It’s a surprisingly stirring little teaser.Īlas, my partner was not moved. “Welcome to the real world,” Morpheus says. The question, then, is this: Ten years later, what does The Matrix mean to someone who was there for the ride back in 1999?įor my part, some of my contrived aloofness and indifference dissipated as soon as the DVD menu loaded chaotic strings of binary code-like symbols give way to Lawrence Fishburn’s Morpheus looking down at the viewer as if the viewer is waking from a dream.
#I have no mouth and i must scream am meaning movie#
Remember how you’d watch a movie from the ’30s or ‘40s, and suddenly a forgotten, nonsensical gag from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon you’d seen years prior would make sense for the first time? Today, for Josh and for anyone else who has yet to see it, The Matrix would be, more than anything else, context for a series of cultural punch lines. So Josh can never come to The Matrix with the same unassuming innocence we all did in 1999 he’s got the film’s cultural baggage to contend with. (His first science fiction movie, indeed, since the maligned Johnny Mnemonic in 1995.) My buddy Josh endured the giddy Matrix hype of 1999, and he has seen the various parodies and he has surely detected, to some extent, the world’s collective disappointment at the sequels (which I may still address in a future installment of this column.) Whatever its faults or merits, much of what helped to make The Matrix become such a capital-E Event in 1999 was the low expectations with which the public regarded what was, let us not forget, a science fiction movie starring Keanu Reeves. To look back at The Matrix, I reasoned, might help me to grapple with my embarrassment at having so fawningly celebrated it in 1999 to study its sequels, one of which I barely remember and the other I’ve yet to see… why, wouldn’t that give me a sense of how my friend Josh might feel if he finally opts to give The Matrix a chance? Still, part of what was so intriguing for me about revisiting the Star Wars franchise was that I did so from the perspective of an outsider I had never been enamored with the original trilogy like most people, and I didn’t see Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith until this year. The challenge struck me as daunting and tiresome, for each of the filmmaking innovations from the first Matrix movie had grown stale sometime around 2001 the “bullet time” effect quickly became not merely a tired crutch but an outright punch line (see the Shrek and Scary Movie series.) Further, the sequel, 2003’s Matrix Reloaded (now as old as Titanic and Men in Black were when Matrix Reloaded was first released) was such a deflating experience for me that I never found the will to complete the trilogy by watching Matrix Revolutions, also released in 2003. More recently, another friend, with the poor taste to have enjoyed my bloated, meandering study of the six Star Wars movies, suggested I tackle the Matrix trilogy as a follow-up. “I doubt it holds up” was my hasty verdict. I was dismissive, not because I thought The Matrix was a bad movie (I hadn’t seen it in several years, at any rate), but because I felt somewhat self-conscious about the unabashed enthusiasm I’d felt for the film in 1999. A decade later, he was curious to know whether he’d really missed much. He had refused to watch it in 1999, owing to nothing more, I suspect, than his distaste for its star, Keanu Reeves. (If you delight, as I do, in such examples of morbid mathematics, try this exercise: starting at your birth year, move backward as many years as you’ve lived, then marvel in horror at the year you reach.)Įarlier this year, my friend Josh asked me about The Matrix.
Put another way: not a single student in my third grade classroom was alive when The Matrix began its theatrical run. But consider this: when The Matrix first arrived in theaters, Tim Burton’s Batman was ten years old.
0 kommentar(er)
