Director: The Wachowskis
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving
Have I Seen it Before: I mean, how would somebody get through the 2000s, own a DVD player the entire damn time, and not see this movie? I’m legitimately curious.
Did I Like It: As is usually the case, it’s difficult to write about a movie that changed the face of cinema ever since, and sometimes in good ways. One could write about how the mythology in the film influenced genre filmmaking, but then you’d also have to note how the series never quite capitalized on its singularly Campbellian display of the monomyth here, but that almost seems like a better discussion to have during the reviews of those movies, especially the persistently discouraging sequels*.
I could talk about how the narrative has changed slightly in the twenty-plus years since its initial release. It’s become something of a parable for the trans/non-binary experience, especially after the Wachowskis transitioned. But they deny that such a parable was at least consciously the case, and there are any number of other writers who could pontificate on that point far more eloquently than I could.
I might go back to the critique I had of the movie back in the day, that Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) might have had a point. The real world of the story is so drab and awful and filled with frequent death, and the Matrix seems… okay enough? Who wouldn’t want to go back into The Matrix? Between the gender parable and just growing up a little bit, that criticism rings hollow.
So, where am I left in this review? It’s a very fine film and if you have, indeed, somehow made it to this point in life without seeing the film, you certainly should. The thing that I was struck by in this viewing was that I had always taken the film as a piece filmed in Chicago, with all of the character of that town. The Wachowskis come from there. And yet, the film wasn’t shot there at all, and instead is a product of Australia, utilizing studio facilities whose biggest contributions to the form up until that point was Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie (1995). I thought I had gotten so sophisticated in my viewing that I could always pick out when a film was shot in a real city or not. This film continues to surprise me. That’s more than a little something.
*At press time, I haven’t yet watched The Matrix Resurrections (2021), but I do get the impression that it isn’t exactly going to bring the whole together all of a sudden.