I think I saw The Matrix in theaters when it first came out. I sort of thought so at the time, and am now convinced years later, that it was one of those rare products that is culturally popular, and justifiably should be culturally popular. Even if you thought the movie was lame, you have to admit the bullet time filming was revolutionary and no one had done anything like that before. And even if you thought the bullet time filming was lame, you’ve got to at least admit that since The Matrix came out in 1999, the use of bullet time filming, or similar post-modern filming techniques, has grown exponentially.
The Matrix is an action movie that can be enjoyed even by people that don’t really like action movies. It’s like what Mastadon is to metal. Along with the groundbreaking cinematography and kung fu action sequences, The Matrix had an exceedingly well developed backstory. Science Fiction movies are rarely as thoroughly realized as this. There’s a complex preamble that encompasses a calculated smattering of eastern religion, philosophy, and technology, that surpasses Star Wars, without coming off wooly.
In the future, human beings have been subversively enslaved by sentient robots that harvest people in pods as a bioelectric energy source. An alternative reality has been cultivated by these robots to control the minds of the humans in order to keep them in their submissive state of inertia. This alternative reality is a computer programmed cyber world (like the Sims) that all people are involuntarily locked into at birth. The name of this cyber world program is “The Matrix.”
Therefore, the essential dilemma presented in The Matrix is The Matrix. People aren’t actually living their lives and are plugged into this alterna-reality while their bodies are fed off of like livestock. The protagonist of the story, Neo, is the One who’s objective is to defeat the robots in their cyber world and restore humanity to true reality. Neo completes ½ this objective in The Matrix when he ascends to the level of supreme Oneness and defeats the primary bodily manifestation of The Matrix: Agent Smith.
If The Matrix was the only movie ever made about The Matrix, it would be presumed by viewers that Neo goes on to liberate the rest of humanity after defeating Smith in battle. However, after the success of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers decided to extend the series into The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution.
In The Matrix Reloaded we discover that there is still a long way to go before the objective goal of the first film (human liberation from The Matrix) can be accomplished. There’s still an army of machinery set on defeating the Neo-led human uprising against their robot overlords. This alone would have made for an ideal plotline for the trilogy: humanity’s overcoming of their technological oppressors. That’s essentially where The Matrix Reloaded begins, and where you think the trilogy’s going to end, but the story becomes muddled in the third film, The Matrix Revolutions, when we learn that Agent Smith has evolved into a rogue virus that threatens both humanity and the machines. Initially, I thought this would just be the C or maybe B subplot to the A plot (human liberation from The Matrix), but in the final act of the final film, the Agent Smith virus subplot becomes the main plot, that the story ultimately concludes when Neo, rather than striking the death knell to his mechanical tormentors, strikes a truce with them to focus on eliminating the Agent Smith virus threat.
This is extremely frustrating, because the principal predicament established in the first act of the first film is never resolved. The Neo/machine truce allows for the robots to presumably continue to enslave humanity in their façade cocoons indefinitely. Eight/ninths of the movie is focused on the struggle between humans and machines, but in the last hour, a new struggle materializes and quickly resolved, and the filmmakers play it off like that resolution was the one we’d all been waiting for.
Look, it’s science-FICTION. That means the plot of The Matrix could’ve been about anything. Anything. But the primary constraining condition is that it needs to be a story, i.e. a beginning, middle, end. You could’ve gone Pulp Fiction and shown the beginning, middle, and end out of lineal order. But you still MUST have the beginning, the middle, and the end somewhere in the movie to fulfill the story requirement. The Wachowski brothers failed this fundamental prerequisite by totally changing direction shortly after the middle part, leaving the viewer sorely unsatisfied. THUMBS DOWN.
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