Mind The Gap: The 'Matrix' Is Still A Trip Even Decades Later
For most of these movies, there is no real reason why I haven’t seen them yet. They’ve just fallen through the cracks or I know enough through basic pop culture literacy that there isn’t an urgency to cross it off the list. The Matrix, however, has a different story for me. When I was pretty young, I caught part of the movie (I can only assume my father had rented the movie from Blockbuster of Hollywood Video), and I was scarred. For the longest time, the only thing I knew, other than the basic “blue pill red pill” question and the existential crisis it could cause, was there was an utterly terrifying scene involving a mechanical bug going into someone’s body and a mouth being somehow biologically grown over. Update: I’m almost thirty years old and that scene still seriously freaks me out.
There is something truly impressive about how this first movie ages. Despite knowing the entire premise of the film, it’s still mind boggling. Despite the CGI being outdated, it’s still impressive to see. Despite it being decades old, Keanu Reeves still looks about the same. It may not have been exactly in my wheelhouse, but I was very much able to appreciate this film, and I wish I could remember all the turmoil and existential crises it caused for people back when it came out.
My main issue with the series on a whole is that they don’t fully seem to know what they are. The first film is almost exclusively a sci-fi flick, but then it goes a hundred other directions as it goes along. It’s part romance, part space epic (different from the tech action/adventure that dominated the aesthetic of the first film), part thriller and then back around again to sci-fi/fantasy. Without a solid identity, the power is lost. Maybe that is just the fate of the sequel. But without that direction, it also made the plots more difficult to fully follow. I was watching these movies at the same time as a friend of mine and we were asking each other questions and trying to figure out if we had missed something. It would be a stretch to call these movies bad, because they still have so much going for them.
One of the most consistent threads is the blurring of reality, and that serves the story well. That’s another reason I struggle giving any real judgment on these films. When confusion is part of the goal, if they succeed, does that make it good or bad? I even had difficulty with this watching the new film (which was what prompted me to finally do a marathon of the original trilogy). I felt like I needed to physically shake my head to try to sort it all out. There are so many threads that are picked up but then left unfinished, leaving me with more questions at the end than I had in the beginning. As an English nerd, however, I love how it brings an extremely unique take on the unreliable narrator. It isn’t that Neo is actively trying to mislead us. He just truly doesn’t know what to think, at least through the majority of the first film.
These are not movies I’ll probably seek out very often in the future. But I can appreciate even more just how it helped to define the modern sci-fi genre into what it is now. As far as I know, other than a handful of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix was one of the first truly successful films that tackled things like technology and the future. It changed the world of science fiction movies forever. And that is something that can’t be downplayed.
This is one of the better experiences I’ve had with my Mind the Gap series, especially when I compare it to others this year. I can’t wait to keep learning more about modern film history as I go.