Bullet Time

This is my The Matrix 1999 review, and I’m going to be straight about it: I’ve been to see it four or five times already and I’d go again tonight. It came out on 31 March and I watched it the week it opened, then kept finding reasons to go back to the cinema. I absolutely loved it, everything about it. It’s a 5 out of 5 for me, easily, iconic and inspiring and one of those films that makes you want to tell everyone you know to go and see it. I’ve been trying to work out how to explain why it got to me so much, and I keep ending up at the same answer, which is that nothing else out there is doing what this does.

What is the Matrix?

It started with the ads, which were so cryptic. They were just a green screen of falling code like a running screensaver and the words “What is the Matrix?” and that was it. No story, no big speech, nobody explaining what it was or who was in it, and I remember being completely curious and having no idea what I was walking into. That’s rare with a film now, where the trailer usually shows you the whole thing and the best jokes, and it couldn’t be further from the posters and toys piling up everywhere for The Phantom Menace, which nobody needed to be curious about.

Then you sit down in the cinema and Keanu Reeves is a software programmer called Thomas Anderson who’s a hacker by night, going by Neo, and somebody is leaving messages on his screen telling him to follow the white rabbit, the same creepy trick of a computer that suddenly knows who you are that Doctor Who pulled with the wi-fi in The Bells of Saint John. From that point I was hooked, and I stayed hooked for the whole two hours and a bit. He’s just a regular guy in a dull job in a dull office, and the film takes its time making you believe that, so that when things start going wrong around him you’re as lost as he is. Agent Smith and the other Agents turn up early on, and there’s something chilling about the way they talk. You can tell straight away they’re not people you can argue with.

The story so far: Neo and the white rabbit

Here’s how it starts, for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Neo, living a double life as a hacker, gets a message on his screen that tells him to wake up, and then another that tells him to follow the white rabbit. A knock at the door sends him to a club, where a girl with a tattoo of a white rabbit leads him to Trinity, who tells him that the Matrix has him and that someone called Morpheus is looking for him. Trinity is a hacker he’s admired for years, and she’s a lot cooler in person than he expected, and he admits he’d always assumed she was a guy. The next day at the office, a phone gets delivered to his desk and Morpheus is on the other end, talking him through how to dodge the Agents coming down the corridor, right up to the point where he’s asked to climb out onto a ledge high above the street and can’t do it.

So the Agents take him in for questioning. Smith tells him he’s living two lives and only one of them has a future, and he makes him an offer, to help them catch Morpheus, and when Neo refuses and asks for his phone call he finds that his mouth has been sealed shut. That’s a creepy and brilliant scene, with a bug dropped into his body that he has to have removed by Trinity’s crew, in the back of a car under a bridge in the rain. And it’s the moment he starts to realise that the whole thing is real, and that he’s already in way over his head.

Taking the red pill

The first act is all about not knowing what’s going on, and it works because it holds that feeling for so long. Neo gets pulled towards Trinity and then towards Morpheus, and Morpheus gives him the choice: the blue pill, and he goes back to normal life, or the red pill, and he finds out how deep it goes. There’s a lot of tension in that scene, with the two of them sitting there across from each other and the whole thing resting on one decision. You’re right there in the choice with him. Then a mirror melts and creeps up his arm, and Agent Smith and the others are chasing him through a world that looks perfectly normal but feels wrong, like something’s off about the walls.

Then he wakes up in a pod, and finding out that the world he’s been living in is a simulation, and that people are being farmed for energy by machines, hit me properly the first time I sat through it. It’s the kind of reveal that changes how you look at everything that came before it. The idea of a whole world that isn’t real turns up in odd places: Resident Evil: Retribution is set in a facility full of fake cities, and Doctor Who got there with the computer-stored people in Forest of the Dead, and I loved sitting there going back over the scenes to see what had been hiding in plain sight. Zion, the last human city, sits out there as the reason any of it matters, and the idea that there are people fighting to wake everybody else up gave the whole thing real stakes. After that the training sequences are a joy, with Neo learning things in seconds that should take years, the jump program that he doesn’t make, the woman in the red dress that Mouse is so proud of, and the Oracle in her kitchen baking cookies, telling him not to worry about the vase a second before he knocks it over, and telling him he isn’t the One.

The crew and the betrayal

After that it never lets up and it never feels like homework either. Morpheus’s crew on the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar is a good bunch, with Tank and Dozer and Apoc and Switch and Mouse each getting a bit of character, so you care when things start going wrong for them. And then Cypher sells everyone out to Smith for a steak and a return to the simulation, and it made me properly angry in the cinema. He kills several of the crew while they’re plugged in and helpless, and Morpheus gets captured, and suddenly it isn’t a cool adventure any more, it’s a rescue. The action in it is just as good as the ideas, which isn’t something you can say about many sci-fi films, because usually it’s one or the other.

And somehow it manages to be cool and make you think at the same time. It’s a rare sci-fi film that does both, and the other one that comes to mind is Dune (1984), which at least tries to cram a whole book of ideas into one film. It’s a film that gives you plenty to think about on the way home. The look of it helps too, with that green tint over the Matrix and the long black coats and the sunglasses, and the real world in the ship all cold greys and blues by comparison. It’s got a style all of its own, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

The dojo, the subway and the rooftop

The fight against Morpheus in the dojo is one I could watch on a loop. It’s two people who are both faster than anyone should be, trading blows in a space where nothing is real, and every move is teaching Neo something about what he can do. The wire work and the choreography are on another level to the usual Hollywood fight, and it’s the first time I’ve seen kung fu done like that on a big screen in a film with this kind of budget. The subway fight with Agent Smith is the other one I keep coming back to, because it’s the first time Neo is up against someone who can actually hurt him, and you feel every hit. So many good things sit in that stretch of the film that I couldn’t pick a favourite if you made me.

Then there’s the bullet time on top of the building, with the helicopter sequence that follows it. I went back to see that again and again, and I still can’t get over how the camera swings right around Neo while he’s bending backwards and the bullets are streaking past him in slow motion. I’d never seen anything like it. The lobby shootout and the helicopter would be the high point of most films, and here they’re just part of the run, one thing after another. When Smith shoots Neo in the hallway and Trinity’s the reason he comes back, that landed for me too, and I loved the ending where he promises to show everyone a world without rules. It was a massive hit, and I understand why.

It’s hard to explain how much the film changed what I thought a big sci-fi action film could be. I’d gone in expecting a good time and I got a good time, but I also got a world I wanted to keep thinking about long after the credits. The cast are all spot on, from Keanu Reeves as the lost hacker to Laurence Fishburne as the calm, certain Morpheus and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity, who’s every bit as capable as anyone on screen. Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith is the cold, polite voice you can’t argue with, and he’s a villain I couldn’t take my eyes off. Every one of them gets a moment, and every moment lands.

What I made of it

I’ve seen a lot of films, and I can honestly say I’ve never come out of one with the feeling this one left me with. It’s a smart film that doesn’t talk down to you, a loud action film that gives you something to chew on, and a love story and an adventure rolled into one. Everything in it feels thought out, from the way the Agents move to the colour of the world inside the Matrix. Even the little things are there for a reason, like the black cat that walks past a doorway twice, which Trinity tells Neo is a glitch, a sign that the machines have changed something, and it’s the moment the ambush starts. And the love story doesn’t get in the way of the rest of it, because Trinity is right in the middle of the action the whole time and she’s the one who goes back in for Morpheus with him.

It’s a 5 out of 5, and it’d be a 10 if I could. I can’t imagine a better way to spend two hours, and I can’t wait to see what comes next. If you haven’t seen it, go. If you have, go again. Rating: 5 out of 5. Loved it, and I’m already planning the next trip back.

If Morpheus had held out both pills to you, which one would you have taken, and do you think Cypher had a point? Tell me in the comments.