Best Keanu: “I have these memories from my life. None of them happened.”

Anyone who reads the front page of this site knows this project started when I revisited The Matrix at the end of 2021, after seeing Keanu Reeves do a late night interview to promote The Matrix Resurrections. The nostalgia value of The Matrix wasn’t lost on me, but I recalled, distinctly, hating The Matrix in 1999 and never watching it again after my initial viewing.

In 2021, I was blown away. I finally saw The Matrix for the piece of art it is. It sent me down the Keanu Reeves rabbit hole, after a few decades of not caring at all about him or his movies and, well, here we are.

It is now May 2023. I just watched The Matrix again, and I’m back to where I was in 1999. Sort of. I can objectively appreciate The Matrix as a brilliant piece of filmmaking, especially for its time and before it was ripped off in various forms.

I’m also, thankfully, not as miserable as I was in 1999. The Marilyn Manson music during the credits of The Matrix was a reminder of just how awful I perceived things to be back then, when I would spend my lunch hours from a job I hated taking long walks dressed in a black hoodie, listening to nothing but Mechanical Animals on a loop.

(This is something I’m embarrassed to admit. Not that I was miserable, but that I once gave over so much of my mental space to someone as repulsive as Marilyn Manson.)

That’s evidence, in a way, of how The Matrix was a product of its time. Watching it now, it’s clear this movie could have gone either way. It could have made an impression on audiences and solidified its place as a cinematic classic. Or it could have been universally panned, turned people off, and wound up in discount VHS/DVD bins (in the early 2000s) or on free streaming services (in the 2020s). The Matrix got lucky, because in 1999 many of us were miserable and most of us were fearing new technology. People were panicked that the inability of spreadsheets to read years coded “00” would cause our systems to all collapse at the turn of the century (they didn’t, but I’m still not sure if that’s because people stepped up to fix it or because it wasn’t actually a real problem to begin with). Most people, me not among them, responded to The Matrix. It tapped into something in the psyche, even if there were some of us whose eyes just rolled with the ridiculousness of the leather outfits and the pompous speech-making about what is real.

In 2023, I find the movie no longer exciting, and really it just comes down to this: it is not my thing. I thought I liked sci-fi. But really, I like fake sci-fi. I like stuff that takes place in space but really is no different than any other standard drama; as an example I loved Star Trek: TNG when it was popular television. I like sci-fi that isn’t really about technology or… whatever real sci-fi is about. In 1999, The Matrix was not my thing. In 2023, it’s still not my thing.

(Of course, I could also just be having a bad day. My cat died three months ago. I had him for 15 years (well, 14 years and 4 months) and he was sick most of last year. Today I finally threw out his toys which had been spread across my living room carpet. I thought I was okay with it, but instead of watching The Matrix today maybe I should have matched my mood with Destination Wedding or, even better, left the house.)

That said, I have a feeling that when I rewatch the two middle Matrix movies — Reloaded and Revolutions — I’ll probably like them more than I did in 2021. Because I think that’s when we get more Neo and Trinity, which is the only real appeal of the Matrix movies to me. It’s Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves, together, that make these movies worth it.

[*]

There’s very little Neo and Trinity interaction in The Matrix, and considering the focus on the pair in the later movies, that comes as a surprise. Neo also doesn’t do very much. It’s not until Morpheus is under threat late (late) in the film that he steps up, which I guess is the plot (or the point). There’s not as much kung fu in this movie as you’d expect either, considering how much it’s talked about when people discuss the film. The famous bullet time sequence(s) don’t even start until at least 1:45 into the film — I say at least that, because that’s the point at which I stopped the movie to look at the time stamp. Because I was thinking, “bullet time hasn’t even happened yet.”

Because a lot happens in this film. It’s easy to lose track of the fact that this is actually a very complicated movie, with a lot of different stages and settings. Maybe my modern, aging, attention-span depleted brain isn’t used to it, even though no one could accuse The Matrix of being a slow film. But let’s take stock, shall we? Here’s my plot summary of The Matrix:

A young John Wick is asleep in his apartment. His computer begins to talk to him, using green text on a black screen. A group of clubbers show up at the door and John exchanges a thin disc for $2,000 and ends up following the group to a club after seeing a rabbit tattoo on the woman’s shoulder, which was predicted (or directed) by his computer. He’s standing alone at the club when a gorgeous woman approaches him and whispers in his ear, as if she’s initiating him into a cult. Then John gets a cell phone delivered in a FedEx package at work. John is panicked, talking to The Bowery King who seems to be telling him to jump out a window. He’s interrogated by men with dark glasses who melt his face and stick a bug into his belly button. Somehow he finds the woman again, they remove the bug with a massive mechanical contraption, he meets The Bowery King, who offers him a red pill to learn The Truth. John goes into another room and his skin turns to metal. He wakes up covered in goo in a glass pod in a sea of pods, his body hairless and attached to thick wires down his spine. He’s on a spaceship run by The Bowery King, he gets a computer program injected directly into his brain to learn kung fu, he’s schooled in the philosophy that he has to free his mind. He learns that humans are batteries to run the race of machines that control everything and that what he knows as real life is a simulation. John also learns that The Bowery King thinks he is The One who will save all of humanity from the machines. There are others on the ship, including one you know is a little bit shady, and the woman, who loves John even though she barely knows him. The Bowery King decides to take John to see the Oracle who will tell him if he’s the One. John sees a kid bend a spoon with their mind, who reminds John that “there is no spoon,” and John bends his too. The Oracle is a middle aged woman baking cookies and smoking in a 1970s-style kitchen and notes John doesn’t know that the woman like-likes him and says he’s “not too bright.” Then they have trouble getting back on the ship because the shady guy has made a deal with the machines to capture The Bowery King and John sees a black cat twice and The Bowery King is captured and the machine guy tells him he hates the Matrix, “it’s the smell,” and then John and the woman end up back with guns, lots of guns, that they shoot through a lobby to get to the King. They dodge bullets, learn how to fly a helicopter, rescue the King, the King says you know you’re the One, then John somehow gets stuck in a subway station. He dies. Then the woman kisses him, he is resurrected and learns he can stop bullets mid-air and fight the machine guy with one hand. Then he’s the one calling people through their computers and flies into the sky. Then there’s credits and music by Rage Against the Machine and Marilyn Manson.

Let’s compare that to the plot of John Wick: Chapter 4:

John Wick shoots the Elder. The bad guys destroy the hotel of his allies in New York. John hides in Osaka and the bad guys come to kill his allies there, too. The daughter of his Osaka friend tells John, “Either you kill him, or I will,” and John says, “I understand,” like a lawyer who isn’t actually agreeing to anything but acknowledging what she’s just said. John finds out who the bad guys are, his New York ally tells him what to do, John goes to Berlin, gets branded with his cousin-sister-adopted kin who appears quite drunk, he makes a deal to duel with the bad guy, the bad guy has John’s old friend who killed his Osaka ally do his fighting, and in the end the bad guy and John both die.

All right, maybe there’s a bit more to John Wick: Chapter 4 than that.

[*]

The Matrix will always be a classic, because of its influence on filmmaking. But it is just not my thing. I am still not exactly sure what it’s about. Is it a lesson in rebelling against the system? Is it about the dangers of giving over too much control to technology? Is it about understanding that we really can change our reality if we just change our perception? I don’t know.

There is one part of The Matrix that I love: the 10-minute sequence when they visit The Oracle. It’s here that I think the real message of The Matrix resides: that all you have to do is just change the way you look at things. There is no spoon, so all you have to do see it differently and it will bend for you. I also love that the Oracle lives in a run down apartment in a bad area and she’s a mother, who smokes, and bakes. The Oracle is a real person, one who could reside among us in whatever reality we conceive of. Last thing I love about The Matrix: the one shot of Neo and Trinity standing side by side, leathered out and gun-toting, just before they save Morpheus. There’s a glimpse of the pair there, the pair that comes to such an awesome conclusion in Matrix Resurrections.

But it may be some time before I watch this one again. I’ll shelve it along with the Marilyn Manson music.

May 2023