‘You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind...’
Sometime around the turn of the millennium, my friend and I walked to our local video shop (RIP Hollywood Nites – hilariously named when taking into account that it sat on one of the most unglamorous streets that Doncaster has to offer; about as far away from Hollywood as it’s possible to get), and rented two films. One of them was an utterly terrible direct-to-video horror comedy entitled Demonic Toys (a film that was incredibly scripted by David S. Goyer, the man who would eventually go on to write the script for the Dark Knight trilogy), the other was a little film called The Matrix. Now, it feels unlikely that Demonic Toys is due a renaissance thirty years after the fact, but The Matrix remains a cultural juggernaut. Revisiting it all these years later is a strange experience…
We all know the plot by now. Neo (Keanu Reeves) is red pilled by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and discovers that the real world is a lie. Neo teams up with Morpheus and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) in order to save humankind from the nefarious robots headed up by the sadistic Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). Elsewhere, a number of minor characters with ridiculous names like ‘Tank’ and ‘Mouse’ appear and are often killed moments later with little consequence.
It appears that one of the main reasons that The Matrix remains so critically acclaimed is that, as with Terminator 2, the effects don’t just hold up, they’re still incredible. Even after all this time. Whilst the ‘bullet time’ concept was lampooned everywhere from Scary Movie to Max Payne, it remains an impressive visual spectacle, and the many fight sequences that pervade the movie maintain the power to thrill. What isn’t mentioned enough however are the performances. Fishburne is a fine actor, but he does his very best work here, with Morpheus arguably the best character in the entire trilogy. Weaving also does sterling work, adding an unhinged sense of menace to his uncanny antagonist that is crucial to the success of the film as a whole. Even the much maligned Reeves deserves credit for building an aura of mystery and bewilderment around Neo that makes his character impossible not to root for.
Despite many attempts, the Wachowskis would never again come close to capturing the lightning in the bottle like they did here. The Matrix was an era defining cinematic moment, a film that reflected the zeitgeist in a post-internet, pre-9/11 world like no other movie released in that era. An important milestone and a genuine masterpiece.