There’s a new Matrix film coming, and people are excited. I get it; the original is beloved, and all our broken culture can produce is pastiche now, so we might as well play the hits. What I don’t get, and have wondered about for a long time, is why the original is beloved. To me, everything about it looks like an embarrassing relic, a mishmash of individual elements that have all aged poorly. And while I write this knowing that people will see it as an expression of contrarianism, I myself don’t feel like it’s provocative or trolling at all. In fact I can’t really understand why my position isn’t the default; it all feels so reasonable to me. Like, if The Matrix was a guy, he’d be the type of guy who calls The Boondock Saints his favorite movie, you know what I mean? The kind who’d smoke salvia he bought at gas stations. The kind to get catalogs for swords in the mail. A tryhard dork, in other words, someone self-consciously “edgy.” And yet people seem to love this guy!
From my vantage point, it seems the most conventional position is that the original Matrix film is a pop culture masterpiece, while the sequels were disappointing or awful. There’s another subset of fans that thinks Reloaded is actually very strong and unjustly derided due to its proximity to Revolutions, which is legitimately bad. And then of course there is the fringe that insists they’re all amazing. But it doesn’t seem like many people question the classic status of the first. It’s canon, part of the crazy-fertile 1999 movie boom. Its influence on visual effects, fight scene choreography, and how action is shot is legendary, and this influence spilled over into changing the basic visual architecture of video games. Most everybody I know loves it, and it really is the film that the Wachowski sisters hang their reputation on. (I know Speed Racer has its defenders, but I think you’ve gotta call this a disappointing filmography, 20 years later.) Certainly there have been few movies that more effectively defined a particular moment in culture, giving the audience something they didn’t know they were missing. I don’t begrudge The Matrix its status as a cultural touchstone.
But it’s just so… bad. Embarrassingly bad. Everything about it seems calculated to be maximally adolescent, which is fine if we’re talking about the latest sequel to The Kissing Booth but less attractive when we’re talking about an R-rated blockbuster that is just bursting with deep things it wants to say. Many people will concede that the series is all about style over substance, making it harder to swallow that no one wants to admit how f*cking dumb the style looks. The movie part of the movie is bad; the legendary aesthetics are even worse.
Look at these f*ckers:
If these three walked by me I’d point them to the nearest vampire rave, or perhaps try to buy some molly off of them. I know Hot Topic is a clichéd reference in this context but, honestly, where else would these people shop? I guess the Etsy stores that are frequented by anxious 47-year-old women who have recently rebranded as witches. Everything about the movie’s look seemed dated to me the very day I went to the theater. Doesn’t this look like some 11-year-old’s vision of what cool people look like? You’re indoors! Take your sunglasses off! Who walks around in all-black, all-leather everything? Can you imagine how they must smell on a warm day? I get that some people now call this all deliberately over-the-top, say that it’s poking fun at itself, insist that it’s supposed to look a little ridiculous. But I don’t think I got any sense that the visual style was supposed to be silly as a 17 year old, or in the half-dozen times I’ve seen it in the past 20 years, nor from watching it again recently. The way it’s shot and framed and presented all suggests that the movie and its makers think it all looks really, sincerely cool. Why did Morpheus steal the Joker’s suit?
I have to admit, I literally lol'd when he started roasting the movie's style and posted the picture, it is pretty cringe in retrospect.