The Matrix review – barnstorming sci-fi still calling our reality into question
The Matrix review – barnstorming sci-fi still calling our reality into question
The movie that launched a million memes has lost none of its conspiratorial power, and its action sequences still dazzle – but was it actually trying to tell us something we’ve all missed?
The Matrix 25th Anniversary re-release
To paraphrase Apu in The Simpsons, this was the year filmgoers were partying like it was on sale for $19.99; it offered the vintage of American Beauty, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense and more. But The Matrix seemed to me then – and seems to me now – more exciting than any of them, first among equals in the previous century’s final graduating class. Rereleased for its 25th anniversary, this barnstorming sci-fi paranoia thriller, produced by action veteran Joel Silver and written and directed by the Wachowskis, holds up tremendously well. The martial arts sequences choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping are gripping and nothing about the bullet-time effects or production design feels dated. Even the ringing payphone – an unexceptional detail in 1999 – now looks like an inspired steampunk touch.
Hrm... The Matrix definitely still looks good, except for the CGI machines that chase after their ship in the back half of the movie. Still, I would argue that Fight Club is at least as relevant still, since it describes a lot of how we got to our present social and political situation.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
To paraphrase Apu in The Simpsons, this was the year filmgoers were partying like it was on sale for $19.99; it offered the vintage of American Beauty, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense and more.
Rereleased for its 25th anniversary, this barnstorming sci-fi paranoia thriller, produced by action veteran Joel Silver and written and directed by the Wachowskis, holds up tremendously well.
The martial arts sequences choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping are gripping and nothing about the bullet-time effects or production design feels dated.
Keanu Reeves, inscrutable, adorable and eccentric in his utterly individual way, plays Thomas Anderson, a talented young software programmer by day, and by night a mysterious online figure on global networks with the handle “Neo”.
But Neo is also being pursued by rebel activists, including Trinity (played with icy severity and style by Carrie-Anne Moss) and led by the charismatic Morpheus (a suavely assured Laurence Fishburne) who, despite his name, wants the whole world to wake up.
Since then, the Wachowskis’ red pill has inspired a million social-media conspiracists, largely on the right, who are complacently #redpilled and can see how the deep state and its complicit mainstream media liberals on Epstein Island are hoodwinking the people.
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