The Matrix

Throughout history people have asked questions about the world. Why does this happen? How can that happen? What, actually, is the world? These are all pretty compelling questions and throughout history there have been been written many books and made many movies about these subjects, the most notable being of course The Bible, which I believe is just as fictional as the movie I'll be discussing here. I am an atheist, who believes that eventually the science will be able to answer this questions. That doesn't mean that they are not worthwhile and fun to discuss. And The Matrix addresses these questions in a very fun way.

In The Matrix the world we live in is a simulation. The Machines have taken over the real world and made it a very bad place to live. Due to a simulation though, they give us the people the idea that nothing's changed and that everything's OK. The Wachowski brothers are obviously heavily influenced by Jean Baudrillard's ideas of simulacrum and simulacra which they also acknowledge in a scene. They do seem to slightly misunderstand Baudrillard's ideas and take them a bit too far, something which apparently infuriated Baudrillard so much that he dismissed the whole film. The Matrix basically claims that nothing we see really exists. Baudrillard does not really claim that nothing we see exists, but that what we think to be the truth, really is not. When Baudrillard said that the Gulf War did not take place, he meant that that it did not take place in the way we saw it on CNN, not that there never was such thing as a Gulf War. Anyway, all of this does not make The Matrix less interesting.

Not everybody though has fallen for the tricks of The Machines. There are some people who know what's going on and fight against the Machines. They do this via a ship that, if I understand it correctly, inside a computer program. The crew we follow is the Nebucadnezzar crew led by Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne in a great performance. They find a hacker, who in the virtual world of computers (or in this case the real world of computers) goes by the name of NEO. This crew for, unclear reasons, believe that NEO is the one who'll beat the machines. By the end of the film they realize he really is the ONE. Something we already knew since he is NEO. The fact that the makers seem to think that they are very clever for naming the ONE, NEO is the only point of annoyance I had with this film.

The film does a lot of interesting things with world it creates. Before I start talking about them though I have to mention what I think is the biggest quality of the film. The story always follows the logic of the world the Wachowskis created. Everything that happens makes sense according to the rules that are laid out. When there are fights, they happen according to the rules, so does the humor. I am not a big fan of science fiction and fantasy and have not seen many such movies and read many books in this genres. But practically every one I've seen or read breaks its own rules of the fantasy-world it created to do something interested, whether it's to have a cool fight or to make the story even more interesting. The Matrix achieves something great by not breaking it's own rules and still having cool fights and managing to make the story more interesting.

The Matrix uses Avatars in a better and more exciting way then Avatar did 1o years later. And I must say that I am a bit dissapointed in Avatar after seeing The Matrix. Avatar only has new technology, but doesn't do anything really great or new with it. How different is this for The Matrix, whose action scenes made partly possible by the at that time new bullet-time technique are way more spectacular then any of those in Avatar.

It's now time to discuss some of the greatest scenes in the movie. One of the more mysterious things that can happen to us is when we experience a deja-vu. When Neo experiences a deja-vu this is a sign to our heroes that their enemies are close. Because what is a deja-vu according to The Matrix? A glitch in the system. It happens when the Machines make a mistake in their simulation and try to fix it.
These people that fight the machines are pretty much ordinary people who don't know how to do the things needed to beat the machines, like fighting for example. They of course need to learn fast. So they get the course they need (like jujitsu) downloaded into their head. At one point while fighting the bad guys, our heroes are in a bad situation and are only able to get away by flying a helicopter. Problem is, nobody can fly the thing. So one character gets the course flying a helicopter downloaded into her and the next thing we and they know, they are on the winning hand.
In a wonderful scene we learn that Nebucadnezzar has a spy inside it's crew. The man wants to stop fighting with the Nebucadnezzar and asks to became a part of the machines. The reason he gives is that despite knowing that the world is fake he misses to eat a fake tasty sandwich, to drink the tasty fake drinks and to make fake love to a fake woman. Because even though he knows that it's fake it just feels better than the real drinks, the real food and the real sex he gets in the actual world. This is a surprisingly poignant scene, also because we can really identify with the guy.
All of the fights in this movie are pretty spectacular, the last fight is absolutely brilliant though. It's made with surprising humor and it's choreographed and scored like it's a fight in a western.
My favorite scene in the movie though is a very simple scene. The machines have captured Morpheus and now he is being investigated by Agent Smith, the leader of the Machines. Agent Smith is played by Hugo Weaving who gives one of the best performance of the 90's here. He acts with such menace despite basically talking in only one tone throughout the movie, like a machine. In the scene I mentioned he is at his most menacing and due to the completely bizarre dialogue he is given in it, this scene is bizarrely great.

It's worth concluding in the end that The Matrix, together with Pulp Fiction is probably the most influential movie of the 90's. Even while watching I could immediately point out that it has influenced Harry Potter, the Kill Bill films Avatar and dozens of other movies made who tried to unsuccessfully copy The Matrix.

I saw this movie on my road trip in USA. It is a movie I was a bit prejudiced against due to my dislike of science-fiction movies. I loved it and it was not the only movie I saw there which I would probably not have seen soon due to my prejudices about it. And that I would have been wrong in not seeing. I am not a big fan of Pixar, but Up was a very funny movie with a brilliant first half an hour.
I also don't like horror, but the Norwegian zombie-film Dead Snow was a delightfully funny movie. It had so many funny scenes and it was obvious that the movie was made with such energy and fun by the whole cast and crew that I would classify this as a feel-good movie, despite the fact that every single living person in the movie dies.