Film: The Matrix

[liv]

Reason for watching it: I was starting to feel embarrassed by not having seen it, and missing pop culture references.

Circumstances of watching it: After two weeks together, jack and I had more or less run through our urgent stack of conversations we wanted to have right that minute, so we felt ok about spending a couple of hours watching a DVD instead of chatting.

Verdict: The Matrix is watchable and original.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Matrix. It's not a sophisticated film, nor a flawless one, but it tells a good story. It's atmospheric and emotive and the characterization is strong. Well, apart from the main character who is a bit of a Mary-Sue: brilliant because the plot says he should be brilliant, but not showing any particular signs of ability, intelligence or even independent thought. Though I'm possibly biased because I have never been able to see the point of Keanu Reeves; he's not pretty and he can't act. But I really enjoyed the interactions among Morpheus' crew, and I found myself easily manipulated by all the ways that the film makes Trinity competent and just cool.

The SF background is quite clever, though the film tends to over-explain things and goes into excruciating detail spelling out the philosophical implications. It's unusual for me to have this kind of complaint about a film, cos I'm a very unsophisticated viewer and I generally have a hard time inferring background from hints, but The Matrix goes too far in the opposite direction. (The "science" is stupid, and indeed jack paused the film at one point to calm me down from getting angry at the stupidity, but basically that's not the point.) In spite of the info-dumping, I thought the pace at which the background was revealed to the viewer did a good job of building tension, even if the background itself has some stupid elements. Also, it was doing Christian themes in a way that didn't offend me, because it felt like a retelling of a great myth, rather than heavy-handed propaganda.

It's visually cool, a bit gritty and a bit futuristic. Though some parts of the background look amazingly dated ten years after the film's release. I couldn't quite decide if 1999 really did look like that, or if it was a subtle commentary on the Matrix' imperfect construction of reality. There's quite a lot of violence, but it contributes to the plot and there's enough empathy with the characters to make it not seem gratuitous. The Agents and Sentinels are impressive as monsters, scary and creepy. Also I really liked the soundtrack, but that probably reflects my taste in music as much as anything.

Someone on the internet somewhere has explored the triangle relationship between Morpheus, Trinity and Neo, right? I think the romance plot would have been much more satisfying (and less clichéd) if Morpheus had been given the True Love denouement. Ahem.

Comments

[marina]

I'm glad you enjoyed it, The Matrix is very much one of those generation defining movies for me, since it came out when I was a young teenager and I remember being TOTALLY BLOWN AWAY by how cool it was and how awesome, and my friends and I quote bits of it to each other to this day. However, in terms of characterization, writing, plot, "science", and ESPECIALLY the relative harmlessness of the Christian themes, I would strongly suggest you NEVER EVER watch the sequels. They are so horrendous I just don't even. There's a bit in one of them where Neo extends his arms in the shape of a cross and is then covered in white light and Trinity becomes totally useless/inconsequential and well. Best not to speak of it, really.

[aphenine]

I feel the same way about the Matrix, and the same way about the sequels. I think it's worth adding to marina's excellent comment that the Matrix was also a film that was the first of its kind in mainstream movies. It's something that doesn't really strike you when you watch it later, because so many movies have emulated elements of its style since then. It's hard to remember just how ground breaking this movie was at the time.

[lethargic_man]

It might have been groundbreaking as a film; as normal, cinema SF was lagging a long way behind print SF, so whilst everyone else was going "wow!", I was going *yawn*...

[aphenine]

Cinema SF has been lagging behind print SF for a very long time. Didn't a film that bucked this trend even a little cause you some wonderment?

[lethargic_man]

Do not underestimate the power of the cynic.

(Well, probably a little.)

[liv]

Yeah, I didn't think it was particularly good SF. To me it was a good action thriller with an SF aesthetic, but as a way of exploring sciencey ideas it was pretty poor, and as you say way behind book SF of the time.

[jack]

Well, none of the rest of the science was especially good, but it brought the idea of a virtual world that you couldn't tell apart from reality to mass audience. I know it's old news to many people, but I'm struggling to put "So, we explain what Decartes was trying to say, but with Kung Fu!" in any other genre :)

[liv]

Mm, yes, I did think that the visual elements were original and ahead of their time. Though I don't watch enough films, and I don't remember the 90s well enough, to have a very clear idea about what was standard for films of that period. What wasn't original was the whole kung fu training scene; that was a cliché much longer ago than ten years!

[liv]

Don't worry, lots of people have advised me not to watch the sequels!

I can definitely see that it would be a film with a strong appeal to teenagers, yeah! Also, it must have been quite an experience to see it when the level of special effects it provides was something novel and radical. (It made me want to rewatch Tron, to compare an early 80s view of the future with a late 90s view.)

[lavendersparkle]

I think I might be the only person to like the matrix sequels. Part of that was that after the the first Matrix film lots of evangelising to teenager groups used the film as a pretty straight allegory for their Christian theology. Neo was Jesus. The agents etc. were Satan and all his minions. Resurrection, the one, the reality you perceive is just an illusion to distract you from the real fight. I got a certain sadistic glee when lots of those elements were turned on their head in the later films. Hmm, so now they are two gods and the Messiah was actually created to defeat the humans and there's some suggestion that the super evil agent was created to bring the war to an end by forcing the machines to negotiate with the humans.

[jack]

I think tepidity towards Keanu Reeves is fairly universal. IIRC he was fairly good in Point Break (where he was an FBI agent who pretended to be a surfer) and awesome in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey (who were two metalhead slackers who travel in time and say "Whoa!" a lot), but come in for a lot of criticism for other things.

[nanaya]

I would also like to defend him on the basis of his sterling turn in 'My Own Private Idaho'. Not as good as River Phoenix, perhaps, but excellently nuanced. I may be biased though, I absolutely adore the film.

Yes, I agree he was vg in 'Point Break'. He was kind of adorable naive as Danceny in 'Dangerous Liaisons' too. And not bad in 'A Scanner Darkly', IIRC.

[gool_duck]

*love* to My Own Private Idaho. It was at one point my favourite film.

[nanaya]

One of mine, too. Makes me cry every time.

[rysmiel]

It struck me as an interesting experiment in terms of resetting Shakespeare in a different context, but suffering from not quite having the social pressures work for the decisions the characters make; Keanu Reeves in that is no Prince Hal/Henry V, basically. Bob Pigeon is rather good as a modern Falstaff, but the rest of it just does not quite hold together for me.

[ajollypyruvate]

I watched Matrix in the theatre with two mathematicians, a p-chemist, and a physicist. We all pretty much hated it.

The point with Nero lying about all dead and Trinity sniveling about blahblahblah don't die on me cliche blahblah cliche cliche cliche... (during which time they are all under heavy attack; always a fantastic point to whine about your dead non-boyfriend) was so obnoxious we actually let out cries of disgust.

For me, the only good aspect of the movie was Hugo Weaving. This is similar to the only good aspect of Die Hard being Alan Rickman; awesome actor but not awesome enough to redeem the stupidity.

[liv]

Yeah, I got annoyed with Trinity going all soppy and doing tender love scenes in highly dangerous situations! I think the scene when they were escaping through the phonebox in the subway should have lost the touching romantic bit, so it wouldn't be Trinity's fault that the agents arrived before they had a chance to escape. That really spoils her earlier characterization as an effective fighter and tactician! And the resurrection scene made no sense at all; if they had to do that thing with true love marking out the One who could cheat death, I wish they had used Morpheus instead of Trinity. It would make more sense, and the writers would be a lot less tempted to make him soppy, if they removed the need to remind you that this tough fighter is actually a GURL after all.

As for the acting, I liked Fishburne's Morpheus a lot, and Pantoliano was IMO excellent as Cypher. But I agree that Weaving was a show-stealing villain, too.

[ajollypyruvate]

Well, I also have a pure loathing for Hollywood's ludicrous and plot-deforming need to have romance of any kind in nearly every movie with any woman in the cast at all, much less their hateful and cliched heterosexual romances. (I'm the same with TV shows. I hate this tactic. HATE.)

The science was really bad. Not as bad as the science of X-Files, I admit, and I stuck with X-Files for several years, even after The Jersey Devil, an episode which nearly caused me to suffer a debilitating brain aneurysm from The Stupid. But since the terrible science of Matrix was a major plot point, it made it impossible for me to ignore.

Oh, yes, both Fishburne and Pantoliano were good but hampered by having to play up to Reeves and pretend he's wonderful. That coloured my emotional investment in their respective performances.

[ewx]

The thing that particularly annoyed me about the background was not just that it was stupid, a fault after all shared with many other films, but that it could have been substantially less stupid with a trivial change: instead of having the AIs using humans as power stations, have the AIs use them as computers. The scene with the batteries would have microchips instead, and it’d be much clearer why humans could break physical rules inside the emulated environment.

[jack]

I'm never sure how to treat removalable singularities in a film's plot. I think it's that a small stupidity can be either "thank goodness it wasn't a lot worse" or "agh, why did they have to put THAT in?"

removalable singularities

[ewx]

*laugh* at linking to an article on complex analysis when discussing the plot of a film.

Re: removalable singularities

[jack]

I do as much as I can :) When I'm talking to Simon, they may help, but otherwise, I'm forced to admit, they normally actually don't...

Although, actually, in this case, I think "removable" is a good description.

[simont]

Yes, I liked this metaphor and will try to remember it. Even if your subject line did have a Homer Simpson-esque spare syllable in it :-)

[jack]

Thank you! That makes me feel good :)

Even if your subject line did have a Homer Simpson-esque spare syllable in it :-)

Oh yeah. I do that too. I don't think there's any especial benefit to that one :)

[liv]

Yeah, that was the bit where jack paused the DVD and explained to me that Morpheus had worked everything out for himself, but got some of the details wrong, and it was really about computing power, not energy. And then I felt a lot less apoplectic and more able to just enjoy the film for what it was.

[simont]

It hadn't occurred to me before to see it as "Morpheus got it wrong" rather than "scriptwriters got it wrong". I'm not sure it helps me all that much: reading it like that now imputes a lack of scientific nous to Morpheus in which it's still pretty hard to suspend disbelief given all the other stuff he's supposed to understand and be competent at!

Even the computing-power hypothesis is pretty unviable, too. For a start, it would be immensely difficult to get things designed as programs for digital computers into a form where they could run at all, let alone reliably or efficiently, on human wetware. It's certainly very hard to imagine that it would be easier, or more resource-efficient, for the machines to enslave the human race and do that than it would be for them to just build an equivalent number of giant piles of silicon. Secondly, for them to be able to use brains as computing power implies that they can trivially get full control over a human brain through their implanted data interface – which is exactly the thing they were trying and failing to do to Morpheus in the time it took him to get rescued by implausible helicopter stunt. (I suppose one could argue that it's all different when Morpheus's physical brain was at the far end of an illicit dialup link rather than conveniently accessible in one of their own pods, but from our own look at the pods it doesn't look as if the data connection was that different between the two cases.)

So I still don't buy it. The way I get round this glitch in my own mind is by totally ignoring the motivation behind the setup: the machines have bundled all of humanity who couldn't run away fast enough into life pods and pervasive VR for reasons never convincingly explained to us, and that just has to be good enough to drive our appreciation of the human characters' motivations to break back out of that setup.

[jack]

totally ignoring the motivation behind the setup

That's essentially what I'm suggesting too, I agree. I didn't mean necessarily that Morpheus himself was mistaken (that's not actually internally consistent, assuming he had any knowledge whatsoever of the wattage of an average human), but that the whole edifice is built on the knowledge of the founders of the city, and we're only told one line about it, so the information given is unreliable in lots of ways.

[rysmiel]

I have very mixed feelings about the trilogy as a whole; you might be interested my comments when first I saw the whole trilogy, here.

Humans as energy source is such profound stupidity that it falls out of my head all the time. I think that the subsequent films are indeed rather icky if one takes them at face value; if one reads them as deliberate subversion, or possibly as trying for something more sophisticated in a ham-handed enough way that it only comes through in spots, I think they are worth seeing - and they are some of the prettiest dieselpunk ever filmed. (Excepting Brazil) There strikes me as rather a lot of interesting possibilites opened up in 2, though many of them are kind of disappointingly shut down in 3. Rather a lot depends on how clearly you read that Neo Does Not Get It, though.