Do people remember when The Matrix was not only a thing but was one of the biggest movies of its era? Back in 1999 when CGI was all the rage and summer movies were becoming pretty rancid, the Wachowski’s presented the public with this weird, cyberpunk-like action movie with people drenched in leather, saturated in this dark green color scheme, dodging bullets, and fighting off against these suit-wearing agents. It wasn’t long before people started to fall in love with this film, both in a general and critical sense. In a general world with generic people, an incredibly generic cyber hacker named Thomas Anderson, who goes by his online name, ‘’Neo’’ (played by Keanu Reeves) discovers a world-shattering revelation when he is contacted by a man who goes by the name Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne). He’s shown by Morpheus and Trinity (played by Carrie-Anne Moss) that his entire life is nothing but a fabrication that all of humanity lives in after the real earth was destroyed and overrun by machines. Now being bred in tubes and used as a power source for the machines, the rebels of this apocalypse, led by Morpheus, believe Neo is the one who will overthrow the machines and save every living being trapped inside this fictional world, also called ‘’the matrix’’, but they face resistance in the form of sentient programs within the matrix known as agents, led by Agent Smith (played by Hugo Weaving). The film was considered one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time when it was released, adored by the public and critics, won four awards at the Academy awards for the time, and even resulted in several books, comics, video games, and even two sequels being made. While people lost interest with the Matrix once the sequels showed significant faults, people seem to overlook the obvious ones that are present in an otherwise still enjoyable movie.

If there’s anything that’s been proven from all of their work, its that Lana and Lilly Wachowskis (regardless of the quality of their end products) have ambition and clearly have a love for the work that they create. Even if their movies have been hampered with several issues, they always strive to create interesting ideas and concepts within their films, and that is something to be admired and can definitely be felt here. Despite what people may expect, the concept of this film (basically that the world is not what it appears to be) has been done a lot in several other sci-fi stories or shows like Twilight Zone, but it doesn’t need to be original if they add their own spin to it, and this doesn’t feel like its specifically ripping anything off. The overall framework for this movie isn’t honestly too bad with over-the-top visuals and larger-than-life consequences mixed in with this deep-seated philosophical undertone that takes up quite a bit of the movie. While this could be preachy and pretentious (and it can be in moments), the movie does have some fairly clever analogies and representations of things that aren’t as openly spelled out as would be expected. It was one of the first mainstream action movies to get people to realize that the genre could be about something and could be allowed to have meaningful talks within it without having to only resorted to mindless action. It warrants praise for achieving this and making future action movies take similar steps, but the movie also suffers from other small complications. While the layout of the story is honestly fine and even the pacing isn’t awful, the movie does feature some pretty lame cliches, a split between action and talking that doesn’t feel smooth or well laid out, and certain themes that even for this movie seem pretty heavy-handed and not that well thought out (no movie can ever be taken seriously when ‘Keanu Reeves is the messiah’’ is the main focus).

While this movie has slight problems scattered throughout, a majority of them actually aren’t too intrusive in the grand scheme of things. As a whole, the movie does manage to hold itself together despite some of the questionably odd choices the story makes and even certain things that open up contradictions or plot-holes, but those don’t ruin things overall. The fact that a majority of the cast are about as interesting as oatmeal is a major problem. Whether it was down to the directing, writing, or acting, almost every character is completely expendable and isn’t even really worth remembering, and this is a particular problem with the leads. They are written as these lifeless shells of generic roles that they leave no defining characteristics, no element of charm, no element of uniqueness, they are the blandest characters shown in arguably any movie of this type and that real ruins a lot of the movie. While the acting definitely doesn’t help with it being stilted, lifeless and incredibly awkward, it doesn’t feel like it’s all their fault as both Reeves and Moss have proven to be pretty capable actors when given good writing and directing. The only roles that leave any sign of memorability is the villain; with Weaving’s incredibly hoaky and weird acting turning an otherwise incredibly bland character into something at least a touch more interesting, the Oracle, (played by Gloria Foster) does a pretty  job with her minimal screentime and is one of the few people in the film who comes the closest to featuring any sense of personality, and Morpheus, who’s probably the only characters with memorable lines and even an arc that feels set-up and completed come the end of the movie. A story can have great ideas and philosophies, but when you have characters this bland and a pointless romance with chemistry as weak as wet cardboard, its going to prevent things from getting really good.

For how much this movie has been parodied and referenced due to its style, look and action sequences, its surprisingly good to know that not everything has dated as embarrassingly as expected. Unfortunately, the movie is still ugly to look at on a production standpoint; no location is enjoyable to look at, either suffering from poor coloration, musty design or just not being very interesting to look at. It suffers from coming from such a dark period as the late 90s with its awful fashion sense and terrible music, but what doesn’t feel too dated is weirdly enough the special effects. The movie has a lot of CG throughout, and it’s used a lot in some of the flashier sequences, mainly the fight scenes, but either because of correct usage, having a mixture between CG and physicality, or just from having pretty great CG artist, a lot of it still doesn’t look too bad even to this day. There are some fun usages with the camerawork presented by Bill Pope and environments designed by Owen Paterson, and even when something looks fake or cheesy, it’s not too much of an issue as it still looks more impressive than a lot of CG at the time and even in some cases nowadays. What is also impressive is the handling of the actions sequences and how the physicality can really be felt in a lot of these scenes. This is mainly down to the Wachowskis having a love for Hong Kong action films and even getting famed Chinese martial arts choreographer and film director, Yuen Woo-ping, to work on the fight scenes. Each fight scene is quick and has great stunts, but it also has that flashy over-the-top sensibility that feels commonplace in a typical marital arts movie. It results in a playfully fun style of action, and they turn out pretty nicely overall. One of the defining cliches that have come from this franchise as a whole is its needlessly long-winded dialogue and its very drawn-out way of saying something obvious, and thankfully this movie doesn’t suffer as strongly as its sequels do. While this one still has a lot of talking, it is trying to further something and isn’t just mindless talking for the sake of mindless talking.

For what it is, The Matrix honestly could have turned out a lot worst when its shown how the franchise turned out. It’s pretty evident that it was not meant to be a trilogy, yet it was forced to after it became such a success, because on its own, this movie does have some pretty good things about it. It runs with its concept (even if it’s not entirely original), it has some nice stunt-work and fights scenes with CG that has surprisingly not dated too badly, and it managed to reshape how action movies nowadays operate as the old-fashion method of ‘no thinking, only kill’ doesn’t really have that much of a presence anymore. The movie does still have its little issues and the characters are 100% the killing factor of this movie (especially the leads), but otherwise, it’s not too terrible a movie to return to. Put on your pointless shades in the dark and walk around in your obviously uncomfortable leather to revisit a film that’s’ green in all the wrong places, but flashy in all the right ones.

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