With the end of the decade rapidly approaching, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the first of the series.
The movie: Does it really need any introduction? Released way back in 1999, The Matrix not only made a shit-ton of money at the box office, but it enjoyed a surprisingly positive critical reception and became one of the first mega-selling DVD releases. A fair number of people were convinced at the time that the inevitable Matrix franchise would dominate the 2000s blockbuster scene.
My reaction at the time: Pretty much the same as everyone else's. I was floored by The Matrix in the theaters and probably saw it four or five times on DVD (also, once on VHS). I wasn't necessarily a full-fledged member of the Matrix semi-cult that existed for a brief time before being unceremoniously disbanded by 2003's The Matrix Reloaded.
On further viewing...: Ten years on, The Matrix actually holds up pretty well. Although the critical focus tend to heavily involve the philosophical themes of the movie, it's important to recall that The Matrix primarily set itself apart from its action-movie contemporaries in the late 90s in more aesthetic ways. In my mind, the real innovation of The Matrix was the manner in which the Wachowski brothers wedded the choreography of Hong Kong action flicks to noir-inspired cinematography and production design. Since the mid to late 90s produced relatively few persevering action movies, it's easy to forget today just how badly shot and staged most action set pieces were in those days; the typical gun or fist fight was a mishmash of medium-close shots and cutaways that completely sabotaged the kinetic and dramatic intentions of the scene. By contrast, the action sequences in The Matrix consist almost exclusively of medium-long or long shots, so you can actually see what's going on, and make judicious use of slow motion for dramatic effect and to accentuate just how well-composed most of the shots are (The Matrix's cinematographer, Bill Pope, is brilliant at shooting action sequences in anamorphic widescreen, see also - seriously - Team America: World Police).
The Matrix also gets points for proper use of Keanu Reeves as the My-First-Anagram-named lead character, Neo. Lots of film fans like to beat up on Keanu because of the fact that he has no range, but he's actually very effective in roles that play to his strengths. One of the big flaws of action movie leads is that they're too commonly take-charge ultimate badass types from the outset of the film, which sort of precludes any meaningful character development over the course of the plot. Keanu's bullheaded-but-naive-and-slightly-dim stock character is a natural fit for a movie that plays up the lead's initial ignorance of the central conflict.
He also ingratiates himself by literally playing the only major character that doesn't spontaneously break out into a portentous monologue whenever their mouth is open. I'd forgotten what a talky movie The Matrix is (I hadn't forgotten that fact about the sequels, though). The worst offender is, of course, Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus, but most of the rest of the cast get their chance to spout off, including minor villain Joe Patoliano, who engages in one of the more egregious examples of "monologuing" in recent movie history. Some of the cast actually adapt to this fairly well: Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith character gets away with it because of his idiosyncratic vocal cadence, and Gloria Foster brings the perfect tone of matronly warmth to her scene as the Oracle. Despite that, I wish there were fewer spoken meditations on the nature of belief and reality and so forth.
Of course, the metaphysical angle of The Matrix is a big part of what hooked its more avid fans. Even though the philosophical subtext of the movie isn't subtle, it's broad enough that a wide range of pet interpretations are possible. Religious commentators pointed to the array of Christian, Buddhist, and Gnostic themes woven into the plot. Undergraduate Naomi Klein disciples read it as a metaphor for the false consciousness created by American capitalism. Philosophy professors showed clips from the movie to explain Plato's Republic. And so on, and so forth.
The beauty is that all of these readings are probably equally valid; The Matrix films are on the whole far more interested in philosophical masturbation than making a consistent thematic point. This probably explains a large amount of the indifference with which the two sequels were met. I think that extent of the fanboy backlash to The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions is a bit overstated (especially in the case of the third film), but it's undeniable that the sequels have at least one bad idea to match every good one. The Matrix, on the other hand, continues to retain its popular appeal; it sits at #26 on imdb's user-voted list of the top 250 films of all time, below Sunset Blvd and ahead of Dr. Strangelove.
Still worth seeing?: Sure. Even disregarding the rest of the strengths of The Matrix, the high-rise invasion rescue shootout alone put it up there as one of the best action movies of all time.
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