Movie still holds up. Forget the sequels. Forget that it spawned decades of cliches, it’s still a damn good looking and entertaining movie.
It’s on Netflix if you want to see it again for the first time in years like I did.
Its effects hold up much better than movies like the Phantom Menace as well.
I would actually point out that the first sequel works fairly well, especially once they leave Zion. The final movie, though, was a complete mess. Like, Star Wars prequel level mess.
But, yes, I would watch the first one and enjoy it. They did a great job.
It bugs me more now than it did when it was new about all these people Neo and company kill. All those guards gunned down in the lobby were people in vats, just like Neo. And now they are all in the compost pile. They weren’t immortal agents.
Supposedly the trilogy is leaving Netflix on July 1, so get on it.
Never bothered my overmuch. ‘Inured in the system’ as they are. 
One thing I’ve always wondered about is what happens to the people taken over by an agent, once the agent ‘moves on’. They are just back, wondering how they got to where they’ve been left standing?
Watched it recently and noticed how much the fight choreography advanced just from #1 to #2. And IIRC this was the first major Hollywood movie that had such elaborate and advanced fight choreography, which I’m pretty sure it borrowed from Chinese martial arts films.
The movie is incredibly stupid (batteries???), but executed with such style!
Well, I think the big thing in the Matrix is that they got Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie Ann Moss, and Hugo Weaving trained to be able to do all the fight sequences themselves so we can see their faces. This, and they got Yuen Woo-ping to come in and choreograph the fighting. The filmed in a non-choppy way so we could see what was happening, helped by the fact that the actors were not stunt doubles.
It holds up well.
There was a time when the Wachowskis looked like they really were the next great thing. Too bad they were less talented than we realized and kind of peaked right there. Jupiter Ascending was trash and I did not enjoy Speed Racer. Cloud Atlas was OK, but I wasn’t as big a fan of it as I thought I would be.
I said it then and I’ll say it now. It’s a couple Zik-Zak commercials short of being a fair Max Headroom episode.
This +1. The red pill/blue pill premise was great, the action sequences were great, the resolution was ridiculous.
And the sequels made it more apparent and therefore worse. If you can get God/the Architect to explain the universe to you, and it doesn’t make sense, you’ve lost credibility no matter how much wire kung-fu you can do.
Regards,
Shodan
I loved this dialog in the Futurama episode that parodied the Matrix:
Bender: But… But wouldn’t almost anything make a better battery than a human body? Like a potato… or a battery?
Fry: Plus no matter how much energy they produce, it would take more energy than that to keep them alive.
Leala: I know, I know, it sounds absurd. In fact, when “The Matrix” first came out, it seemed like the single crummiest, laziest, most awful dim-witted idea in the entire history of science fiction. But it turned out to be true!
Mrs. Cups had never seen any of them (and is in a Keanu kick) so just last weekend we watched 1 and 2.
They both hold up surprisingly well and I still say the highway chase scene is one of the best action setpieces in movie history. Not THE…but it’s in the conversation
I would agree. There are issues with the second movie, but they did a great job(and spent a ton of money) filming that sequence and it is great.
I remember rolling my eyes in the theater when the humans-as-batteries plot point was revealed. I was hoping this would later be corrected or addressed in the movie(s), but no such luck.
What’s worse is that there was such a better explanation available to the script-writers: utilizing humans not as batteries (which makes no sense and violates the laws of thermodynamics), but instead to utilize the processing power of their brains.
I thought this was an interesting response to the ‘batteries’ thing:
"MORPHEUS: For the longest time, I wouldn’t believe it. But then I saw the fields with my own eyes, watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living -
NEO (politely): Excuse me, please.
MORPHEUS: Yes, Neo?
NEO: I’ve kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you’re telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven’t you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?
MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?
NEO: Anyone who’s made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!
MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?
(Pause.)
NEO: …in the Matrix.
MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.
(Pause.)
NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?
MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn’t run on math."
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 64: Omake Files 4, Alternate Parallels
Personally I thought the humans as batteries thing was silly when I first heard it but people seem to have got a little obsessed by it.
I thought the Architect scene was fairly straightforward, if I remember correctly its basically that the machines were never quite capable of designing a virtual reality that all of humanity would accept, a tiny percentage would always reject it, Zion was a safety valve but when it got too large and uncontrollable the machines would tear it all down and begin again but with a small remnant or seed chosen by The One.
This time though Neo isn’t playing by the plan laid out for him, because he loves one person intensely rather than humanity in general.
I know it’s a humor piece, but that wouldn’t work. The physics of life in Zion is exactly like that in the matrix. If Zion had “humans” who looked like jellyfish suspended in blue space, maybe I could be convinced to believe thermodynamics was different in the “real world”.
I just happened to watch it on DVD last night for no particular reason.
Question: We’re zooming in on a vast weird complex of what we eventually realize is what I’ll call an incubator farm/battery pile. Clearly we’re passing some funky complex attachment/connectivity hardware and then zooming toward another pile and, there, crawling upon various parts of the machinery are pale white spider-like things.
What the hell are those?
Parasites?
Caretakers?
So my friend who was a big fan told me The Matrix and its sequels AND the TV Cartoons were all supposed to be considered Canon. Thus, since I didn’t bother with the cartoons I apparently missed a lot of the extended plot and storyline that would otherwise have helped me understand a hell of a lot.
Furthermore, according to him, the whole milieu is supposed to be one big giant Geek Cliche, with metaphysics and symbolic interactionism (a lot of quotes from George Herbert Mead), and computer hacking paradigms* as well as the existentialists-in-a-simulacrum idea that someone kicked around on this board only a few months ago as if it was a new concept to debate. He also pointed out the similarity between some of the Manga/Anime fight scenes and the flying ‘real person’ punch & kick-fests in the combat scenes.
In other words, it was really “Let’s compile as many Geek Tropes as possible into one movie and see who thinks it’s cool.”
–G?
- Somebody suggested the idea of bypassing the security/defenses by going in through a discharge port (was that Matrix III?) was pretty brilliant. Several years later, the computer industry was raising alarms about a new way hackers were trying to get into secure networks: plug a laptop into an ethernet port that the business is using to connect a network printer. Since then, most businesses have learned to secure those ports, and also to lock down their Wireless Printing channels, as well.
Caretaker robots.
I’m not sure any sequels or “canon” were envisioned or green-lit when the movie came out. Assuming that was the case, the only storyline and symbolism to understand is that which were actually shown in the film.
There are a few things going on, but the main theme is that Neo = Christ. Rises from the dead and so forth.
I will always defend Jupiter Ascending - it is not trash. Falls a bit short of its ambitions, but it is (IMO) fun. I put it with Fifth Element and Valerian for fun - all 3 nicely recreate a particular SF comic book experience that I love - the balls-out colourful craziness of BDs that you just don’t get with the more … IDK, technophilic? or whatever … visually downer style that’s more fashionable.
Funny aside. I was watching a Youtube show with kids watching it - some were surprised to learn that the Wachowskis used to be men.
As for the rest of their work - the Matrix ruined things for them. The first was ambitious and well executed and changed films, and they’ve strained to top it ever since, and audiences have expected them to top it and the attempts get more outrageous and the disappointment gets more pronounced and I don’t think they can win.