer to the question “What is The Matrix?”. It is soon revealed that the Matrix is a computer program, an alternate reality, powered by “a kind of fusion” and the electricity generated by imprisoned human beings. None of what we see is anything more than a computer generated dream and Morpheus allows Neo to escape into The Real World. Neo is believed to be The One, which in Kung Fu movie terms means, he downloads entire forms of martial arts into his brain in a second and can go toe to toe with anyone that gets in his way. Think of the infinite health and weapons cheats in Grand Theft Auto and you’ll get a good idea of his freedom.
Yuen Woo Ping
Famed director and choreographer Yuen Woo Ping (Fearless, Kill Bill, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) is a genius, as I’m sure you’re all aware and he designed fighting styles and choreography for each individual member of the cast, for which they trained solidly for three months. Trinity (CarrieAnn Moss) was much more flexible than the rest of the cast and has some of the best close combat scenes in the movie, the power house of Morpheus (Laurence Fishburn) and Neo (Keanu Reeves) have very explicit style differences. The thing that becomes most clear on this retrospective viewing is that, unlike almost every other film in Holywood, you will actually be The Matrix – SMA 2 watching every actor weaving through MMA, Kung Fu, Wing Chun, JuJitsu and everything else you can think of. Even after 20 years the fight scenes are still exciting even though some of them are really stupid.
Bullet time
The popularisation of ‘bullet time’, the ability to play a scene in slow motion while the camera pans around them in real time, is what made The Matrix stand out so much, to the point that you couldn’t watch a movie, or go to a bar without seeing somebody trying to emulate the slow motion scenes in the matrix. Especially if you went to a bar with me, a few shots of tequila and I’d be bending in half backwards to avoid imaginary bullets and then picking alcopop covered glass out’ve my clothes for the rest of the night after I fell on my ass in the smoking area.
Gorgeous Wankery
The Wachowski’s know how to pitch a movie, they know how to make a movie look incredible, but they can’t write movies for shit. The Matrix characters are two dimensional and the plot is a lazy homage to the Jesus story part of the Bible and all the good bits from Neuromancer. The following two movies in The Matrix Trilogy, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending should illustrate the absolute gorgeous wankery they can make when left to their own devices. All this being said, I’m not sure why The Matrix is great, but it is.
