the first matrix is genuinely a great film, like said in the article lots of different ways to interpret, a solidly plotted hero’s journey. I think it matters what age you saw it at too, its built from the ground up to appeal to lonely teenage boys. The Wachowskis also proved to be a bit of a busted flush, the sequels are 2 of the worst films I’ve seen. The action and exposition aren’t blended like the first film, its just a lump of one then the other. The cleverness present in the first film is just absent, its hard to believe they were written by the same people.
The Wachowskis have far more stinkers than hits, so they are not going to skin me for the price of a ticket just for a hit of nostalgia. If anyone is looking for something similar, the film Dark City came out around the same time as The Matrix, it has a similar premise – a man resisting a simulated world conspiracy but where the first Matrix message amounts to break the simulation, Dark City ends a lot more hopeful and is more like build a better simulated world to live in.
Yebbut why was it good? Like Howard Jacobson’s piece today about “Michel” Kundera, nothing in the article explains what’s so great about the subject. Between its apparent fascination to incels, and the part about the Wachowski brothers having apparently decided they are in fact sisters, it feels like it’s an exposition of the mental landscape of some very unfortunate but not especially interesting people. Why would anyone who’s not an incel or otherwise confused man enjoy this?
It may be an age thing. When I was in my teens to mid-20s, the kind of sci-fi I was watching was stuff like Blade Runner, The Thing, The Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Robocop, Total Recall, and so on, bookended by Alien and Jurassic Park. All of those were well-written and expertly directed by people who had impressive careers before and since (ok, maybe not John McTiernan so much), who as a result produced coherent, rewatchable stuff, and who did a better job with similar ideas (in eg Blade Runner and Total Recall, of which The Matrix is clearly if feebly derivative).
In what sense is The Matrix 10% as good as any of those? I imagine it’s very popular among the denizens of places like housepricecrash.com and so on. But really, if you were older than about 17 or you had an IQ above room temperature, chances are that in 1999, you thought it was a stupid and forgettable waste of 2 hours. The dimness of the audience is best illustrated by the fact that they wrung 2 sequels out of it that even its fanbois consider to have stunk, but still went to see.
Somebody explain this to me. If I were about to be marooned on a desert island and I could choose one film from among those mentioned above, why would I choose The Matrix over the least of them?
I think your right Jon, I saw the Matrix when I was 15yo with an IQ to match, I hadn’t seen or heard of those better films at that age, I’d have dismissed them as too old to be of interest . I’ve seen all of them since and like you say, each of them is a more coherent, better told story with more substance than the Matrix (probably not Predator though). I think the fist matrix is very good though, it steals from lots of better sci-fi’s but stole widely and wove it together well with manga inspired kung-fu, robots and a state of the art cinema technique in bullet time. It also pre-empted the first batch of superhero films, which basically follow the same structure / formula for their origin stories.
The sequels were a triumph of marketing, I got fleeced to see those in the cinema, that life lesson was worth the price of admission, losing £20 on those dog s$£”t sequels has probably saved thousands in the years after from the cynicism that experience instilled.
Jon, it is popular because many people FEEL as if they are living in the matrix – all the kung fu stuff is just peripheral crap – many also feel that staying in the matrix is getting harder and harder and as in the ‘opting/dropping out ‘ of the sixties it is a rerun of that for the generation of the 90’s. However in this day and age BOTH the pill choices are increasingly unpleasant so that that choice is at the back of many thinking person’s mind hence the Matrix is the eternal existential struggle given a modern idiom .
I love the Matrix! I think, frankly, the Wachowski’s nailed the art direction and script. It’s one of those films that has an unfairly high density of memorable lines and scenes compared to most others.
The article quotes some of the best known ones but really the whole film is just teeming with great moments and unique styles. The film is a meme factory for good reasons.
Of course we must not forget the revolutionary bullet time effect either.
The Matrix has been as culturally influential as Star Wars and as visually influential as Bladerunner. If not more. All films owe something to their predecessors but as far as I am concerned the 00s were riddled with Matrix references, I even saw it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is influential in its own right.
I saw all the films you mention in my teens. Massive fan. Aliens and Bladerunner are perhaps my 2 favourite films of all time. I wrote a dissertation on Ripley as a female hero. The Matrix blew my mind. I thought it was cool and thought provoking. I guess that makes me feeble minded does it?
This reminds me of the time I got on a local bus and looked down the aisle only to see, literally, everyone wearing head phones and either staring ahead with a glazed look or texting someone (in one case I noticed, when I sat down, a young girl texting another girl sitting across the aisle). At this point I remembered Forster’s book and thought if onlythe machine would stop.
I do a country walk most days, and pass one woman who goes by without tearing her eyes away from her smart telephone or yapping into it. Beauty all around her she ignores (and me too of course).
Every – single – time.
Sad isn’t it. Personally I make a point of NOT doing that. I don’t want to be a phone clone. And besides, it’s dangerous. I’ve nearly run over a couple of automatons staring at their screen who just walked out into the road without looking. Apparently *I’m* supposed to stop for *them*.
David Batlle
2 years ago
Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump are “far Right”, according to the author, who despite his eloquence on the matter, enjoys his steaks juicy and delicious.
LOL. Yeah I thought that too. Doesn’t take much to be ‘far right’ nowadays
David Batlle
2 years ago
The Wachowskis mention all sorts of influences except, of course, the most obvious one, the Bible because on the Left only unsophisticated rubes are influenced by the Bible.
Neo awakens on the vessel “Mark III No. 11″, which alludes to the Bible verse Mark 3:11: “And, whenever the evil spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God'”. The One.
Oh I saw religious allegory all over it when I saw it. Same as The Phantom Menace. Saviours. Chosen Ones. Resurrections. Special powers. Healing the sick.
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
2 years ago
“It was unflatteringly compared to the 1995 flop Johnny Mnemonic“.
Johnny Mnemonic predicted a pandemic in 2021. It is not as bad as people think.
Peter Kriens
2 years ago
I must say that I was falsely prejudiced. It was quite a surprise to me that the Matrix had been written by 2 females!
The thing that spoiled the Matrix for me, as with so many similar films, was the central premise. The notion of propagating millions of comatose human beings to generate electricity is just……silly! An idea that would embarrass a Bond villain, never mind an advanced artificial intelligence.
Also, I was disappointed there was no mention of the three years of intensive physiotherapy that would be required to allow a human being raised under such slimy circumstances simply to stand. (This last observation applies equally to Minority Report.)
Have you seen Oblivion? A sci-fi film that does pass the Credibility Test.
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
waiting for approval – got blue pilled because Phillip K Di* k’s name is suggestive – the mods should read the Pooh Perplex one done as by a Freudian analyst. Am re-posting with ** redacted.
PKD has been mined more prolifically and without attribution for book and movie ideas than any other writer I can think of.
The villain of Terminator 2, a shape changing robot, is prefigured in a PKD short story called The Claws, in which a machine shifts its shape to disguise itself as things it sees, including a woman and child. The premise of D M Thomas’ 1982 novel The White Hotel is the hysteria of a Freud patient that originates not as he thinks in her past, but in her future, because she has second sight. The same premise is found in an earlier PKD short story about an analyst’s patient who’s inexplicably afraid of heights, for the same reason.
PKD seems to have thought of everything before everyone else did. I am sure if one went through his stuff, one would find the plot of The Matrix in something he wrote in 1960 or something.
PKD ideas are indeed fabulous. However, when I read his books and short stories they came across as too ‘religious’ for my taste
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
Love good literary satire – . Back in the early 1970s I remember reading a book still – ‘The Pooh Perplex’, a literary satire of finding deep meaning – and then expanding on it, and using it, allowing a writer their bias and agenda all by interpreting a common story.
He chose Winnie the Pooh, and had a dozen stories, each writing by another camp – Freudian, Marxist, and so on, all use analyzing Winnie the Pooh stories to demonstrate the truth of their thinking.
It is much like this article. In fact I am sure the writer could write the same article after a real good digging through all the writings of Milne, but with Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, Owl, and especially Eeyore to explain the red pill/blue pill concept of Descartian Philosophical existence..
“have cited a litany of influences: ranging from Homer’s Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to the cybernetics expert Kevin Kelly, Schopenhauer, Buddhism and Jean Baudrillard,” “Plato’s cave, Hilary Putnam’s brain in a vat, Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, Philip K Di* k, Plato, Socrates, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Dostoevsky, Sartre” “‘This is amazing! You wrote a script about Descartes!”
pierre.piquemal
2 years ago
Completely agree with this part: “A myth is fluid and ambiguous, open to diverse and contradictory interpretations”. My take on all of the theories about the movie: we live in a time where we don’t like complexity, we want simple answers, right or wrong, black or white, red or blue (pill!). It seems to me that in all these theories about this movie the same thing is happening, people want a simple, straightforward reading of it and don’t want to go into the more complex questions that the movie ask.
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Like everyone else I sat through The Matrix in 1999. I retained no impression of it at all, and so this year, I watched it again for the first time in 22 years. I lasted about three quarters of an hour before becoming so bored I switched over and watched a repeat of The Repair Shop instead.
My general impression is that this was most people’s experience. Admittedly, everything with Keanu Reeves in it has the same effect on me.
You are very entitled to your own view. However, “My general impression is that this was most people’s experience.” drifts from fact to hard to support supposition
Christina Dalcher
2 years ago
This may be the finest article I’ve read in UnHerd to date (and I’ve read a ton of good pieces). Wow. Wow. Wow.
It’s a film.
That’s quite literally what the last paragraph says.
I’m here in Finland so I’m becoming succinct.
the first matrix is genuinely a great film, like said in the article lots of different ways to interpret, a solidly plotted hero’s journey. I think it matters what age you saw it at too, its built from the ground up to appeal to lonely teenage boys. The Wachowskis also proved to be a bit of a busted flush, the sequels are 2 of the worst films I’ve seen. The action and exposition aren’t blended like the first film, its just a lump of one then the other. The cleverness present in the first film is just absent, its hard to believe they were written by the same people.
The Wachowskis have far more stinkers than hits, so they are not going to skin me for the price of a ticket just for a hit of nostalgia. If anyone is looking for something similar, the film Dark City came out around the same time as The Matrix, it has a similar premise – a man resisting a simulated world conspiracy but where the first Matrix message amounts to break the simulation, Dark City ends a lot more hopeful and is more like build a better simulated world to live in.
Yebbut why was it good? Like Howard Jacobson’s piece today about “Michel” Kundera, nothing in the article explains what’s so great about the subject. Between its apparent fascination to incels, and the part about the Wachowski brothers having apparently decided they are in fact sisters, it feels like it’s an exposition of the mental landscape of some very unfortunate but not especially interesting people. Why would anyone who’s not an incel or otherwise confused man enjoy this?
It may be an age thing. When I was in my teens to mid-20s, the kind of sci-fi I was watching was stuff like Blade Runner, The Thing, The Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Robocop, Total Recall, and so on, bookended by Alien and Jurassic Park. All of those were well-written and expertly directed by people who had impressive careers before and since (ok, maybe not John McTiernan so much), who as a result produced coherent, rewatchable stuff, and who did a better job with similar ideas (in eg Blade Runner and Total Recall, of which The Matrix is clearly if feebly derivative).
In what sense is The Matrix 10% as good as any of those? I imagine it’s very popular among the denizens of places like housepricecrash.com and so on. But really, if you were older than about 17 or you had an IQ above room temperature, chances are that in 1999, you thought it was a stupid and forgettable waste of 2 hours. The dimness of the audience is best illustrated by the fact that they wrung 2 sequels out of it that even its fanbois consider to have stunk, but still went to see.
Somebody explain this to me. If I were about to be marooned on a desert island and I could choose one film from among those mentioned above, why would I choose The Matrix over the least of them?
I think your right Jon, I saw the Matrix when I was 15yo with an IQ to match, I hadn’t seen or heard of those better films at that age, I’d have dismissed them as too old to be of interest . I’ve seen all of them since and like you say, each of them is a more coherent, better told story with more substance than the Matrix (probably not Predator though). I think the fist matrix is very good though, it steals from lots of better sci-fi’s but stole widely and wove it together well with manga inspired kung-fu, robots and a state of the art cinema technique in bullet time. It also pre-empted the first batch of superhero films, which basically follow the same structure / formula for their origin stories.
The sequels were a triumph of marketing, I got fleeced to see those in the cinema, that life lesson was worth the price of admission, losing £20 on those dog s$£”t sequels has probably saved thousands in the years after from the cynicism that experience instilled.
Jon, it is popular because many people FEEL as if they are living in the matrix – all the kung fu stuff is just peripheral crap – many also feel that staying in the matrix is getting harder and harder and as in the ‘opting/dropping out ‘ of the sixties it is a rerun of that for the generation of the 90’s. However in this day and age BOTH the pill choices are increasingly unpleasant so that that choice is at the back of many thinking person’s mind hence the Matrix is the eternal existential struggle given a modern idiom .
I love the Matrix! I think, frankly, the Wachowski’s nailed the art direction and script. It’s one of those films that has an unfairly high density of memorable lines and scenes compared to most others.
The article quotes some of the best known ones but really the whole film is just teeming with great moments and unique styles. The film is a meme factory for good reasons.
Of course we must not forget the revolutionary bullet time effect either.
The Matrix has been as culturally influential as Star Wars and as visually influential as Bladerunner. If not more. All films owe something to their predecessors but as far as I am concerned the 00s were riddled with Matrix references, I even saw it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is influential in its own right.
I saw all the films you mention in my teens. Massive fan. Aliens and Bladerunner are perhaps my 2 favourite films of all time. I wrote a dissertation on Ripley as a female hero. The Matrix blew my mind. I thought it was cool and thought provoking. I guess that makes me feeble minded does it?
‘…some very unfortunate but not especially interesting people’.
An apt summary of both the incel and trans communities, excellently put.
How do I get out of this Metaverse Mr Suckerburger ?
Answer: The Machine Stops by E.M.Forster
Throw away your telephone.
Simples.
This reminds me of the time I got on a local bus and looked down the aisle only to see, literally, everyone wearing head phones and either staring ahead with a glazed look or texting someone (in one case I noticed, when I sat down, a young girl texting another girl sitting across the aisle). At this point I remembered Forster’s book and thought if only the machine would stop.
I do a country walk most days, and pass one woman who goes by without tearing her eyes away from her smart telephone or yapping into it. Beauty all around her she ignores (and me too of course).
Every – single – time.
Maybe she’s shy. Surprise her and say ‘good morning’, see what happens……
Tried that. Like water off a duck’s back.
Maybe I will shoot a water pistol and try to short out the phone
That is because she IS living in the Matrix -and you are not…
Sad isn’t it. Personally I make a point of NOT doing that. I don’t want to be a phone clone. And besides, it’s dangerous. I’ve nearly run over a couple of automatons staring at their screen who just walked out into the road without looking. Apparently *I’m* supposed to stop for *them*.
Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump are “far Right”, according to the author, who despite his eloquence on the matter, enjoys his steaks juicy and delicious.
LOL. Yeah I thought that too. Doesn’t take much to be ‘far right’ nowadays
The Wachowskis mention all sorts of influences except, of course, the most obvious one, the Bible because on the Left only unsophisticated rubes are influenced by the Bible.
Neo awakens on the vessel “Mark III No. 11″, which alludes to the Bible verse Mark 3:11: “And, whenever the evil spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God'”. The One.
Oh I saw religious allegory all over it when I saw it. Same as The Phantom Menace. Saviours. Chosen Ones. Resurrections. Special powers. Healing the sick.
“It was unflatteringly compared to the 1995 flop Johnny Mnemonic“.
Johnny Mnemonic predicted a pandemic in 2021. It is not as bad as people think.
I must say that I was falsely prejudiced. It was quite a surprise to me that the Matrix had been written by 2 females!
“females”
The thing that spoiled the Matrix for me, as with so many similar films, was the central premise. The notion of propagating millions of comatose human beings to generate electricity is just……silly! An idea that would embarrass a Bond villain, never mind an advanced artificial intelligence.
Also, I was disappointed there was no mention of the three years of intensive physiotherapy that would be required to allow a human being raised under such slimy circumstances simply to stand. (This last observation applies equally to Minority Report.)
Yeah I thought that too. I still loved it though.
Have you seen Oblivion? A sci-fi film that does pass the Credibility Test.
waiting for approval – got blue pilled because Phillip K Di* k’s name is suggestive – the mods should read the Pooh Perplex one done as by a Freudian analyst. Am re-posting with ** redacted.
PKD has been mined more prolifically and without attribution for book and movie ideas than any other writer I can think of.
The villain of Terminator 2, a shape changing robot, is prefigured in a PKD short story called The Claws, in which a machine shifts its shape to disguise itself as things it sees, including a woman and child. The premise of D M Thomas’ 1982 novel The White Hotel is the hysteria of a Freud patient that originates not as he thinks in her past, but in her future, because she has second sight. The same premise is found in an earlier PKD short story about an analyst’s patient who’s inexplicably afraid of heights, for the same reason.
PKD seems to have thought of everything before everyone else did. I am sure if one went through his stuff, one would find the plot of The Matrix in something he wrote in 1960 or something.
PKD ideas are indeed fabulous. However, when I read his books and short stories they came across as too ‘religious’ for my taste
Love good literary satire – . Back in the early 1970s I remember reading a book still – ‘The Pooh Perplex’, a literary satire of finding deep meaning – and then expanding on it, and using it, allowing a writer their bias and agenda all by interpreting a common story.
He chose Winnie the Pooh, and had a dozen stories, each writing by another camp – Freudian, Marxist, and so on, all use analyzing Winnie the Pooh stories to demonstrate the truth of their thinking.
It is much like this article. In fact I am sure the writer could write the same article after a real good digging through all the writings of Milne, but with Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, Owl, and especially Eeyore to explain the red pill/blue pill concept of Descartian Philosophical existence..
“have cited a litany of influences: ranging from Homer’s Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to the cybernetics expert Kevin Kelly, Schopenhauer, Buddhism and Jean Baudrillard,” “Plato’s cave, Hilary Putnam’s brain in a vat, Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, Philip K Di* k, Plato, Socrates, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Dostoevsky, Sartre” “‘This is amazing! You wrote a script about Descartes!”
Completely agree with this part: “A myth is fluid and ambiguous, open to diverse and contradictory interpretations”. My take on all of the theories about the movie: we live in a time where we don’t like complexity, we want simple answers, right or wrong, black or white, red or blue (pill!). It seems to me that in all these theories about this movie the same thing is happening, people want a simple, straightforward reading of it and don’t want to go into the more complex questions that the movie ask.
Like everyone else I sat through The Matrix in 1999. I retained no impression of it at all, and so this year, I watched it again for the first time in 22 years. I lasted about three quarters of an hour before becoming so bored I switched over and watched a repeat of The Repair Shop instead.
My general impression is that this was most people’s experience. Admittedly, everything with Keanu Reeves in it has the same effect on me.
cool story mate. I bet you’re great fun at dinner parties.
Watching paint dry would be less brain rotting than watching the repair shop. You’ve sunk the depths of emotional manipulation on that one.
You are very entitled to your own view. However, “My general impression is that this was most people’s experience.” drifts from fact to hard to support supposition
This may be the finest article I’ve read in UnHerd to date (and I’ve read a ton of good pieces). Wow. Wow. Wow.
Sarcasm at last – thank you!