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Rating: R
Director: Lana and Lilly Wachowski (born Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski)
Writers: Lana and Lilly Wachowski (born Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski)
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss
Release Date: March 31, 1999 (United States)
Run time: 2 hours, 16 minutes
THE PLOT:
(via wiki)
In 1999, in an unnamed city, Thomas Anderson, a computer programmer known as “Neo” in hacking circles, delves into the mystery of the “Matrix”. His search brings him to the attention of hacker Trinity, who discloses that the enigmatic Morpheus can answer Neo’s questions. At his workplace, Neo is pursued by police and Agents led by Agent Smith. Morpheus guides Neo’s escape by phone, able to somehow remotely observe their movements, but Neo ultimately surrenders rather than risk a hazardous getaway.
The Agents interrogate Neo about Morpheus but he refuses to cooperate. In response, they seal Neo’s mouth shut and implant a robotic device in his abdomen. Neo awakens at home, initially dismissing the encounter as a nightmare until Trinity and her allies arrive, extract the implanted tracker, and bring Neo to Morpheus, their leader. Morpheus offers Neo a choice: a red pill to uncover the truth about the Matrix or a blue pill to forget everything and return to his normal life. Opting for the red pill, Neo’s reality distorts, and he awakens submerged in a mechanical pod with invasive cables running throughout his body. Neo witnesses countless inert humans similarly encased and tended to by machines before he is ejected from the facility and rescued by Morpheus aboard the hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar.
Morpheus reveals that the year is approximately 2199. In the 21st century, humanity lost a war with their artificially intelligent creations, leaving the Earth a devastated ruin. As a last resort, humans blackened the sky to eliminate the machines’ access to solar power and, in response, the machines developed farms of artificially grown humans to harness their bioelectric energy. The Matrix is a simulated reality based on human civilization at its peak, designed to keep the subjugated humans oblivious and pacified. The remaining free humans established an underground refuge known as Zion, living a harsh existence on scarce resources. Morpheus and his rebel crew hack into the Matrix to free and recruit others, manipulating the rules of the simulation to gain superhuman physical abilities. Even so, they are outmatched by the overwhelmingly powerful Agents—sentient programs protecting the Matrix—and dying in the Matrix causes death in the real world. Morpheus liberated Neo because he believes him to be “the One”, a prophesied figure destined to dismantle the Matrix and liberate humanity.
The crew enter the Matrix to seek guidance from the Oracle, the prophetic figure who foretold the existence of the One. She implies that Neo is not the One and warns him of an imminent choice between his life and Morpheus’s. The crew are ambushed by Agents after being betrayed by Cypher, a disgruntled crew member who wants to be reinserted into the Matrix to enjoy its comforts. Convinced of Neo’s importance, Morpheus sacrifices himself to confront Smith, only to be overpowered and captured. Meanwhile, Cypher exits the Matrix and begins forcefully disconnecting the others, killing them. Before Cypher can kill Neo and Trinity, Tank, a subdued crew member, regains consciousness, kills Cypher, and safely extracts the survivors.
Smith interrogates Morpheus to obtain access codes for Zion’s mainframe, which would allow them to end the human resistance. Determined to rescue Morpheus, Neo reenters the Matrix with Trinity. They successfully free Morpheus, who escapes the Matrix with Trinity, but Smith intercepts Neo. Gaining confidence in his abilities, Neo fights Smith, demonstrating comparable power and eventually killing him. However, Smith resurrects in a new body and kills Neo.
In the real world, machines called Sentinels attack the Nebuchadnezzar. Standing by Neo’s real body, Trinity confesses her love for him and that the Oracle prophesied she would fall in love with the One. In the Matrix, Neo revives with newfound abilities to perceive and control the Matrix. He effortlessly destroys Smith and exits the Matrix just as the Nebuchadnezzar’s electromagnetic pulse disables the ship’s power and the Sentinels. Sometime later, within the Matrix, Neo communicates with the system, promising to show the enslaved humans a world of limitless possibilities, before flying away.
The Review
To be honest, I really debated over whether to review this film. Despite being over a quarter of a century old, it has never really left the Zeitgeist. My brand is reviewing things after they’re gone. Nearly everyone has seen this movie. It’s arguably more influential in the public discourse today than it was in 1999. In spite of the multiple follow-up films’ failure to live up to the original, there is something about the original that has given it an unusual cultural endurance. I think the explanation is that the film provided people with a visual and linguistic framework to explain the modern world. Is that a lot of praise for a single film? Yes.
When The Matrix was released in 1999, it was groundbreaking in a lot of respects. The aesthetics of the film have been copied so much since that it’s hard to remember life before, but at the time, they were very unique (the sunglasses, the futuristic cyberpunk and vaguely gothic good guy outfits, the anime-mirroring special effects, the music, etc.) It was not the first film to create a new aesthetic, and it wasn’t the last. But there is a cultural cache that comes with setting a trend.
That doesn’t explain the endurance of the film, though. In my opinion, The Matrix endures because it introduced into the mainstream of our cultural lexicon the ideas of AI and Simulation Theory. Again, in 1999 AI was a very SciFi and mostly fringe topic. It came up in much earlier films like The Terminator and others, but probably due to proximity to the thing becoming reality, the AI talk after the release of The Matrix went more mainstream. (SkyNet is a more limited and specifically military idea than AI more generally, but we’ll get back to that franchise below.)
Further, the film introduced the idea of the Simulation Theory – at least indirectly. If you were a character in a simulation, would you know? What are the odds that we are in a Simulation now?
A lot of scientific effort has gone into proving that we are in a Simulation since this movie was released, and the effort has not been fruitless. If you’re interested, you should read up on “the Double Slit” partial experiment and the links between the James Webb Space Telescope and Simulation theory. We even have Congressional hearings now discussing ‘interdimensional beings’ as part of our reality – and you can draw parallels between those beings and the Smiths if you wish.
The idea of simulation, or a partial reality, isn’t a modern idea. A lot of religions have embraced a concept that there is a reality beyond the one in which we live. However, what Simulation Theory does is provide a technological and linguistic framework for “science” to navigate back toward cohesive cooperation with religious belief. This is a pretty profound development, inasmuch as it likely signals the philosophical beginning of the end of the Enlightenment’s hostility toward religion and the start of a reconciliation between the two. Obviously the film is not the engineer of the idea, but it was a major vector through which the idea was delivered into the mainstream.
As a result, we still discuss ‘the Simulation’ with the lexicon of ‘the Matrix.’ And as a result, there has been a growing cultural and philosophical return to linking ‘The Matrix’ with matters of traditional religious faith.
The movie was aware of this link when it was made. The awake humans in the film lived in Zion – which is a direct reference to the home of the Abrahamic faiths. The process of being pulled out of the simulation mirrors the notion of being ‘born again.’ The pods even look something like a womb, with the cord on the head mirroring an umbilical cord that needs to be cut.
In fact, Neo – the film’s messianic figure – carries a lot of Christ-like qualities – namely that of prophecy, righteous self-sacrifice, death, and then victory through resurrection. Neo is poised as the film ends, to be someone who can lead people out of the Simulation and into new life.
Trinity is a pretty clear and direct reference to Christianity. Her name is designed, in my opinion, to draw the link between the story of the film and the religious parallel. Though it’s notable that she is not the actual Messianic figure – just a helper to him. Morpheus is a character name derived from the Greek god of sleep and dreams. He is a messenger of truth to Neo. You might think of him as something of a John the Baptist figure, though again its notable that he is a side character to Neo, and portrayed with a pagan name, not a Christian or Jewish one.
Of course, as the film’s writers were not Christians, the mirroring of Christ was likely not intentional, or more likely that it was intentional but also somewhat subversive. The pattern of Messianic storytelling (prophecy, righteous self-sacrifice, death, and then victory through resurrection) is present in a lot of religious texts and stories. Harry Potter is a pretty famous modern fiction example. Innumerable superhero stories follow this pattern. However, it is most well-known through the person of Jesus Christ.
It might be that Neo is intended to be viewed as something greater than a Christ figure. If we view the Simulation as a malicious enterprise, then it stands to reason then that we view its maker as malevolent. God would be the natural parallel for ‘The Machines’ as the Simulation-maker. If so, then the point of waking up is not reunification with God but escape from Him. And if that’s the message, we would expect Zion from the film to perhaps reflect that – a place of debauchery at the center of the earth. Is that a picture of Hell instead of a parallel to heaven? (Keep your eyes open for that type of depiction of Zion in follow-up films.)
So maybe Neo is a positive spin on an Antichrist parallel. It’s a good thing Keanu Reeves never did any other films where he worked cooperatively with the Devil.
The film makes a bunch of references to Lewis Carroll’s works. This has led to a significant uptick in the use of Carroll in the world of conspiracy theories and truth-seeking. If you had said to someone in 1998 that you were “going down an internet rabbit hole” on a research topic, that person might have figured out what you meant, but it would have been a weird thing to say and a difficult one to interpret. First, you’re implying that truth is hidden and second that you might be lost in the search. Today, largely due to this film and other pop cultural products which have mirrored its language, these Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland terms are common and commonly understood. I would argue that it’s now mainstream to assume that truth is hidden by the authorities and that it is a dangerous enterprise to learn the truth. We convey that belief with the words we choose. Again, the movie demonstrates its power as the source of a linguistic framework in an era where humans and machines are interacting to an increasingly greater degree.
One funny element of the film is that, when it was released, it was kind of a joke that the late 1990s were the peak of human civilization. A quarter of a century later, a lot of people hold to that view that without any humor or irony at all. Despite technological advances, people have grown increasingly miserable. Birth rates are plummeting. Mental health is at an all time low (at least since we’ve started measuring.) We also now live at the dawn of AI – just as was predicted in the film – so it might be that the film got the timeline exactly right. Is it possible to collectively just turn off the machines at this point? Probably not. So we’re going to have to live through things and see how they go. Hopefully we don’t find ourselves in a cataclysmic fight with our creation.
Some of you may know this, but I share it for the benefit of those that don’t. There have really been two mainstream film franchise entertainment warnings about AI and technology in general, that broke through into the mainstream. Those are The Terminator franchise and The Matrix franchise. What a lot of people might not know, though, is that there is a woman, Sophia Stewart, who claims that both are part of the same story and that she was the original creator. She claims Hollywood stole her ideas and made and adapted both franchises.
I have no idea if she’s telling the truth, but I do wonder sometimes if stories like hers have validity. Is it evidence that she’s telling the truth that the follow-ups to both franchises got progressively worse? The directly stolen stuff makes for good films, but the further away you get from someone else’s creation, and the more you have to rely on your own ideas, the more you reveal yourself to be fraudulent?
That’s an easy thing to believe, but there are a ton of musical artists and book authors who are one-hit wonders, too. Sometimes getting art to resonate is just difficult, and accomplishing that feat once doesn’t mean you will continue to do so over time. The inability of the Wachowskis to continue replicating the success of their original film isn’t proof that they stole it from someone else. Nevertheless, people get ripped off all the time. It’d be incredibly difficult to live with the reality (assuming it were true) that two of the most important works of science fiction in the last fifty years were your idea, and that someone else made billions of dollars after stealing it from you. Is it weird then to hope she’s lying? Either way – I wanted to share her name here.
I am glad I rewatched The Matrix. A lot of the things that I found mind-blowing back when it was released aren’t so mind-blowing anymore, but it still looks fantastic, the pacing is quick and engaging, and the hero’s journey is well told and extremely enjoyable. As my review indicates, I also really enjoyed the movie through the lens of its long-term and enduring cultural impact. It’s genuinely crazy how pervasive the movie is with respect to the present day’s lexicon. We speak the language of ‘The Matrix’ every day. Do we live there? Just to be on the safe said, I recommend that you keep your eyes open for the woman in the red dress.
Have you seen The Matrix? If so, what did you think?