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.
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