The Matrix (1999)

The Matrix is one of those movies that is going to be remembered for years and years to come. It still has a massive amount of significance twelve years after its release, and it is as smart and brilliant as ever. Released in 1999, the year many consider to be one of the best years in modern cinema (and you’d have to search hard to find decent evidence against that claim, with cult favorite Fight Club, The Matrix, Award beauty American Beauty, among many others), this film still stands as one of the science fiction greats. Personally, I stand it close to Minority Report, which I love very much. Except The Matrix has a decent ending (well, to the film, I haven’t heard such great things about the ending of the entire franchise). Starring Keanu Reeves (in one of about three films he’s in that are good) as Thomas Anderson, known as the hacker Neo, the film takes place in a world where everything we know is a lie. According to the mythology of the film, in the early 21st century, the war between man and machine crowned a winner, and the humans had lost to their own creations, these solar-powered metallic monsters. In the middle of the war, in an attempt to defeat the machines, man blocked out the sun powering the robots. But they found a decent-enough replacement-us. Found in the sun, also found in humans are the necessary materials needed to run these things. So humans started to be grown like plants, and harvested, and then tossed away when they die. And in order to keep the humans still and occupied, so that we could be harvested, the machines created this computer program known as The Matrix, which we know as our world. The Matrix works almost perfectly. There are a few people who still notice something wrong, one of which is Neo. He is then led farther down the rabbit hole (the movie makes countless references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and so I thought I might as well too) by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburn), and his crew of the Nebuchadnezzar (Carrie-Ann Moss as Trinity, Marcus Chong as Tank, Joe Pantoliana as Cypher, among others), a ship working in the real world to try to end The Matrix. Residing in The Matrix in order to kill the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar is Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), who tries to kill the crew while they are in The Matrix, taking Neo to see The Oracle, who will tell him if he is ‘The One’, the person destined to bring down The Matrix. Sound confusing enough? Don’t even get me started on the whole bug thing. Either way, as weird and confusing as this movie sounds, it is completely brilliant. The movie sticks to its own science, it is brilliant, it is wonderful, and it is easily one of the single greatest science fiction films ever made.
9/10