Matrix Trilogy

As far as I know, here in the year 2008, nobody else has written anything about these Matrix movies ever, anywhere, so I’ll enjoy taking first analytical crack at one of my favourite action trilogies of all time.

These films are one of those weird cases of mish mashing lots of genres together combined with taking on really pretentious themes and it actually coming out a great movie series. The main theme is the nature of reality, and especially the first two films have a unique structure and scene flow designed to explore this theme in full Hitchcockian mindfuckery. The third one doesn’t really question the nature of reality, it’s mostly about two dudes mud wrestling, but Aristotle would think that was cool too.

The first half of the first film has a really unique structure to fully explore the nature of reality through the nature of dreams. The film opens with a pretty confusing scene where we meet an attractive lady named Trinity. She’s well spoken and well dressed all in a shiny catsuit and obviously doing some hacking on a computer, but doing it all in a dodgy hotel that doesn’t really fit with her style. There’s a bunch of local cops out front waiting to bust her but then a bunch of agents who look like Feds show up and we get a typical pissing contest over jurisdiction.

Some cops burst in on her and she does a bunch of ninja moves and escapes to neighbouring street and begins to approach a telephone cabin where the phone is ringing. What looks like a dump truck passing by suddenly screeches to a halt, turns around and starts charging Trinity. She does the weirdest thing possible by dashing for the telephone cabin. AAA won’t help you here, sweetheart. The dump truck smashes the telephone cabin but she’s disappeared. Then the guys we thought were Feds all pile out of the dump truck and start talking to each other. A minute ago these Feds were arguing with local cops about jurisdiction but now they’re driving garbage truck? That’s clearly a municipal service vehicle.

But then we cut to this guy Thomas A. Anderson (played by Keanu Reeves) waking up and we figure we were just seeing his dream. It’s got all the typical elements of a regular guy’s dream: sexy ninja, contempt for authority figures, and we figure this Anderson guy is probably just a big Dr. Who fan and that’s why dreams about magic telephone cabins. We later find out that he helps his landlady carry out her garbage, so it would also make sense that he would dream about a dump truck killing somebody since garbage duty is probably a task he laments. The second film flips this in that it also starts with an elaborate action sequence starring Trinity, but in the second film it actually does turn out to be a dream that he’s having!

He gets a knock at his door and it seems that Anderson has some sort of night business designing wedding invitations or something because a goth guy comes by and Anderson gives him a disk in exchange for cash. Anderson obviously doesn’t understand the value of referrals since he tells the guy to forget where he got the disk. It turns out Thomas A. Anderson’s friends and clients don’t call him Tommy or T ‘n A or Andy or anything that seems like a derivative of his name, they all call him Neo.

The clients who dropped by his house invites him to hang out at a goth S&M club, where Neo is approached by Trinity and they have a surreal vague conversation which is interrupted by….. you guessed it: a cut to Neo waking up! So did he wake from a dream into another dream? Is he really awake now?

He gets hauled out of work by the Feds who interrogate him about an alleged associate he has named Morpheus. Since these movies are all cryptic and full of philosophical questions you think the agents have come up with their own version of ‘If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound?’ when they ask Neo ‘What good is a phone call if you’re unable to speak?’, but it turns out they’re not as into philosophy as everybody else and they’re actually speaking literally. We get a wacky moment of where Neo’s mouth seals up and they implant a larvae in his belly. Then cut to another shot of Neo waking up!

Narratively this for the best. Though I would’ve liked some scenes of Neo walking home and pausing in front of any reflective surface to lift up his shirt and see if he could see the larvae. Then maybe him overdosing on Imodium and tequila trying to flush the larvae out of his system, then paying a boxer to punch him in the gut. But I think the Wachowskis knew best in omitting these types of scenes.

At this point, the movie is quickly turning into a psychological Escher drawing. At least in the next scene Neo says he thought that part with the larvae was just a dream so we know he’s as baffled by all this as the rest of us and we’re thinking maybe he’s just got an overactive imagination like Calvin and Hobbes or that dude in Science of Sleep. He gets a call and goes for ride with Trinity and her friends, Apoc and Switch. We get another moment where think people are speaking figuratively when Neo is freaked out and asks to get out of the car. Trinity encourages him to stay saying “You’ve been down that road before, Neo, and you know exactly where it ends.” Like I said, we think she’s speaking figuratively about paths of life etc. but then they actually cut to a shot of the road and it turns out they’re speaking literally about the street they are physically on, which presumably leads to a Chuck E. Cheese Restaurant or somewhere lame.

Again, the development of the theme of reality versus dreams, and figurative speaking versus literal speaking.

The car ride with Trinity’s crew leads them to an old house where we meet Morpheus. He says a bunch of confusing shit then offers Neo pills. Neo does the sensible thing and takes drugs from a confusing guy who only seems to have read Alice and Wonderland and wears sunglasses at night indoors and hangs out in dilapidated abandoned buildings. Then we get the weirdest wake up of the whole series: Neo wakes up as a giant baby. And I don’t’ mean he’s a big baby in the sense of a manchild character in a Kevin Smith movie who accepts some adult responsibilities but is still obsessed with immature pursuits like comic books and dirty jokes. I mean he’s a full-grown man with no hair anywhere on his body sleeping naked in a giant artificial womb complete with metallic umbilical cord.

Then Morpheus picks up Neo in his spaceship and we finally start getting some answers. Morpheus tells Neo that his whole life up until this point has been a videogame called The Matrix, like The Sims, only they probably don’t have The Sims in The Matrix because that’s like showing movies set on airplanes as in-flight movies. I think that they should have at least tried this explanation before offering Neo the pills and if he said “Huh?” three times, then liberate him. But Morpheus and his crew seem to feel it’s easier to show than tell, and they’re also biased since they feel everybody should be free from The Matrix.

Morpheus uses an obnoxious level of references to the book Alice in Wonderland, but when we see that the real world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland it’s hard to imagine that such a book would be kept in print. It turns out that Alice in Wonderland was just something Morpheus was obsessed with that week, because in the sequels he completely stops referencing it. He probably moved onto Judy Bloom or Eloise or somebody just told him to cut it out. Niobi probably told him it made him look like a pederast; she’s blunt like that. In fact, she probably said it to him right before he made that big speech to the people of Zion and it just kinda threw him off and that’s why his delivery was so stilted. He probably had a bunch of Alice in Wonderland references ready to inspire the crowd then Niobi said “Psssst, if you keep quoting that kids book people will think you’re a pedophile.” And so he improvised a Cyrus from The Warriors homage.

The few humans not permanently hooked up to The Matrix ride around in crappy flying submarines chatting about prophecies and Tasty Wheat. We don’t know this during the first movie, but it turns out the crew of Morpheus’s ship (called ‘The Nebuchadnezzar’ because ‘Ol’ Betsy’ was taken) represent few of the only people left in the world with anything remotely resembling a sense of humour. In the sequels we get to see Zion, the last human city, and find out that almost everybody there speaks in stoic platitudes and abstract ultimatums.

Morpheus introduces us to the crew, we already know Trinity but she does a cool little ode to Flashdance by taking off a welder’s mask and cocking her head flirtatiously. There’s Switch and Apoc and we also meet the ship’s two operators Tank and Dozer. These guys introduce each other as brothers and I did a bit of a doubletake because Dozer is clearly black and Tank looks like a latino. I figured there was just something wrong with my eyes but then later in the movie Tank actually says “Neo, this is loco!” He didn’t add “esse” or “muchacho” on end, but that ‘loco’ was enough to clinch it. I think you must lose your membership in the Latino Screen Actors Union if you use the English words for loco, chica, Diablo, amigo, or adios.

So I figured this must have some sort of significance that two brothers can be different races and that was supposed to make me feel like a racist or something, but then in the second movie we meet the third brother, Link, and that guy is also black. If they’d made him Asian or white I would’ve still been wondering what the significance was, but now I think this actor must’ve blackmailed somebody into getting this part or something.

This actor really bugs me every time I watch this movie. His delivery always seems to run opposite of what the dialogue is supposed to be saying. When he’s proudly introducing himself, he seems cautious. When he’s expressing that he’s impressed by Neo he sounds like he’s laughing sadistically. When he talks about Zion, his loving home, he sounds disappointed. And on that note, I want to add that he introduces himself as “a genuine child of Zion”. I mean, Zion is already a somewhat pretentious sounding place, but even if you introduced yourself as a “genuine child of West Oakville” you’d still come across as putting on airs. So yeah, I don’t like Tank.

But I don’t think the Wachowski Brothers liked him either. They seem to edit the movie to make him look like an idiot who thinks he’s cool. Especially this little move he does when he jumps into his pilot chair and lets out a creepy squeal. Another weird thing is that he’s alive at the end of the movie but in the sequel they say he died. He got zapped with an electrogun, but seemed okay. He probably died of tetanus considering how The Nebuchadnezzar looks. Morpheus clearly wasn’t putting enough manpower on rust removal duty. Rumour is that the actor asked for all sorts of money. I would’ve put something in the sequel script to spite him and ruin his character’s legacy like have Link say “Tank died trying to plug his rectum into The Matrix.” But the Wachowskis are more mature than that.

We also meet a guy named Cypher who chugs engine degreaser like it was moonshine. Neo may be the Hitchcockian everyman of this odyssey, but this Cypher guy is just an everyman. We identify with him because he likes steak and he’s an assman (this is shown in a shot on The Nebuchadnezzar where they cut back to Cypher just to show him cock his head around and stare at Trinity’s bum). So it seems kinduva shame to have him get killed by a douchebag like Tank. I know Cypher was selling out Morpheus to the agents, but the guy had personality, at least let Switch waste him.

I like Switch, she’s a great lesbian sidekick in the long tradition of action movie lesbian sidekicks going back to Streets of Fire. Everybody else wears black, she wears white. And she’s got a sly wit. Anyway, this Cypher guy is a good actor. There’s part where he’s setting up a secret meeting with the agents and Neo walks in on him and he does that whole you-walked-in-me-looking-at-porn-but-I’ll-discreetly-minimize-the-window-and-hope-you-didn’t-catch-it face perfectly.

It turns out Neo isn’t just another guy they’re freeing from The Matrix, he’s the possible saviour of humanity. So they begin training him to be the ultimate philosopher-brawler. They can quickly upload chunks of knowledge directly into his brain through the plug in the back of his head while he sits in a dentist’s chair. Tank has a bunch of disks with groups of knowledge and skills like fighting, helicopter piloting, and probably some boring stuff like pottery, dining etiquette, dentistry and basket weaving but we only see the action-philosophy oriented stuff.

Morpheus and Neo spar in a fighting program. The Wachowskis do a subtle job of using angles that resemble a fighting game like Mortal Kombat but don’t go overboard by having giant letters on the screen saying “Fight!” or “Finish Him!” or energy bars at the top of the screen. But the artificiality of the situation is visually communicated.

Then Morpheus has this other two-for-one lesson deal where he teaches Neo how not to be distracted by boobs and how to remain cautious of others. A voluptuous lady in a tight dress walks by distracting Neo and then turns into an agent to show how in The Matrix anybody can turn into an agent. It’s kinda funny though, since all the sexy ladies in these movies are actually allies of Neo’s and the one person Agent Smith pops out of in The Matrix is a hobo. But the lesson of discipline and caution is still valid. I’m not sure Neo ever really masters his ability not to get distracted by boobs. He starts wearing some sunglasses so you can’t see where his eyes are going. And if I were sitting across a table from Monica Bellucci in that dress she wears, I’d need the shades too. Actually, now that I think of it, in The Matrix is probably the only place where you can ask if a woman’s breasts are real and have it count as a philosophical question. Because what is real?

The whole first movie is like the first issue of a comic book, establishing that Neo is The One, the saviour in a prophecy of the liberation of mankind from The Matrix. And it’s a good thing too because this Thomas A. Anderson guy wasn’t exactly a winner. When the movie takes that turn into the whole virtual-reality-kung-fu deal it’s at exactly the right time before we start getting kinda judgemental of Neo and wonder why we’re watching this movie about some narcoleptic asshole. When he went to the S&M goth club with his pals he didn’t even bother dressing up or socializing. I’m sure he at least had a fishnet tank top and some leather trousers in his closet. But he goes in his cotton shirt and just slouches alone not even bobbing his head rhythmically to the Rob Zombie megamix.

When Trinity approaches Neo at the club he’s kinda curt and hostile. He’s got a fishbowl full of condoms next to his bed, but the lack of charm he shows Trinity in the goth club makes you wonder how many of them he gets to use. Okay, not a social butterfly. Then we see him at work and he’s also a shitty employee who just sits there twiddling his thumbs and staring at his blank monitor. Both Morpheus and Smith mention he’s a taxpayer, but he accepts a wad of cash from the goth guy for that disk and I somehow doubt he declared the income. Before finding out he’s mankind’s saviour all he really had going for him was that he helped his landlady carry out her garbage and flipped a room full of agents the bird.

But he really steps up to the role of being The One. He develops a long monk-like robe and even a sly wit, though its probably lost on most of the genuine children of Zion since they all take themselves really seriously. He humours all his boring worshippers including an overzealous teenage boy and a dithery old man. But the old man’s ramblings help establish the bigger theme of the second two films: balance and co-dependency.

I wouldn’t have thought of it if they’d only made the first film, but when they bring in the theme of co-dependency and balance it makes you think about how much all the people fighting against the The Matrix really enjoy The Matrix. They got all judgemental about Cypher wanting some steak, but whenever they go into The Matrix they take full advantage of getting to wear flashy clothes. If they were truly content and committed to reality wouldn’t they wear the same cotton rags in The Matrix that they do in the Real World? And in the first one when Neo and Morpheus are sparring they all gather around and get all excited watching The Matrix like a sporting event. One little guy called Mouse even mentioned that he had cyber-sex with the NPC vixen from that distraction simulator, which I guess results in you lying there in a rusty space shit in a dentist’s chair with your raggy pants full of splooge, but hey, you’re still a revolutionary.

And in the third film Agent Smith whips The Oracle’s biscuit tray at the wall, thus breaking the tray and rendering the biscuits inedible, so the motherfucker has clearly gone too far and needs to be stopped. But the machines just don’t think abstractly enough to beat their own rogue agent, so they depend on Neo to bring an end to Smith’s little mutiny.

We also get a good political allegory about how extremes justify each other and ultimately cancel each other out with Agent Smith and Neo’s storyline. They both develop and crave more and more power over each other’s domains. Smith possesses a guy who resembles him, which is I guess is better than a hobo like in the first film, and walks around as a regular human in The Real World. Neo begins to have telekinetic power over machines even in The Real World. They set this up by showing how in the first film if you get kicked in The Matrix you bleed in The Real World and the same goes for death. But what if Trinity had an affair with Agent Smith in The Matrix, would she get pregnant and give birth to a toaster or something in The Real World? I’m not saying she’d ditch Neo or anything, but before she met him she must’ve considered it. A well-dressed well-spoken guy like Agent Smith with a good government job. Ya know, a girl gets lonely.

We also get more great stuff about the differences between man and machines. There’s one scene where Neo and Trinity have sex in Zion. A buddy of mine finds this scene disgusting because you see all their plugs, but I can actually see getting plugs and jacks in the back of your head and arms becoming a big trend among the tattoo and piercing crowd. So it doesn’t really bug me that much. But visually it’s the contrast of flesh and machine that further develops the themes.

Enjoying the reproduction act is a distinctly human phenomenon. We’re the only species that engages in the reproductive function for leisure and has actually taken measures to prevent conception. Do you think the robots get pleasure out of making another robot? Would robot porn just be footage of an assembly line or an engineers meeting? Would a robot go all the way down an assembly line making another robot and then pull out and scrap the parts at the last minute because that’s too much responsibility? Of course not.

It’s also funny how our psychology frustrates the machines when they discuss the various versions of The Matrix. They say they tried to make a version of The Matrix that was a ‘perfect world’ but humans were too pessimistic and wouldn’t accept it as a legitimate reality. The machines probably overthought it and made an overly elaborate world where we ride unicorns and live in gingerbread houses and dance across rainbows with leprechauns instead of just giving every guy a twelve-inch cock and calling it day.

The machines also have some human characteristics. They are very stubborn and their government, like most human governments, refuses to admit they made a bad investment and start over from scratch. They opt for band-aid solutions in the form of upgrades and patches, Microsoft style. Obviously enslaving humans in The Matrix to generate bioelectricity was more trouble than it was worth. They probably realized early on that they should’ve just enslaved cows and then programming The Matrix would just be designing a big field instead of all this effort of writing programs to govern the behaviour of seagulls and the texture of bricks and design all these buildings. Typical machines, making everything too complicated.

We meet the guy who designed most of The Matrix, he calls himself The Architect and you can really see how The Matrix turned out the way it did when you meet him. He just doesn’t get people at all. He’s able to get all of Neo’s internal emotions up on television sets he’s got all over his room, and even with that advantage he’s pretty feeble at manipulating the guy. I doubt this guy could even program a competent poker sim considering his inability to read and understand people.

There’s a part where Neo gets angry with The Architect and all the monitors showing Neo’s emotions have him screaming and there’s one really funny shot of him defiantly flipping the bird and looking really pleased with himself. If you watch the special features on the DVD they show the making of this scene and you get to see Keanu Reeves go on a multi-minute cussfest bluestreak that had me on the floor laughing.

The Architect tries to rattle Neo by confronting him with the artificiality of his life by showing footage of Neo all through his life playing with toys as a little boy and going to school and stuff. But Neo’s gotten over that long ago. If you really want to throw a guy off balance you show him footage of every time he wanked in his life. Even The One would find that embarrassing. But that Architect just doesn’t get people.

When Agent Smith ultimately takes over The Matrix and Neo enters it to confront him, Smith coyly asks “Like what I’ve done with the place?” What Smith isn’t aware of is that he’s turned The Matrix into a giant monument to his unoriginality. All he’s done is turned everybody into a clone of himself and arranged the clones in rows. I would’ve expected it to be like when John Malkovich enters his own psyche in Being John Malkovich. We’d see giant billboards advertising Smith, little kids with Smith heads drinking Smith cola, every street named Smith Street, televisions showing various famous movies re-enacted by Smith clones, parades featuring giant inflated floats of Smith. For extra points Smith could take over the restaurant where Neo used to eat ‘really good noodles’ in The Matrix and replace every item on the menu with Smith Steak cooked in Smith Sauce with Smith Garnish and a Smith Salad. But no, Smith is a machine and he’ll never have the inventiveness of a human.

But in the world of The Matrix man and machine have to find a balance and work out their co-dependency to amicable terms. The robots need people plugged into The Matrix and there are people who’d rather be plugged into The Matrix, like Cypher. So as long as the robots let people who want to unplug do so, everything is honky dory.

One guy who I think would want to go back into The Matrix is this Zion army guy, Jason Lock. The guy is clearly not an out-of-the-box thinker and I get the feeling somebody freed him from The Matrix in the first place as a joke just to have somebody to fuck with. He’s the only guy who chooses to go by a regular type name and not some one-word cool-sounding screen name. He constantly seems frustrated with how abstract Zion’s thinkers are. At one point he blurts out “You people speak in riddles!” so I think it’s a good thing this guy never meets The Oracle. That wouldn’t go well.

We also see programs becoming more human. One program named Seti, who must be version 1.2 or something since she looks like a little girl, creates weather effects in The Matrix. The third film ends with her creating a nice cloud parting and warm sky. Before this The Matrix had one note weather effects typical of a video game. When it was day, it was bright. When it rained, it poured. But the machines are clearly evolving to appreciate nuances like those days when it looks like it might rain, but doesn’t, or when it looks warm, but it’s actually cold when you go outside.

And they also feel love. Seti’s father talks of this to Neo in an annoying conversation at a metro stop in the third film. Seti’s father is pretty typical of talkative wierdos you meet on the metro. And even though The Merovingian is a program he appreciates blowjobs. So maybe there is hope for man and machine, though I doubt Sarah Connor would stop doing chin-ups just yet.

If anybody comes out of these movies a smiling motherfucker it’s Morpheus. I mean, he picked The One correctly. I’m sure there was some pool going in Zion and a bunch of guys who bet on The One being Bane or Ghost or Cypher all probably owe Morpheus some money. And he’s reconnected with his ex-ladyfriend, Niobi, and she’s a real fox. I honestly expected Morpheus to be all out of tricks in the sequels but he actually pours it on and defies the precedent set be Obi-Wan Kenobi in being a mentor who survives. They say never bring a knife to a gunfight, but Morpheus defies this idiom and brings a samurai sword to a car chase and comes out the winner. And according to Niobi Morpheus can apparently cut a mean rug, though we never see his foxtrot and Morpheus taught us to be distrustful of hot chicks, I believe her. The way he moved on top of that semi-truck is proof and pudding enough for me. So the guy’s doin’ alright, and a lot of residential units in Zion have just opened up on account of everybody got ripped apart by metal octopussies, so if Morpheus moves quick and snatches up Captain Mifune’s old room he might be upgrading to a nice view of the Earth’s crust.

During the course of this epic story we see Neo gain an appreciation for the nature of reality, we see the ying and the yang polarize and cancel each other out (called ‘the yong’), but most importantly we see a bunch lobbies get shot up. Overall, these films are full of interesting philosophy and great ideas, but they’re mostly an intelligent excuse for some top-notch stylized action. There maybe be no spoon, but there’s a boot Smith’s ass.

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