The Matrix
Year:
1999
Directed by:
Andy Wachowski
Directed by:
Larry Wachowski
The ultimate "What if?"
If you take a Honk Kong martial arts flick, switch it to sci-fi, add a little philosophizing, add quite a few more visual effect techniques, add a lot supernatural abilities, and add loads of guns, you will have a movie called The Matrix. Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, The Matrix is one of those films that is so good and so entertaining in so many ways, you could not care less when its flaws pop up. It is a pseudo-cyberpunk action film with adequate smarts, stunning cinematography, and extreme action.
(It is impossible to write thoroughly about The Matrix without giving away a crucial twist that occurs about a quarter of the way through the film, so if you like your movies totally unspoiled, skip the next three paragraphs, and read them after you have seen the film.)
Thomas "Neo" Anderson, software programmer by day, hacker by night, wakes up in his dingy apartment, and someone somehow is sending him messages via his computer screen, claiming to have the answers to a question he cannot crack: What is the Matrix? Unfortunately, the authorities are on to him, too, and they do not want him to know the answer. After a series of nightmarish events, including having his mouth fused shut and receiving an insect-like robotic tracking device through the navel, Neo is rescued by a group who will take him to the man he knows has the answers--Morpheus. After another series of even more nightmarish events, Morpheus shows him exactly what the Matrix is. It is our world. It is a computer construct that emulates the world as we understand it. All humans are actually perpetually asleep with their brains hooked into the Matrix, so they believe they are living normal lives. It would take at least one more full paragraph to explain fully how and why, but just know this--after accomplishing mankind's ultimate technological achievement, a sort of artificial intelligence, we sparked and lost a war with the robots of our own creation (actually, the robots of our own creation's creation). The renegade humans that have been awoken into the real, hellish, world are striving to free mankind from the Matrix and take back the Earth. Here's the kicker: those who understand that the world is just a facsimile in cyberspace can break and bend its rules--particularly rules of physics, such as gravity--when they plug themselves back into the Matrix, just as any hacker can break the rules of a traditional computer program. This, as you can imagine, makes for quite an entertaining piece of cinema.
The questions that this film asks, almost didactically, are the questions of reality: Do we really live in reality? How do we know? And just what is reality, anyway? Is there some harder reality beneath our lives? This film suggests there is--perhaps not literally, like the Matrix, but metaphysically. What is the deeper truth beneath the lives we live day-in, day-out? How would we know if there was? This question is actually answered with unapologetic earnestness: we wouldn't know it; we would feel it. Throughout his life, Neo has felt that something is wrong, that there has to be some basic, undiscovered truth about the world. It seems that that is how he came across the idea of the Matrix, even though he did not at first know what it was. He questioned the world persistently, and by doing so he found the answer. It is an answer too powerful at first to accept, but it is true.
The Matrix often gets either significantly more or significantly less praise than it deserves. Specifically, this relates to its meaning. Many fanboys and -girls give it too much credit for intelligence and originality. On the other hand, there are those who pass it off as unoriginal and, therefore, boring. The former ignore the film's many influences. The latter give it too little credit for its ability to entertain. I will say here that this film's questionings, and even much of its action and imagery, cannot be classified as original (wait for the "but"). This movie draws from many sources, some explicitly (particularly Alice in Wonderland), some implicitly. The very idea of the Matrix (including the term "the Matrix") is taken right out of William Gibson's revolutionary cyberpunk novel Neuromancer; we had already seen humans existing within computer programs almost twenty years earlier in TRON; many of the film's more grotesque visuals are unquestionably influenced by the Alien series; and when Morpheus tells Neo during a training fight, "Stop trying to hit me and hit me," the phrase is unavoidably reminiscent of Yoda's famous "Do or do not; there is no try" in The Empire Strikes Back. The reality-questioning itself is not original either; indeed that is what postmodernism itself is ultimately concerned with. Many elements of The Matrix are indeed borrowed from other sources.
