There Is No Point: A Review of The Matrix

Yeah, okay, this one's been done to death. The Matrix is bad. Say it ain't so.

But in retrospect, if you've seen the film, it will always hold a special place in the heart of every single man, woman, and manchild on the face of this planet who have witnessed the hammy acting, the tight leather fetishism, and the hilarity of Hugo Weaving trying his best not to act on film. Whether that special place is one of fond remembrance, a fanatic devotion, or the trash bag full of crap you've outgrown that you meant to get around to in January depends on who you are. So, without further ado, let's take a look at why The Matrix wasn't as revolutionary in film-writing as we thought it was.

Now let's get right up into this bitch.

In a quick synopsis, our generic store-brand anarchist protagonist who, like so many other protagonists before him in edgy cyberpunk thrillers, is searching the incredibly dated internet for a man named Morpheus, kinda like Peter looked for Jesus. Someone gets in contact with him through his computer screen, telling him that "The Matrix" has him. Some other sh*t happens, there's an allegory for following a white rabbit, and this girl shows up to the door with her boyfriend-- a guy who just so happens to be a customer of the hacker Neo, the eventual "true name" of our copy-pasteagonist, known so fondly as...

Yeah, I know, but you knew it was coming.

...by the Agents, but we'll get into them later. Mr. Thomas Anderson works at some kind of software company, and he's been pirating their material. If this turned into a scandal, would we call it AppleGate, or BillGate? In any case, Tom gives the guy the illicit C++ he ordered before the guy calls him "my own personal Jesus Christ". Wow. That was subtle. In any case, Neo notices the tattoo on his girl's arm-- the white rabbit-- and decides to tag along with them to the 1999 rave party. Complete with Rob Zombie's growling into a microphone-- you know, before he directed Halloween and became a general disappointment to us all. 

While Neo enjoys the perks of being a raveflower, he is approached by a woman clad in tight black leather-- a woman named Trinity, who apparently used to be a cyber-terrorist, like Morpheus, mentioned above. She tells him the answer is out there, allows herself into his personal bubble for a moment or two to whisper sweet empty plot points into his ear, and then hops down along the bunny trail. The next thing we know, he's late for work, and he's getting chewed out by his boss the same way Bob Parr from The Incredibles gets chewed out by the Sicilian from The Princess Bride.

"You see, Tom, a company is like an enormous spoon."

I'm not kidding. The only way this scene could have been saved from film mediocrity is by Mr. Anderson going full Bruce Banner and TKOing his boss by throwing him through a bunch of cubicles. Speaking of which, that's a plot point. Neo goes back to his cubicle after he's been lectured by Mr. Generic, when he receives a package in the mail. It is a phone that, oddly enough, rings when he takes it out. Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, is on the other end of the line, and spends most of the next scene keeping Neo from being discovered by the feds-- in actuality, the Agents mentioned above. So Agents are like McAfee anti-bodies. Their job is to keep any sort of insurgency from people who are no longer in this Matrix, which is a computer program meant to simulate life from 1999-2009 in order to cause brain development in the humans grown by the machines in the neodystopia of the twenty second century as the equivalent of Duracell Batteries, in check. The Energizer Bunny spent the rest of his life homeless as a result.

He does some Solid Snake-esque sneaking around, sans the cardboard box, and finally reaches a point where it's leap of faith or a day in the lions den. So he takes the day in the lions den, and does not have a fun time-- as he does what any arrogant fedora doffing computer dweller does in these situations, call his mom and get her to pick him up give our OS SS Officer the bird and demand a phone call.*

*:most likely to his mom for a new pair of pants

This goes infamously unwell for him, spawning one of the most visually unsettling graphics in this movie-- and on that note, I will say this only once. The Matrix revolutionized film CGI. It did. I will admit it now, so that I don't have to later. As we have all learned from Michael Bay, however, CGI-porn does not make a good movie. Hugo Weaving learned that the hard way when he plays the villain in both of these high hitting disappointing franchises. I'm not drinking the kool-aid here, but if you need proof that The Wachowskis single-handedly set a standard, let's take a look back on what we had before this movie.

Yup. The guy the Ewoks refused to share a trailer with.

Speaking of, the effect is neat because they make Reeves' mouth melt together so he can't speak or breathe, and shove this techno-centipede lookin' thing right up in his navel. 

I'm not even gonna caption this. It, ironically, speaks for itself.

Sounds hot, right? Well, if you're someone who thinks Fifty Shades of Grey is a real romance novel, this might be right up your alley. In any case, he wakes up at home, receiving another call from Morpheus, telling him to go to some bridge. He gets picked up by DominaTrinity and her friends, who we will call Red Shirt #1 and Red Shirt #2. Red Shirt #2 threatens Neo with her pistol, and Neo gets ready to bail-- but after a lackluster speech from Trinity about how if he goes back, he'll be arrested, he stays in the car. On the way there, she tears that bug out of his stomach with a device we aren't ever really given an explanation for. Get used to that.

In any case, they take him to Morpheus, played by the huge ass gap in Lawrence Fishburne's front teeth.

Disclaimer: I actually love the sh*t out of Lawrence Fishburne. And his gap.

The first thing Morpheus does is ask Neo if he believes in fate, and they both come to the consensus that fate is dumb, because it takes away the idea of the ability to make your own decisions. He tells Neo that he has a choice-- he can take one of two pills and wake up from this weird ass dream, or he can take a blue pill and go right to sleep. So it's Dayquil or Nyquil, and Neo, of course, chooses Dayquil. Morpheus leads him into this room, they plug some important looking electrodes to him, and he gets his ass pulled out of the Matrix and into the real world-- in which he is living in a battery pod. After being discovered by one of the harvesters, he is paaaainfully unscrewed from the chords that are hooked up all over his body to what seems like human headphone jacks, and he is flushed into the wastes, where Morpheus and his crew are waiting to save him from drowning. This is the Real World mentioned above-- a dystopia where everything is terrible and humans are grown, not born. Machines run this bitch now, and it's our job to Rage against them so that they let our people go. 

Morpheus takes Neo within the Matrix and blows his mind by telling him all about why the Matrix was created, painting it as if the machines took over of their own accord, and we were just minding our own business reading The Holy Bible-- or rather, "We don't know who struck first-- all we know is that we were the ones who scorched the sky". Yep, the sky is a plot point in this movie, and it's not explained at all unless ya watched the beautifully done Animatrix, in which we're told that we scorched the sky in order to kill the machines, due to their reliance on solar power. However, the machines decided that this was the last straw, and turned us all into Duracells.

He happens to leave out mankind savagely murdering machines in the first strike recorded within the human library, and our decision to start an AI Holocaust.

 

Oh, how I wish I was kidding. Seriously though, go watch the Animatrix. Way better than the sequels.

Alright, so Neo's gonna accept all this. After having a fit and freaking out, throwing up goo all over the floor of the Nebuchadnezzar, adding to the ever growing gross out factor of this movie. Then he wakes up, is met by one of the members of the crew, Tank-- their operator, who can allow the crew to jack in and out of this cybernetic reality known as the Matrix, in which you are not really physically present-- the mental projection of yourself is. That doesn't mean you can't get killed in the Matrix, however-- if your mind gets the sh*t kicked out of it, so does your body, I guess? But you don't have to run out of breath there for some reason. Because... the rules don't apply to you? But they do. But they don't. It's bullsh*t, and it's confusing.

In any case, he accepts his situation, and allows Tank to boot him into their loading program, where Tank spends the next hour or so uploading combat programs like Kung Fu and Ju-Jitsu into his brain in the span of time it would take a song to download onto your iPhone. 

He's actually running Foo Fighters. Just look at that face. Pure Punk Rock.

Morpheus decides to challenge him to Philosophical Kombat, sans fatalities, and kicks his ass the first time. Why? Because Neo hasn't freed his mind yet. When he does, Morpheus is bested in about a minute or so. They do a training montage in the loading program, the Agent simulator with the lady in the red dress, literally a computer hooker, and some less-than character development. Oh, and subplot! Juda-- I mean, Cypher, is jacked into the Matrix making a deal with Agent Smith. He surrenders Morpheus to them so that they can get the codes for the Zion doors, and kill off the remaining humans once and for all. What does Cypher get from this? Ignorance. Socrates is performing Cirque-de-Soleil in his grave right now.

In any case, Morpheus takes Neo to see this woman named the Oracle, who can tell you your future. Wait a minute, like fate? Didn't we just say, like, an hour ago, that fate is dumb? But no, apparently the whole crew has their own prophesies. We don't care about those, though-- we care about Morpheus and Trinity. Morpheus was told that he would find The One, which is what we think Neo is-- Cyberpunk Jesus, who can free all of humanity from the binding chains of the Matrix and end the war forever. Trinity was told some sh*t she's needlessly fickle about until the end of the movie, however, so we'll get to that. So Neo has to chill in a room with a bunch of kids who have "The One" potential.

No complaints here-- this scene is the tits.

So The Oracle calls him in, and she goes off on a tangent, telling him to Know Thyself. Which is cool and all, but if he was supposed to know himself, then what's the point of her telling him anything? He knows what he is, so why must he be told anything? In any case, she tells him he's not the one, but he could be, in the next life. This bugged me a bit, but I began to accept it after a revelation I had during the credits. Oh, and that there would come a time very soon in which Morpheus would die for Neo or Neo would have to die for Morpheus, a warning that Morpheus goes out of his way to ignore. Maybe he thought Neo being the one or not was kinda like his Schrodinger's Spoon christmas present? In any case, moving on.

Cypher, or Cipher, has successfully betrayed Morpheus and the crew. They are caught in an ambush and Morpheus is captured, but not before being subdued by police officers. Y'know, violently.

Couldn't think of a joke I'd be proud of for this one.

Now we know Cipher is bad, but the rest of the crew still believe he's on the up and up. Which, of course, leads to the death of Tank, and Tank's Brother. Did I not mention him? Neither did he, what with the two lines of dialogue he has in this movie. Also, Red Shirt #1 and #2 die. Oh, the horror. Cipher's actor does that crazy thing he does, what with the killing of characters we have no time to get emotionally attached to, and therefore do not hold any sort of emotional weight for us. Except, maybe, we'll never get to see them look that cool in leather again. RIP.

Also, Cipher gets really... really uncomfortably close to Trinity in this scene. Just because she's plugged into the machine world and talking to you over the phone does not mean this is a phone sex line, dude. 

I love you, Judas Metaphor, but ya can't be doin' that now, c'mon.

So, before he has the chance to kill the two remaining protags, the protag he shot in the stomach but didn't die, coincidentally the only person they couldn't have completed the rest of the movie without, stands up and gats this dude down in one of the neatest vengeance scene put on film. Tank's fine, guys. He can take hits like stomach blows and not go down. You could say he's built like a Tank. Anypun, Tank gets Neo and Trinity out of the Matrix, and they debate pulling the plug on Morpheus until Neo decides that, well, f*ck it, he's not gonna let this happen. Why? Because he's deciding not to play bitch to fate. Well, that's one way of looking at it. He can also be accepting the fact that he can't die yet, because Morpheus is supposed to find The One-- and if he dies, and Neo isn't The One, then that means the prophecy won't come true. So he isn't playing bitch to fate-- he's playing super bitch to fate.

Meanwhile, in Agent land, Smith is having no luck attempting to elicit a response from Morpheus. He's tried everything from Christopher Nolan dialogue to Virus metaphors, and can't seem to get the codes. Why wouldn't he ask him directly? They've administered a truth serum at this point, so why the f*ck are you beating around the bush?

This is, of course, to give Trinity and Neo plenty of time to plan a full scale assault mission between the two of them-- which leads to the coolest f*cking scene in this movie; known simply as the lobby fight.

This was so cool for 1999. So cool.

So in any case, they go up on the roof to hijack a helicopter, Neo gets into a gunfight with an Agent, somehow manages to dodge all his moves in a gravity-defying moment of sheer bullet-time, and Trinity shoots an Agent point blank-- becoming the first person to ever kill an Agent, which is glossed over.

They hijack the helicopter due to Trinity downloading the autotuned "Let's Go Fly A Kite" helicopter program from MatriTunes, streamed by Tank, and Neo saves Morpheus. How? By firing directly into the closed space he's in with a incredibly inaccurate machine gun mounted on the helicopter. Y'know, in order to shoot the Agents. Because if you believe hard enough, you won't kill your mentor with a piece of machinery the size of Michael Bay's CGI boner.

Okay, to be fair. One tenth the size.

Some other sh*t happens, Neo begins to awaken his powers as the one by saving Morpheus and Trinity by somehow halting the descent of a helicopter by pulling on a long strip of parachute cord, simultaneously saving his titular love interest and his last remaining disciple. They book it out of there, Smith and the other Agents possess new people within the Matrix (did I mention they could do that? Well, they can. Anyone who isn't unplugged, because, you know, you can download Minesweeper onto a triple A battery) and give chase. Morpheus and Trinity get teleported out through the hardlines and back into the real world, but not before Smith prevents Neo's escape, resulting in an underground subway fight where Neo kills Smith with a train.

Dumb ways to die, so many dumb ways to die~

So that's the end of it, right? WRONG. Smith possesses someone inside the train, and so do the other two unimportant Agents who we will never see again after this movie ends. There's a chase scene in the Matrix, as in the real world a bunch of sentinels-- squid looking things whose only jobs are to seek and destroy-- home in on the Nebuchadnezzar, Morpheus refusing to pull the plug on Neo and kill the signal that's giving them away, fearing that he would lose The One. There's a chase, several more people are possessed, and by the end of it, Neo is shot in the chest by Agent Smith. Gratuitously. Man, we thought Hugo as V could hold a grudge.

Neo is very dead at this point, and Morpheus is having a moment of internal screeching while the Sentinels bore their way into the ship. Trinity does some monologue bullcrap, tells Neo that her prophecy was that she would fall in love with the One (doesn't everyone have their own The One?) and then says he can't be dead because she loves him. Wait, what? When was this even implied? Was this a real relationship? I seem to remember her wanting him to succeed in a couple of scenes, and awkward attempts at seeming like a human being, and a whole lot of... inappropriate closeness, but when did she fall in love with this guy?

Anyway, she kisses him, and surprise! He's alive. Why does Hollywood have a corpse-kissing fetish? Why does kissing a corpse have the Lazarus effect on technopunk messiahs? If you're looking for the answer, something tells me you can find it in the end of The Sopranos.

This is meant to be black comedy.

Neo comes back and faces the Agents, before Smith charges him. Neo humors him like one would humor a child playing Spider-Man, before slamming him in the sternum so hard he flies back twenty feet and hits the deck. Neo dives straight into him and explodes him from the inside out. I am not kidding. How, you may ask? Well, I'm not gonna ruin it with a gif. Go YouTube the end of The Matrix. It is absolutely ridiculous.

Remember how I mentioned that problem I had with the Oracle's prophecy? Well, at this point in time, I realized that Neo wasn't really the one until he died-- and when he was revived by Trinity, he had entered into his next life. So in a way, the Oracle was right. This, of course, means that fate is still a thing. F*ck this message.

Neo makes it in time, wakes up in the real world just before the entire crew is turned into squid hors d'ourves, and Tank deploys an electromagnetic pulse-- killing the techno squids before they played sushi turnaround. The movie ends with Neo's soliloquy about how he was going to show the people still trapped in the Matrix "what you don't want them to see": meaning, of course, the sequels to this movie. He flies up into the camera in an incredibly dated green screen effect, and the movie ends with Rage Against the Machine's Wake Up.

I will always remember this scene as a simpler time. When sunglasses were cool to wear and trench-coats didn't mean restraining orders.

That's the Matrix, ladies and gents. This movie was my first choice as a reviewer, as much as I am dying to do the next one-- and that reason is because of a revelation I had recently in viewing it. The Matrix is about a hero with no personality who falls in love with the ideal woman-- a kickass leather-clad dominatrix with a heart of gold, and through a sacrifice that meant nothing and no plot-crucial character flaws to speak of, becomes the only hope for humanity's continued survival.

Conceptually, this movie does for guys what Twilight did for women.

Before you throw tomatoes at me and call me names, think about it. Twilight was a series of romance books meant to pander to women. The protagonist is a blank slate named Bella who falls in love with a chiseled  emotionless man-- a youth eternal Adonis, if you will-- and ends up immersed in this other world with characters we need not care about, besides a couple of werewolves or vampires. I think. She's different than everyone else, and ends up saving eeeeveryone she cares about, with a few minor exceptions.

How is Neo any different? Well, guys, I can give you my take on it: timing. Men instinctively hate anything that women get nuts over, from One Direction to Magic Mike. Why? Because we feel threatened. Don't get me wrong, Twilight is generally terrible, but it's harmless-- and quite evidently sculpted as feminine fanservice. Why else would Lautner take his shirt off a million times? In the same way, though, The Matrix is male fan service at it's finest. Senseless violence, constant death that we don't have to feel concerned about, guys surviving after receiving twenty degree burns to the stomach, and most importantly, Trinity's leather clad badonk. This movie is testosterone catnip, the same way Twilight is estrogen laurel leaves. It keeps us happy the same way Nic Cage using a broken crane as the world's biggest chainsaw in Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance keeps us happy-- and I'm guessing the same could be said about Twilight and the Titanic for people of the fairer sex. 

It is not my intention to discriminate, far from it. It is my intention to point out the double standard. We can laud The Matrix as a bastion of special effects and philosophical ingenuity, but once we take that away, we are left with how guys perceive Twilight-- bland spaghetti that's been under cooked. 

That's it for this week. If you decide to take the metaphorical red pill and/or drink the kool-aid, you can join me as I ramble on about a movie I can't say a bad thing about-- but will desperately try to. If you take the blue pill, you can move on with your life, and forget this little escapade ever happened. As for the former...

Let's get deeper into this rabbit hole, shall we?

If you liked this review, don't be afraid to stroke my ego a little-- it ain't suffering from psychosomatic dwarfism, but it won't hurt, either. I'm a Silver Screen Sardonic, and that's all, folks.