Franchise Friday: The Matrix (1999)

The Wachoskis' sci-fi epic still brings the 'whoa.'

Nov 26, 2021

I talked about this a bit in a “We’re Watching Here” episode about 1999, but if that was the year that movies broke my brain, The Matrix was the film that first drilled a hole in my head. When I stepped into the theater that first Saturday afternoon of release, I expected nothing more than a fun bit of action. I left with my jaw agape and my mind blown, going back another three or four times during its theatrical run. It was the film I talked about all summer with friends, amazed not only at the technological mastery and stunt prowess but also the philosophical implications. It was my first exposure to idea-driven science fiction, a story that made me rethink what movies were capable of.

And then, of course, the Wachowskis came back four years later with two sequels that caused us to sour on the entire enterprise.

Despite the rabid love I had for The Matrix in my early twenties, I had not revisited the film in its entirety since The Matrix Revolutions ended and I sat in the theater asking my friend, “what the hell was that?” I’d dismissed The Matrix in the flood of distaste for the sequels, and considered it nothing but a stylish actioner with delusions of depth.

Watching it again, I realized I’d been wrong. The rabbit hole The Matrix sends us down is just as mesmerizing today as it was more than 20 years ago, and the movie is still as stylish, even if the philosophizing falls a bit flat.

Just say “Whoa”

The Matrix became a phenomenon for two reasons: it had big ideas, and it was damn cool.

The latter is still true. Two decades and countless parodies haven’t dulled the Wachowski’s sense of style, and their visual instincts are superb. The “real world” is a horrifying, grimy place, a world of enormous fields where people are grown to be batteries for the machines. The crew of the Nebuchadnezzar looks pitiful, all rags, shaved heads and raw ports. But inside The Matrix, they can be as amazing as their programming allows. Neo (Keanu Reeves), Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) don’t walk in The Matrix; they strut, filled with all the poise and confidence in the world. Sure, we might cringe at the sunglasses and black leather trench coats, which quickly became action movie clichés, but it works in the moment. The film’s plot, which posits a world in which humans are tethered to a complex simulation, gives meaning to the style, keeping it from being void of substance.

Watching it again, I’m still surprised that mainstream audiences were willing to get onboard a film that gets so weird, so fast. The Matrix likely wouldn’t even get a greenlight today, as it’s not based on any existing IP. But beyond that, it’s a big-budget film centered around a mystery; the Wachowskis withhold information for a good hour and keep throwing weird twists and turns. Even before Neo meets Morpheus and takes his red pill, we’re asked to accept mysterious agents who can remove men’s mouths, squid creatures that burrow into belly buttons, and physics-defying kung fu. Then we meet Morpheus and we get sentinels, simulations, bombed-out cities and humans as batteries.

What makes it all go down smoothly is how ably the Wachowskis spin their yarn. The film rarely stops for giant info dumps and when it does, the directors deliver exposition visually without slowing the film down. The sequence where Morpheus explains The Matrix is a commercial-inspired bit of iconography and once we have the world outlined for us, the directors trust the audience to keep up. After that, the film is breathless, rarely delivering exposition without a special effect or fight to spice it up, and the plot wisely stays intimate, focused on rescuing one character instead of bringing down the system.

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Reeves is an actor who is too often underestimated; a mistake we’ve learned not to make in the John Wick era. He’s often seen as a blank, when his best roles actually depend on his Zen calm. He’s perfect for Neo, a man who starts off having to rethink everything he knows and then achieve a confidence that he could be the savior of the world. It’s also important not to underestimate the physical dedication Reeves brought to the role, undergoing grueling martial arts, wire work and gunplay; a quick look at Reeves’ subsequent career choices, including the John Wick films and his directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, show the impact The Matrix had on Reeves’ future choices.

Fishburne combines cult-leader confidence with earnestness and wonder as Morpheus, the head of the rebellion who also is giddy about discovering the man he believes is The One. Trinity, unfortunately, became more of a doe-eyed love interest in the sequels, but Carrie Anne Moss is perfectly badass here; in the film’s first scene, she announces that The Matrix will change everything we know about science fiction and action films, and she’s just as dangerous as Neo in the film’s final raid. And Hugo Weaving earned a career blank check as Agent Smith, drawing out and savoring his every line and creating one of cinema’s most iconic villains.

Even minor characters feel perfectly integrated into this weird world. Joe Pantoliano is a blast as the conniving Cypher, and Gloria Foster takes what could have been a problematic “magic negro” role as the Oracle and imbues her with warmth and wisdom. The other members of the Nebuchadnezzar crew all have their memorable quirks as well, although I wish Warner Brothers had allowed the directors to have one crew switch genders between the real world and The Matrix; not only would it have been an interesting concept to play with, it would fit with themes the directors have played with throughout their career.

I know kung fu

What keeps The Matrix from sinking under the weight of its pretensions is its pulp grounding. For all its grand philosophical treatises (which we’ll get to), the movie is also a kick-ass action movie with roots back to Shaw Brothers martial arts films and ‘80s shoot-’em-ups.

It kickstarted a resurgence in kung fu-spiced action movies, particularly if the wire fu was filmed in slow motion. There’s a reason why the martial arts work of Jet Li was relegated to a villain role in 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4 and then the star was brought to the forefront for 2000’s “Romeo Must Die,” an action movie that borrowed much of its action aesthetic from The Matrix. Working with famed choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, who would top himself the next year with his work in the masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Wachowskis deliver bone-crunching fight sequences that purposefully shatter the laws of physics. It at once harkens back to the martial arts films of the sixties and seventies while feeling completely new.

Of course, the film also relied heavily on gun play, particularly in its climax, as Trinity and Neo storm a skyscraper in The Matrix and lay waste to the guards inside. Here, the film shows its age, as what was once badass plays slightly more problematic at a time where mass shootings are regularly occurrences (the film came out shortly before the Columbine massacre and received blame at the time for inspiring its shooters, a connection never proven). I’ll admit watching Trinity and Neo waltz into the building, pull out their guns and start shooting security guards — who, in the film’s logic, are innocent bystanders asleep in their pods — was uncomfortable.

And yet, here’s where I have to admit hypocrisy. As staunch an advocate of gun control as I can be and as horrified as I am by mass shootings, the sequence just looks insanely cool. “Bullet time” might have become a cliché and source for parody quickly after, but in context it looks incredible and not just a clever effect; there’s a narrative reason for it. I know I should feel bad rooting on heroes who carry out what is basically an act of terror in the final act; and yet, I can’t deny the power of the visuals and the adrenaline kick I get from it. It’s upsetting and awesome at the same time, even if 20 years later I’ve begun to share Roger Ebert’s disappointment that a movie so full of ideas has to resort to a bullet-riddled climax.

What’s really baking our noodle

Because, let’s admit it: For all the incredible stunt work and effects, what elevated The Matrix beyond every other action movie at that time was that it was rooted in ideas. I was one of many twentysomethings who walked out of the theater only to spend hours debating the film’s philosophical and spiritual underpinnings with my friends.

As someone who came of age in evangelical culture, I walked away from the movie buzzing about Jesus parallels and the way the Wachowskis’ film pulled in elements of our theology. I remember Bible studies that leaned heavily on The Matrix, and books were written about the film’s apparent Christian theology. At the time, I didn’t realize that Buddhists, atheists and postmodern thinkers were having the same exact conversations.

The Matrix is a giant (cosmic?) gumbo of postmodern thinking and ideas, heavily influenced by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation (a copy of the book is used to hide items early on in the film, and Morpheus’ line “welcome to the desert of the real” is pulled straight from Baudrillard). Baudrillard’s work was focused on society’s use of signs and symbols and how they are simulations of reality, not the thing itself. It fits in line with a world in which our world is “the wool pulled over our eyes” to distract us from reality.

The Matrix pulls from Baudrillard and other philosophers. The Wachowskis’ fascination with identity and fluidity also comes into play, with a sprinkling of hero’s journey. Visually, the film borrows from anime, comic books, martial arts movies and Hong Kong action flicks. The result is a collection of homages that combine into something that, in 1999, felt fresh and groundbreaking.

Twenty-two years later, is The Matrix as deep as we thought it was then? It depends. Its philosophizing feels a bit grandiose and awkward, as if a college student couldn’t wait to cram everything he read into the screenplay they wrote on the weekends. The Matrix isn’t really saying anything so much as it’s trying to say everything, which is another way of saying that it’s saying nothing. It’s big, heady sci-fi that’s full of ideas, but those ideas basically add up to “let’s go shoot a lot of guns.”

Yet, to divorce the ideas from the finished product is to lose what makes The Matrix so special. Those heady ideas create a mythology and texture to the Wachowskis’ world, giving it the semblance of something deeper than it really is. The directors are smart enough to use these ideas to color in the corner of their universe (the bit about deja vu is pretty great) and then get out of the way of the bigger story to get to the chase. It’s a mixture that’s wobbly at times — Trinity’s confession of love at the end is a saccharine turn for such an intellectual film and the shootout, while cool-looking, feels like a betrayal of the film’s higher ideals — and yet, it still largely works.

The Wachowskis would try to up the ante on the philosophizing and world building in the sequels, which sank under the weight of the pretension (they do have their defenders and perhaps a revisit is in order). But The Matrix works because it finds the proper balance of smart and cool, style and substance, aesthetics and intelligence. It’s easy to see why we left the theater with a collective “whoa” in spring 1999.