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The Matrix hacked Hollywood, upgrading American action with tricks from abroad


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The Matrix (1999)
We’ve been seeing some weird shit happen in the world lately. Donald Trump, trailing badly in the polls and making an ass of himself for the entire election season, was somehow elected president. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series in game seven, in extra innings, after a ninth-inning rain delay. The Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 game lead and lost in the NBA Finals. The New England Patriots won the Super Bowl in overtime after making a historic, unprecedented late-game comeback. The Oscars ended with a wild clusterfuck—one movie announced for Best Picture before someone rushed out to say that it was a mistake, that it was really supposed to go to another movie. Any one of those events would’ve been weird. Taken together, they’re enough to leave your head spinning. And as a result, a theory has been floating around online in recent months: We’re really programs, living in a computer simulation, and someone is fucking around with the algorithm.

I was all set to laugh that idea off until some troubling news emerged from Hollywood last month: Warner Bros. wants to reboot The Matrix. Despite the massive, overwhelming collective groan at that news, rumors have been flying around. Maybe it’ll be a prequel. Maybe it’ll have Michael B. Jordan as the younger version of Morpheus. Maybe they’re laying the ground for another whole series of Matrix movies. This shit was too much. Because the idea of rebooting The Matrix is the sort of thing that could only happen in the actual Matrix.

The Matrix, the original 1999 movie, was a glitch in the Matrix, a massive fluke of a blockbuster, a movie that should’ve never been allowed to exist that ended up grossing more money worldwide than any other movie that year. The Matrix was a big-budget studio sci-fi movie built around a brain-fucking philosophical premise, one that sent audiences scurrying out of multiplexes and back into malls wondering whether they were still breathing actual air, whether the blinking store lights around them were just designed to keep them docile. Its characters were barely characters; instead, they were stand-ins for ideas about the fundamental human struggle against mass control. And it introduced the idea that fights in Hollywood movies could be every bit the equal of the insanity coming out of Hong Kong, that American movie stars could and should be expected to spend months training in the art of wire-fu before cameras even rolled.

The movie’s bugged-out premise, it turned out, was vague and fluid enough that just about anyone could find something in it to use, that it could prop up existing belief systems just as easily as it undermined them. Case in point: The internet shitbags of the men’s rights movement have grabbed the movie and run with it, taking the red pill/blue pill scene as a metaphor for their own paranoid visions of a massive, sweeping feminist conspiracy. At the same time, there’s compelling evidence that the whole movie is about gender dysphoria; after all, the two Wachowski siblings who directed the movie came out as transgender years later. The Matrix can’t be both a movie about the men’s rights movement and about trans identity, but it resonated with enough people that it’s taken on both of those meanings, and plenty more besides.

The movie wasn’t a completely original vision or anything. Ideas about reality as a construct had been floating around, in science fiction and elsewhere, for decades. The whole idea that you’re actually a special person, one who’s been oppressed by a world that doesn’t understand your brilliance, is one of the great fictional tropes. The characters in the movie keep making Lewis Carroll references, but it’s not just Wonderland; it’s also Narnia, Hogwarts, the X-Mansion.

More directly, the legendary comic writer Grant Morrison has complained that the movie ripped off his series The Invisibles, and it also took obvious influence from the original anime Ghost In The Shell. The Wachowskis paid direct homage to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in the movie; Keanu Reeves hid computer discs in a hollowed-out copy of one of his books. A year before The Matrix, the movie Dark City had drawn on similar aesthetics to play around with similar ideas. But all those things combined didn’t blow minds the way The Matrix did in just its first week of release. It’s hard to overstate what an exciting moviegoing experience The Matrix was. The trailers were cool, so people went in blind, with no idea what to expect. And we walked out dazed and shaken and energized. It was really something.


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That was, in a word, WHOA-inspiring. :) Nah, i disagree. This has been happening since before The Matrix.

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