Reenter the Matrix

Rewatching The Matrix for the first time in many many years (maybe a decade), it stands as an even more remarkable and stunning piece of commercial art. It’s actually a bit shocking how well it holds up. Not withstanding a few late-nineties trending style choices, that while of their time mostly blend into the background because the movie is so well-crafted and straight-up badass.

It’s fairly easy to see, but also easy to forget, how groundbreaking of a film this was when it was released in 1999, a year full of remarkable change and evolution in modern filmmaking. It reset and laid a new foundation, still felt today, of films’ visual and structural construction, and the expectations of audiences.

The Matrix serves as the total package – great story, memorable characters, stunning photography, and breathtaking set pieces. There are so many iconic scenes and images. So many memorable lines. So many cultural touchstones. I was both entertained and engaged during the entire rewatch.

What strikes me about The Matrix upon this rewatch is how esoteric it is, yet how approachable the filmmakers made the story and its concepts. It is a masterclass in patience and pacing, deftly handling exposition, and a lot of it, in multiple ways that were genuine and natural to the story itself while active and engaging for the viewer. I typically don’t like the first films in trilogies because they have to do the laborious work of setup and world building more than actively advancing the story. But The Matrix threaded this needle, not just in world building and laying out the rules, but layering it with a philosophical intention.

This, to me, is peak creative form of the medium. Watching it again, it makes perfect sense why this was such a hit when it came out, but also why it still holds up. It has many aspects that appeal to a broad audience, on different levels. Rhythmically dancing between both an entertaining action movie and as a compass to examine the world around you, it has both the brawn and the brains.

The most important part is the story and characters created, which is a work of art, a woven tapestry of vision, craft, and luck. This was the foundation of what made this film unique to everything else at this time.

The second alluring aspect is the action and fight sequences. And what a spectacle these sequences are, even today. They used the creative freedom of the world they built, to create not just genre bending sequences, but cinema bending movie magic.

The story and visuals work off one another to create something truly special and unique.

Though, to be clear, this film is first and for most an action movie. But it wisely uses the story beats to create action sequences. They are natural and organic to the story being told. That is what makes them so compelling, memorable, and iconic. I’m sitting here rewatching these sequences as if I’m in a constant flashback. I remember them all so well and have seen these scenes used in advertising and montages for two decades. They are indelible in the mind, as they are in our pop culture.

But they were also unique and novel at the time of their release. No one had ever seen film sequences like this. This was a moment of a rare giant leap in capability of movie magic that totally reset the audience's expectations going forward. The bullet time, the slow-motion, the fight-scene choreography, the CGI, all of it was unprecedented.

Peoples eyeballs exploded. Minds blown. My mind gapes in awe rewatching it. I get giddy with shock at how startling well it holds up and is still a thrill to watch. The film’s blending of the narrative with the cutting-edge technology of the time (instead of using it for the sake of using it) that makes it original and unique, creates a deeper connection with the audience.

It’s an astonishing feat that this film came together the way it did, especially considering it went through the grinder of the studio system. Coming from a different era, it jump started the current era we are in with epic superhero operas, both in story telling and production value.

This movie changed, inspired, and molded the next generation of filmmaking. This does not feel like a film that could be made today. Or if it did, it most likely, it would be made as a TV show.

This is not to say the current era is bad or pass judgement. The ingenuity and skill to create ever escalating franchise enters is jaw dropping. It is more of a nostalgic feeling to these days of non-IP big budget stories. And while bringing the complex interconnected web of comic books to the feature film medium is impressive, what is on-screen is not groundbreaking or mind-blowing.

This nostalgia, though, has to be viewed through a framing of living through a period when my pop culture tastes and cinematic appeal where molding me. It is always easy to be nostalgic for the era from nascent periods of your life, so you have to look deeper for an objective truth. It’s not what was happening then was better than now, at that time, everything then was in its own codified place before The Matrix. That truth for me is the reminder that there is still a power and essence to the medium of film, that when properly empowered, can bring about unique results.

The Matrix is the essence of ‘cinematic’, that is, being a story that can only be told as a film. You can’t create this fully realized vision in any other medium.

Warner Brothers took a gamble on an esoteric dystopian sci-fi story that ended up elevating above and beyond the genre into a pop-cultural phenomenon. As I’ve said, I’m shocked it got made, but the more I think about it, maybe not. Not at the time, where while there was plenty of cringe-worthy from the era, there were also significant gambles on original stories, looking for that one to break through.

And while this proved to be the catalyst for the next decade of trilogies, which grew into the franchising and TV-ifcation of movies, it started, as all beginnings do, with The One being given a chance. And I hope there are more of them in the not to distant future that resets the paradigm for more original, thought-provoking, badass cinematic gems.