NORTH BY NORTHWEST @ 65

Madison Avenue exec Roger Thornhill is abducted from a business meeting and taken to a country mansion where a sinister crew interrogates him, using a different name. Puzzled and miffed, he resists and then survives an attempt on his life. This is already action packed but from this point on, he's about to get thrown into Alfred Hitchcock's most kinetic thriller adventure. Along the way he is accidentally in the frame for the murder of a U.N. official and persistently mistaken for a secret service agent and takes time to fall into mutual fascination with the beautiful, urbane and young Eve Kendall. All that is well before the hour mark in this over two hour film.

It's hard to know what to say about this one as it joins Vertigo and Psycho as one of Hitchcock's most written about movies. I'll be keeping this on the shorter side as I'd be here all night otherwise. I did note, as I went through it again for this blog, that it was probably the first time since his WWII movie Saboteur that Hitch would cast his hero into such a thrill ride across the country. The two share a kind of patriotic touch point in this as North by Northwest with its Cold War connotations, makes much of the glorious post war affluence in the architecture of New York City and Mt Rushmore as poster sized adverts for the land of the free.

The casting is noteworthy. James Stewart pleaded with Hitchcock for the Thornhill role. Gregory Peck was also considered. Both men had been in Hitch's movies but the thriller auteur chose against them and banked on the intergenerational sexiness of Cary Grant. In a brief moment when Grant walks through a woman's bedroom and her tone changes from alarm to attraction and Grant wags a finger at her with a pronounced, "uh-uh," he's not only funny but believable. Neither alternative castings could have carried that off. It does ring a little naff, now, but only a little. Grant was in his mid-fifties but physically trim and had a face that aged beautifully. This still happens and the examples of it are easily listed.

The other thing that still happens is the romantic paring of older men with decades young women. Eva Marie Saint was over two decades younger than Grant at the time. Her character describes herself as being a decade younger still, broadening the age chasm. My assumption is that the goodwill of Grant's stardom covered what can only be obvious in widescreen Technicolor as it is, here. Also, Jessie Royce Landis who was a single year older than Grant, plays his mother. Personally, as I'm knowingly watching fiction, I tend to look past age gaps (especially since I know a fair few people younger than me who make more of them) but the Grant/Saint rift is only smoothed by a pair of committed performances.

Hitchcock's 1950s were mostly larger and more lavish productions than he'd been used to, with few exceptions. Here, he seems to gleefully flaunt the big bucks that MGM could still throw at its productions. The setpieces that mix soundstage and location like the crop duster chase, Mt Rushmore scenes, the exterior/interior U.N. building and so on survive the punishing clarity of 4K in a way that some recent films shot that way have not. The final act sequence with the modernist house and the monumental Mt Rushmore heads is given a nocturnal dark blue wash that feels so confidently contrived that we happily accept it.

But that's the thing about these big, bold Hitchcock epics from this time; they have more scope than normal thrillers but less substance than almost any musical. Hitch's famous trope of the McGuffin (an  object that primarily served plot motion) doesn't make an appearance until the third act and feels perfunctory. The triangle of Grant, Saint and the intimidatingly urbane James Mason as Van Damm makes us care more than anything else. There is nothing of the creepy psychology of Vertigo, the stark horror of Psycho or the unease of Marnie on screen, here. Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman just like the idea of dummy agents enough to dress it in a plot and cast Cary Grant and some big scenery. In this run of Hitchcock greats, North by Northwest feels like popcorn. But it is deluxe popcorn.

Viewing notes: I watched the recently released 4K, plain edition from Warners which looks astounding all the way through. A puzzling but not displeasing Dolby Atmos soundtrack is on by default which can overstate Bernard Hermann's blaring score but that's not a big issue. Some good extras like the writer's commentary and contemporary promo featuring Hitchcock himself also come recommended.

EYES WIDE SHUT @ 25

Well-heeled Manhattanite couple Bill and Alice go to a Christmas party thrown by their uber one-percenter friend Victor and there, in the boozy, soft light wooze, both are sexually tempted but both decline. Afterwards, sharing a post party joint, they get into an argument about potential infidelity which ends in Alice confessing that she was struck by the sight of a naval officer at a recent holiday they'd been on. Not just struck but after a single glance from him, she says she was ready to abandon her marriage for the stranger. Bill is so slammed by this that he sets off into the night looking for an opportunity to slake his jealousy by any means possible and ends up infiltrating a secret orgy of the great and famous where his life is threatened. He is saved by an interloper whose fate appears dreadfully sealed. Freed, he flees, determined to discover what happened.

Stanley Kubrick was by the time of this film's completion producing so few new films that each was given greater hype than the previous on their approach. Among the rumours sticking to this one was that it was a box office time server before the one he really wanted to make, A.I. Such rumours served to diminish Eyes Wide Shut as a secondary work made to finance a primary one. However, Kubrick had wanted to make an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream-Story) since the 1960s. It had gone through many different imaginings and castings until finally made in the 1990s. It was a primary work that Kubrick was highly pleased with. 

On the ground around me, people who professed to be lifelong fans of the director mostly expressed distaste for the movie, often exaggerating the lameness of the hyped orgy scene and considering the film a waste or their time as well as the effort it took to make. I was reminded of a lot of backlashes previously, against all kinds of things, other movies, music artists' new albums, novels and so on: Kubrick didn't make the movie they wanted so whatever this one was was angrily flushed. For my part I had been unconvinced of Kubrick's unquestioned genius but had seen something in this last one that fascinated me. To this day, I consider it one of his best and most rewatchable. This is not, I swear, my own contrariness, the film's themes of responses to jealousy feel hauntingly genuine to me, heightened by the high sheen of the visuals and gravity of the music. If I had to choose, I'd rather have this than Lolita, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket.

Why? Well, expanding on my reason given just then, I think it's one of the most accurate treatments of sexual jealousy committed to screen. Not only does it hit the disproportionate responses between the couple but neither consummates their extra marital desire. It plays and feels more like a fable than the erotic thriller it's often touted to be.  Alice, however drunk she is, resists the charms of the Hungarian lecher at the party. Bill seems on the edge of following the two models who appear like a masturbatory fantasy from the golden light of the glitz. The couple's post-event discussion about each other's moments of temptation leads to the argument and Alice's confession. That confession, while it still haunts Alice, becomes a motif for Bill, recurring throughout his adulterous trek in a series of black and white vignettes, a scene that never happened for real but is what he imagines his wife imagined and desired. He is revenging himself against a passing thought (a resonant one but still just a thought). 

I don't think that this expresses male jealousy vs female, just the likelihood of a lack of balance between people intimately involved. This story invites you to revisit the often brutal ugliness of a moment of your own jealousy and, honest viewers who were more interested in what the film before them asked of them than in what temporary approval they might find by trashing the movie in front of others, will take away a confronting candour.

Is the orgy scene lame? Compare it to the New French Extremity and the daunting boundary pushing of erotic thrillers since and, sure, it seems very slight for the participants to care too much who knew about it. That point is better expressed in the conversation Bill has toward the end with Zigler which is more about class exclusion. The suggestion that any given modern city might be by powerful narcissists might not be news to anyone but the thought of it, when given a second or two, remains a shivery horror. As to Bill, wandering the rainbow coloured sets of a very clean Greenwich Village crawling with dirty minds, he for the moment can only see opportunities that he feels the force of his will alone bestow entitlements upon him. It's as powerful an allegory for the concentration of sexual arousal as any.

While the casting of the two leads had changed greatly over the decades as Kubrick returned to the thought of this adaptation, he really knocked it out of the park by choosing alpha celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Young, talented and beautiful, Cruise and Kidman were on screens as much as they were on the covers of celebrity mags at supermarket checkouts. They were characterised as a power couple without controversy. The opening scene depicting the pair getting ready to go to the party feels completely natural and, once established, we feel we are in the company of people we know at the same time as unreachable movie stars. Cruise plays up to his walking grin persona but is also put through such strain that this appears increasingly shallow. Kidman speaks mostly in hushed tones with elongated vowels takes Alice to a point of unquestionable authority. The film's final line is hers and she delivers it with the quiet but abrupt confidence that the whole film has begged: "fuck!"

PHANTASM @ 45

Tommy gets lucky and takes his belle de jour to the graveyard for sex one night. When its her turn to penetrate she chooses a long sharp knife into the chest. Not quite the pillow talk he had in mind but he's beyond caring about that. Also, the woman has transformed in the space of a cut into a tall frowning man. When Tommy's brother Jody goes to the funeral with his friend Reggie, they talk about how weird Tommy's apparent suicide was before Jody goes into the bizarre black and white mausoleum where he's slammed on the shoulder by the tall man in the prologue. Younger-still brother Michael, who's been following Jody around, turns up on his trail bike and watches through binoculars as the Tall Man (as the figure came to be known in the franchise) effortlessly lifts a full casket into the back of a hearse. Ok that's all in the first ten minutes and I haven't mentioned the strange creatures who seem to be darting behind headstones or the Dune-like box o' ordeals that Michael is tested with at a local medium business.

This is the world of Phantasm built of strange details that seem left over from last night's whiskey flavoured writing session. It's also one of the most refreshingly original genre-bending films ever made. I said original and just above I also said that one of the details was like something from Dune. Writer/director Don Coscarelli knows you know that (and this is five years before Lynch's feature film made a big thing of it). Jody goes to a watering hole in the town called Dune Cantina. You might find some resemblance between the flying ball and the flying syringes in Dune but the similarity is slight and diverges as soon as the ball meets a head and drains the blood which it spits out a hole in its rear. That's the kind of thing Coscarelli was thinking up when he conceived of this film. He was on a phone call and played around with a Styrofoam cup, pushing through the bottom with a finger and watching as it moved apparently by itself. That's what I mean by original. A lot of what you see on screen here feels invented on the spot, spontaneous, regardless of how screenplays happen.

Apart from the impressive practical effects and atmospheres, the human story of the younger brother's sadness at Jody's intended departure for further adventures is an affecting one. The scene of Michael running after Jody as he rides a bike around the streets feels less literal than figurative, it's how Jody sees it and how Michael feels. And there is a suggestion that the weird happenings in the town that only this family appear to see, rise directly from this melancholy state. When you see what becomes of the brother from the prologue, the sting of the absence is made clear.

That aside, Phantasm is a fresh adventure with plenty of sci-fi ideas and horror scenes and a bad guy who joined the Jasons and Freddies of mainstream horror from the off. The fact that the blending of ambience between the green suburban streets and the stark gothic of the mausoleum feels so smooth is testament to why this film continues to work. This is an unofficial extension of the homely suburban leafiness of Halloween and a precursor of the Spielberg look of the decade to come but while the sex on show is not even mainstream explicit it is too clearly suggested to allow a G rating. This puts Phantasm in that strange margin where adult and young adult blend uneasily. Michael's grin at spying the sight of exposed breasts is knowing (just like Coscarelli's inclusion of it).

The other group I'd put Phantasm into is the margin of early home video and arthouse titles like Evil Dead or Tourist Trap, held together with gaffer tape but holding real originality. These travelled under even the parade of slashers and cheaper sci-fi and emerged decades later for delighted discovery. Phantasm, as aforesaid, found itself a franchise but it is this first think-it-and-throw-it-against-the-wall outing that still packs the punch.

Viewing notes: I watched this on the Well Go region A Blu-Ray which is very fine. If you are tempted to explore, you are currently limited to buying overseas or trying ebay. To my knowledge this film has not been released locally since the days of VHS (which is how I first saw it). 

CHINATOWN @ 50

Private eye Jake Gittes gets a routine extra-marital gig. Bit of shadowing and al fresco photography and enjoy the expense money. It's 1930s Los Angeles and a guy can really clean up. But nothing's that easy. In pursuit of the unfaithful beau, he begins to notice details that don't add up. The story takes a turn or two before blowing up epically. And then just when you think it's got as bad as it can, it quiets down for something that will send you to the shower for a cleanse.

Roman Polanski's mid-70s noir did what that decade's neo-noirs were doing except he kept it in Raymond Chandler time. The high style fashions of young Hollywood come out and play while the tale dives into depravity and darkness. The push through a scenario of monstrous capitalism to something more Old Testament and disturbing allows viewers to wonder which is being tarred by which as it all will inevitably be absorbed in the name of business. And it's still a compelling thriller.

Jack Nicholson had yet to commit to his Jack persona and was still preferring a more naturalistic acting style. Nevertheless, the Jack we'd know from Cuckoo's Nest onward is clearly forming. His Jake Gittes is a wise guy who knows a scam when he sees it, for his own preservation as much as for the protection of his clients. But he's willing to take the beatings that all good gumshoes need to give them the victim's wash to get clear of the cynicism. By the time the story is half done, there is no longer any need for the sarcastic Chandler tone.

Faye Dunaway, also destined for mid-career breakthrough in Network, presents a vulnerable L.A. aristo who is a few conversations shy of crumbling. She's got a lot of life to confront. Dunaway takes us from an eerie confidence to someone attempting to stop shaking to death. This role with its sustained denial of panic before disaster clearly informed her big scenes with William Holden in Network.

Veteran director John Huston takes over his every scene as the patriarch Noah Cross. Huston had begun his directorial career with seminal noirs like The Maltese Falcon in a career that saw him blurring the lines between cinema and true life adventure. As Cross, he exudes an intimidating urbanity, roughed up by his consumption of the best of anything he wanted in his loud and privileged life. Huston has acted throughout his career with varying results but give him a director of actors as astute as Polanski and he seems to wear the character like a favourite shirt.

Polanski, also steps back from the kind of dazzle he had put into almost everything he'd done till then. He let the story tell itself. Fans of his (we'll get to the elephant) might find this film one of his more subdued or even dull but his management of the action as storyteller here is the stuff of mastery. A confession conducted with a series of slaps allows the horror of its subject to feel equal to the pain of the violence. It's not a forties-style slap her around and find the truth, it's tearing the pretence away to see the worst. We're not invited into the action but kept at a cold arm's length; it feels as desperate as it looks.

Chinatown is a moment of greatness from a cinema artist at his peak.

Now ... Roman Polanski is problem figure. He pleaded guilty to the charge of sexual assault of a minor before absconding with his freedom, never to face the consequences. If he was a fingernail's thickness less of a master filmmaker this would dominate all mention of him since. Fans of his early work can plead that his misdeeds were without precedent. I know of none such. For my money he had one last great film (The Tenant) in him for the rest of his career and even that was released before the crime. 

Should that make a difference? I don't know. I cannot solve this problem here any better than I can those of Michael Jackson or Woody Allen. Polanski is also difficult because some of his early films are powerfully aligned to the plight of women as victims of men (including this one) or whole societies. There's nothing tokenistic about the assaults in Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby: it's not simply that he makes a good film, he has made them deep and confronting. Does it matter that he had Hitler in his face as a child and Charles Manson as an adult? Probably, but I don't know how. All I can surely say is that if you are to see his strong early career films there is plenty to take away and that none of them condone the kind of actions that brought him before the law. I think the choice is a personal one but it is one to make with serious consideration.

Viewing notes: I most recently rewatched Chinatown on the recent 4K that scrubs up like it was made last week. It's having a minor revival to go along with the 4K and is widely available on streaming.

THE CONVERSATION @ 50

Harry Caul says he doesn't care what's on the tapes he makes of other people, just that they are good recordings. That's until one job he carries out as a surveillance wizkid leads him into the rock and hard place squeeze of a powerful corporate client and what might become the business mogul's victims in a love triangle. Also, others in his profession consider themselves his rivals would jump at the chance of stepping into his spot if he's discredited or eradicated. Harry starts caring fast.

Francis Ford Coppola's first feature after his massive breakthrough with The Godfather was its opposite. The mafia epic was long on themes of secrecy and protection. The Conversation is about the dangers of secrets and the ethics of protection. Coming in the hard wake of the Watergate scandal, it presents an America destabilised behind a public partition of order. The crucial phrase uttered by one of the couple Harry records in the opening scene can be interpreted with opposite meanings, both are bad. Hobson's choice, I guess, but in this case he could take his fee and go on or intervene, act, as anyone who helped expose Watergate had.

The paranoia thriller is not substantial enough to really form a sub-genre but there are some significant entries. From the same year as this came The Parallax View, Alan Pakula's dizzying scenario of assassination contractors recruiting from the disaffected and powerless. The Conversation is from the side of the practitioners and its world is no warmer. The sense in both cases is that it's not just the corrupt and subversive that are the threat but the power that prefers to go unnamed. This is not me getting into conspiracy bullshit, just recognising that there have been anonymous movers in the past that these films allude to. 

Coppola keeps his pallet drab and workaday, bringing us into the home and job life of Harry and his colleagues. Even their conventions are sleazy and low. That said, the opening scene of the team making the recording of the titular conversation, with one shotgun mic set up at a high window looking like a sniper rifle, mics hidden in bags or lapels, and the orchestrated movement through a busy CBD lunch area with crowds, a miming busker, and a site office in a van, is impressive. Also, one of the most diverting tactics in focussing interest in any kind of thriller is to show process. The individual recordings are all beset with a flutter. They need the other recordings to be perfectly synched and played together. After that has been established, the magic laid bare, we are already cocking ears to hear what will be the film's McGuffin. Coppola had already shown mastery of this in The Godfather with the setup of the restaurant hit; this is one instance where he expanded his practice from that film's scope.

Gene Hackman leads a cast of actors who variously had been known or would be but it is his barely concealed intensity that drives the film. He keeps his detective eyes behind his glasses and further into the recesses of a mind he doesn't like sharing with anyone. Hackman shares an obvious pain when he must open up and make his decision. Undeservedly bridesmaid but never bride Terri Garr has a brief but notable role as Harry's mistress. Harrison Ford is young and shark-eyed as a corporate frontliner. Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams, soon to be the Shirley in Laverne and Shirley, are the seemingly doomed couple at the centre of the big nasty machine moving around them.

Harry Caul is too wary of surveillance to have a phone at home. Today, he wouldn't hae a mobile or any internet footprint. He's gang, he doesn't just know what they can do but what they do. The post pandemic world leaves us in a position where we waive trust for convenience and fall prey to myriad scams, all through access that we all but advertise just to be a part of the world as it is. Harry's world is only limited by analogue technology, it's digital descendants are much stealthier, hungrier and sleazier. 

I had misremembered the twist of this story. There is a moment when Harry understands a different reading of the crucial line which brings him to action. But the real twist is in its extension, its similarity to the effect that an AI approximation of our speech patterns and voice tone remind us, the creepiness is not in the shadows but the faces we welcome in.

Viewing Notes: The Conversation is having a fleeting revival at The Nova in Melbourne. This might well be in conjunction with its release as a disc for home video (I have the magnificent 4K bujt it's also on DVD and Blu-Ray) or available through subscription on Paramount streaming.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 @ 50

We follow several characters through the streets of Manhattan on a busy day as they go down to the subway and get on the same carriage. As this is happening, we also follow a grumpy transit cop take a group of Tokyo transit cops on a tour of operations. As that is happening, we also watch a new driver being taken through this checklists buy an old hand. The train departs and the men, all in similar clothes with glasses and moustaches, make their move and hijack the train, casting all but one carriage, before contacting the control centre with a demand for a million dollars. What if we don't? Well, eighteen dead people, one per minute after the deadline.

From that point, the tension is played like a masterbuilt instrument by a virtuoso. Hemmingway's iceberg approach to character definition (i.e. gradual and telling) provides its own tension as the crime gang members reveal their various instabilities and the captive commuters deal with the high likelihood of their own deaths. Meanwhile at the control centre, the hard boiled Lt Garber squints his way through the process of finding the flaws in the gang's plan. Then there's the chaos the action has made of the transit system and the wheedling politics of the city that would always prefer such annoyances could be wiped off the table without consequence.

These things compound to deliver a solid picture puzzle of life in the big city and what we make of it when the boundaries of its civilisation are exposed. This happens to varying degrees whenever we have power outages or service disruptions through far less nefarious causes. And while we placate ourselves with footstamping whinges we allow ourselves to ignore what the act is telling us about our dependence on this vast Jenga pyramid of weak links. Add ill intent and it crosses effortlessly into the realm of evil.

This film depicts the panic above ground when the machine is kicked over, a sparking mix of violent wishing and thickening dread. Below, in the tunnel, in the carriage, the order is almost entirely maintained by the gang who need it for their plan to work. Their conflicts are the stuff of whispers and murmurs behind closed doors as they commit to the fatal despatch of their hostages if their demands are not met.

At their head is Mr Blue (all the gang have colour code names) who is played with steely determination and an intimidating military crispness. Robert Shaw was less than a year away from his opposite turn in Jaws as the salty Quint. Shaw was a writer as well as an accomplished actor and well knew the sinister gravity of his character (having significantly imagined an ex Nazi on trial for war crimes in Man in a Glass Booth). While he understands when his counterpart is joking he erases the effect with a chilling statement of fleeting time or carefully executed violence.

That counterpart, Lt. Garber, could not have been better cast than by Walter Matthau, the go-to man for burdened, wisecracking professionalism. Matthau, who was only three years past his already too-old casting in the blackest rom com ever, A New Leaf, seems comfortably precise in his world weariness here. He can deliver a withering frown through the phone.

No one is miscast and even the craven Mayor, a literally snivelling Lee Wallace, who initially considers non-payment is pushed too much. Seinfeld fans might delight in Jerry Stiller's Lt. Patrone as a much younger man. 

The world of the crime scene, the train carriage is kept eerily warm in the homey browns and greys of artificial light and winter clothing. The contrast between it and the situation works its own tension. It is superficially the softly glowing sanctuary in the darkness of the subway tunnel but also a place where a mass murder is likely at any turn. In the dazzling fluoro lighted control room and frigid city streets, the panic is visible in the tiniest detail. Add the prevaricating city officials and the sense of collapse advances in perfectly measured steps.

Director Joseph Sargent brings all of the muscle and leanness of his then decade long career of television, action movies and social issue tv features. If you read his IMDB rap sheet he comes across like a jobber, the lows of Jaws: The Revenge but the highs of Colossus: The Forbin Project. If all of those were to be washed away as bill payment, this film wouldn't be going anywhere. If you were to define tough urban crime action from the '70s you'd only need to screen this.

THE MATRIX @ 25

Cat suited agent Trinity battles and escapes authority figures ending in a strange action where she seems to have disappeared down a phone line to dodge the massive truck that crashes into her phone booth. Across town (or is it?) young Thomas Anderson is troubled by messages that keep coming up on his screen at home, telling him to follow the white rabbit. A knock on the door reveals a crew of cool folk who pay for a disc of something less than legal. They notice his distress and invite him out clubbing. Seeing the white rabbit tattoo on one of them, he follows his curiosity. At the club, he is approached by the woman from the beginning who bids him follow her. His world is about to change from nature up.

So begins one of the touchpoints of modern cinema from a year rich with them. 1999, as I'll be saying in a few of these anniversary blogs this year, was a time of cinematic refitting. I'll continue with this film in a moment but will now ask you to contemplate the following: Being John Malkovich took whimsy to dizzying heights, inviting anyone to do as much; Fight Club used the imagery of advertising and the grinding fiction of the men's movement to produce what satire would look like moving forward; The Blair Witch Project reinvented horror cinema with an Easy Rider nonchalance; Run Lola Run gave us the reboot action comedy; and The Matrix gave us a blend of espionage, dystopia, martial arts, cyber-action and philosophy in a hard sci-fi package that required bettering by its close imitators.

Another thing is gave general culture is the red and blue pills. The blue pill that Morpheus offers Neo (previously Thomas Anderson) lets him continue believing in his normal workaday life. The red pill introduces him to reality in all its grinding ugliness. Most of the crew of the resistance craft that moves through the sewers of the desiccated old city have been given this choice and have all taken the red pill to fight the good fight against the AI that rules the Earth. Morpheus thinks Neo is The One, the saviour. When Neo chooses the red pill, he chooses a tough fight for freedom.

Red pilling is a term adopted by the libertarian right who use it to describe deprogramming from the alleged tyranny of things like feminism, identity politics, and so on, so that they emerge as independent thinkers (instead of just finding a tag to legitimate their "good old days" bigoty which is what's really happening). There are two ironies to this. The Wachowskis who created this film are both trans women, the very beings to generate fear responses in the looney right. Also, the red pill effectively wakes the one who takes it to reality (so they can start spouting delusional bullshit in public). Try calling a red piller woke and see what happens. Anyway ...

The Matrix gave us bullet time. This is involved slow motion photography/effects but is not simply slow motion. When Neo goes from the wirework of his Kung Fu bouts with Morpheus to flying through the air in evasion of a blow and later to dodging bullets as they speed by him in light-penetrating courses, he is experiencing bullet time. Action movies still appropriate this trope in some form and it has become so endemic to high stakes action sequences that its use is long past feeling derivative.

But the thing that keeps The Matrix pulsing along without losing its audience to a devastated setting and keeps us in touch with its central struggle is how it incorporates the look and sensuality of the AI's fantasy world. To meet the Oracle or run sorties against the AI's agents the crew must re-enter the twentieth century city for their actions. We know that we are looking at an AI construct but we also know that we'd rather see them fight there than in the older-school wreckage where the resistance actually live and fend off the squid like drones. There needs to be some of that but if it had been all that this movie would be an hour shorter in run time and decades shorter in its reach. We go where we can see Morpheus at the hands of the agents and Neo's skills develop so dramatically.

The internet of 1999 had been browser dominated for over half a decade by the time The Matrix was made but, while growing towards daily-use importance, was still representable as the stuff of enthusiastic nerds. Digital communications in the film are kept to an ASCII screen with blinking prompts and stringed commands. This gives the technology the look of having been rebuilt from disaster and allows a kind of steampunk feel to the VR tech used by the crew to manifest as people in the city. Put even basic representations of contemporary browsers in there like Netscape would have felt jarring. The tech, overall, is carefully managed to sit somewhere between the magic of experts and what people used throughout the day. Add that to instances of protean illusory moments like the tracking bug injected into Neo which sometimes looks organic and sometimes like a mechanised syringe, and the effect only heightens the need to keep attentive in a film that not only requires your constant attention but rewards it regularly.

Speaking of technology, this film that uses every trick available to the film maker of 1999 holds up triumphantly these many years on. Some moments reveal their vintage but almost every processed sequence carries the narrative along with such muscularity that I barely noticed anything feeling dated. Details in the viewing notes but I can report the deluxe means of viewing this at home presents it with the film grain of the source material and the bravura effects.

If the casting and dialogue can shift this film towards old B-Actioner movies that feels intentional. If the gravity heavy Laurence Fishburne intones his baritone wisdom in a thick whisper it still works as show don't tell dialogue. Carrie-Anne Moss also brings weight to the cast as Trinity, physical and intense. Joe Pantoliano brings the sleaze of his best characters (see him in The Sopranos and Memento). Hugo Weaving uses all the humanity he can must to convince us he's a machine. And then there's Keanu Reeves as Neo who is unfairly remembered for lines like, "whoa!" but performs his role as a conflicted and disturbed would be hero in perfect accord with the conceits of the film around him. If you are noticing a lot of Australian accents in the supporting cast (including the little boy who delivers the line about the spoon) it's because this was among the first of the offshore productions of the deacde just ending that moved to Australia for shooting. The Sydney skyline is clear to all who recognise it when it's on screen.

The Matrix describes a future while carrying its seedstock into its future as a film. It has sprouted a number of sequels. Having seen the first of these convinced me against bothering with any further as it seemed to ignore why the first one remains so special. The Wachowskis continue working in and around sci-fi/fantasy and enjoy consistent success. But anything that stops audiences as much as The Matrix did back in 1999 has so far not appeared. They aren't flashes in the pan but this monument to imaginative cinema that appeared so early in their career will shadow every new thing they deliver. Then again, when that hound of memory is as both lean and substantial as this, I can't imagine they'd feel any resentment as the change it made to movies was for the better.

Viewing Notes: I watched the 4K disc of this film. It's considered a reference for the format. Deep blacks, pleasing film grain and strong colours within its noirish pallet are a delight. If you see it this way (it will be in print for the foreseeable future) and you are equipped for it, go into the settings menu and choose the Dolby Atmos audio option. I have seldom experienced something so strongly at home as I did when I saw it at a state of the art cinema in 1999.