Movie Details
| Title: | The Matrix | |
| Director: | Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski | |
| Year: | 2021 | |
| Genre: | Science Fiction | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.27.21 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (2)
- The Matrix Reloaded
- The Matrix Revolutions
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.27.21 | Internet | This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2021 As the year wraps up into another total shit show, some of you imaginary readers out there may be lamenting the fact that, for the first time in 16 years I did not do a DVRfest. PSYCHE! It's happening right now! This year, the weekend that I usually hold this ridiculous thing happened to fall on the first weekend after starting a new job. The beginning of November is already a pretty busy time of year so I figured it wouldn't be much fun to give up that weekend where i'd probably need sleep and video games to help get over that flood of new information. Plus, last year I did it in December when I had more time off and no DVR-police showed up at my door. One of the good things about a personal film festival is I do what I want, so this year I delayed until Christmas week when I knew I'd have stress-free time off to enjoy myself. As a side-effect to that, some of the year's Oscar-bait movies are already available. So if I can get the time, I'm going to plow through a bunch of hopefully good stuff. Starting with this. Usually my festival rule is to limit movies I've already seen to one, but with a new Matrix movie coming out I feel like in order to give it the best chance of me liking it, I need to revisit the original trilogy first. You could kind of make the argument that they're all kinda one movie? but not really... so I'm breaking my rule but again: I do what I want. Let's sit down and watch this Matrix stuff again, for the first time since before starting this site! True to form for recent years, DVRfest started already behind. This year, the fest really started with a three hour call to Jarrette, catching up and talking movies and how we're old and Austin has changed and everything is terrible. In many ways this represents cherished memories of attending festivals in person and was completely welcome even if it pushed back my start time to 6. I have no idea how I'm cramming all four of these in tonight but I can't waste time writing about it on here if I'm ever going to make it. So, what did I think about revisiting the first Matrix all this time later? Well... so much of it brings back memories of when it came out. If memory serves, friends and I saw this movie five times in the theater. Once with all of us, once or twice with Trapper and I alone, maybe once with my roommate Anthony, and definitely another round when it hit dollar theaters. It was amazing in ways that are hard to comprehend these days... probably similar to Citizen Kane or something now that we've had 20 years of CGI sci-fi mind-bending nonsense in its wake (not to mention the dampener that the sequels brought to this film, which I'm sure I'll get into with the next entry). But for starters, we had no idea what the movie was before we saw it. The trailer and tv spots were genius, playing up Laurence Fisbhurne's line of "nobody can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself." matched with these slow-mo shots of the underside of helicopters or people jumping from rooftop to rooftop or whatever, all set to slammin' late 90s soundtrack. So the first half hour or plays straight in a way that I don't think anyone these days can experience, kinda like knowing what Rosebud is or the end of the first Planet of the Apes or something. It's seeped into society such that people just know what The Matrix is. But after that... plenty of movies try to pull a twist or a reveal, usually in the last act or whatever. And Lots of movies foreshadow stuff or make vague statements that make sense later, but I feel like this movie is the king of all of that. Watching the first half hour now makes a level of sense that felt impossible on first viewing. And to have this revelation spill forth like half way through the movie, really spending half its time trying to explain to the audience what the hell is going on... but to also make that entertaining is so crazy to think about. I have a distinct memory of sitting in the theater seeing Morpheus hold up the battery and completely having my mind blown. But fast forward to now, where I know everything going in, it's still fun to watch! The exposition feels super graceful and succinct and straight-forward. Even the Oracle stuff (which I suspected was deliberately obtuse to levels I'm preparing for with the Architect scene in the next movie) make sense in retrospect. I'm not sure there are many movies that pull the trick of having nothing make sense then having everything make sense more deftly than this. And on top of the ideas being presented, you also get top-tier kung-fu fight sequences. The training dojo scene alone can sit on the same shelf as any Jackie Chan or Donnie Yen movie. It's clear the actors trained their asses off, you can see them doing the moves, you can follow the fight through the edits, and everything is photographed as effectively as possible. Now the third element comes in: the visual effects. Maybe part of the reason this movie hit so big is because it presented ideas that perfectly leveraged new technology. There's probably a version of this movie using old-school film magic techniques that would also work, but bending reality through CG with bullet time and that building ripple when the helicopter hits it perfectly shows off the glimpses behind the curtain that they were going for. The one note here that hasn't aged is the real-life stuff with the hovercraft eluding the sentinels. Since those shots are pure CG they come off much faker than the Matrix stuff, which I guess could be a philosophical comment but I suspect is more a product of its age. And lastly, both the iconic horns of the score and the ultra 90s-ness of the source music used puts the musical atmosphere of the film into the category that all the other 90s techno-babble hacker shit like Lawnmower Man and Hackers and The Net to shame. The Propellerheads bassline when Neo and Trinity enter the lobby is like... a joke at this point. Or the Rage Against the Machine that closes the movie, or even the Prodigy and whatnot that blasts in the hacker/bdsm club at the beginning all work so hard for the tone of this movie. It really feels to me like a definition of film at the end of the millennium. I guess that's a lot of words to say I still liked the movie, and probably nothing a ton of critics haven't already said, but it's now on the record one more time as I bid adieu to this most perfect version of the story and its world and head into the sequels. I honestly can't remember many actual details about the second or third... but I'll get into those more in a couple hours. |
