


It’s a kung-fu movie, choreographed by an iconic Chinese martial arts legend, Woo-Ping Yuen. To be clear, Matrix churns through the staples of Eastern martial arts film, just one that’s wildly subversive considering the surroundings. It’s unavoidable, lest a large market audience find themselves dumbfounded.Įven without seeing The Matrix, the nigh maddening influence on pop culture and action cinema still festers in studio cinema

The rest is Reeves asking “What’s that?” repetitively, souring the intellectualism of the script. “The spoon isn’t real,” says a small child, convincing Anderson – or Neo in this future – of the world’s open possibilities. The Bible, retconned, with a hearty dose of exposition to explain it all. Anderson turns into a Christ figure, a singular, all-powerful, all-knowing rebel against a vicious, well-dressed authority. More post- Terminator where the machines undoubtedly won, and the fragile fragments of resistance await a savior. A plainly named cubicle slave Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) leads a band of rebels through actual reality, some 200 years in the future after machines overtook us all. It’s wild and philosophically speculative. To consider such an escape – even one where sci-fi suggests a false existence – was a sensation. The Matrix serves a Gen X fantasy, where the humdrum beginnings of online connectivity led to ponderous, screen-staring corporate office gigs. Despite this though, The Matrix doesn’t date itself. Dial up and CRT monitors, pay phones lining sidewalks and cell phones that look like bricks. To revisit The Matrix is to revisit Precambrian internet tech.
