Matrix

From LoveToKnow Sci-Fi

Is This Real?

The Matrix explores a concept every angsty teen has grappled with at some time or another - what if everything I see around me is just an illusion created in my mind? For some, it can be the beginning of a mental break with reality. For others, it can form the basis of a blockbuster's screenplay.

Redefining Action

The Matrix was released in 1999 and action films were unalterably changed. Starring Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson aka Neo, Lawrence Fishburne as Morpheus, and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity, it was one of the most talked about films of the year, and inserted a number of concepts into the culture. Even people who have never seen the movie, for instance, know what a choice between the red pill and the blue pill means.

Life is an Illusion

It's a zen concept - the transitory, illusory nature of the life that we think we're living. Yet for Thomas Anderson, it becomes dramatically illustrated. Living an everyday life and a secret online life as hacker Neo, he discovers another reality, above the one he thinks he knows. In this reality, it is not 1999 as he believed, but several hundred years hence. He only goes to work at his job in an elaborately constructed virtual reality, much like the Trek franchise's holodecks.

Everyone he interacts with is similarly fooled into thinking they are living a real life, but in reality, they are encased in tanks, living a virtual life while world-ruling machinery siphons off their energy. The entire human population has become nothing more than a collection of batteries to fuel the life of the machines, and what Neo thought was life is just a diversion the machines constructed to keep the 'fuel' happy and contented.

Rage Against the Machine

Neo is offered a choice by Morpheus; the red pill or the blue pill. If he chooses the blue pill, nothing will apparently happen - he will go on with his life as it currently exists, and forget Morpheus. If he takes the red pill, his body in its confinement will wake up, and he will drop out of the virtual reality most people live in and into reality.

He chooses the red pill and discovers a bleak and barren earth controlled entirely by the machines that rebelled and enslaved humanity. A tiny band of humans outside the matrix wage guerilla war in a seemingly hopeless effort to free humanity from captivity. They can jack into the matrix to interact with other humans and machine-created apparent humans.

Every Effect a Special Effect

It is the scenes in which the rebels interact with the machine avatars in virtual reality that set this movie apart from other action-adventures of the nineties. The machine avatars have control over reality, so they are inhumanly unstoppable. But Neo learns that he too can bend virtual reality to his own will, and bullets stop in mid-air, people fly over the heads of their opponents... in short, there is no limit to what you can do when you rule the laws of physics.

The Matrix probably had as much influence on fashion as on the action genre. The 'look' is a kind of fin de siecle future-dystopic post-Goth of long black coats that swing when you walk, leather catsuits and impenetrable dark shades.