I think I know what you're all thinking: "Oh, come on, dude. This is NO cult film. This must be the most parodied and referenced movie of the last 20 years." Well, you're right there. But remember: there are countless websites where fans discuss its every nook and cranny, its characters are practically cosplay mainstays, and Film Studies lecturers have frothed at the mouth over it for years (I should know; I was a Film Studies major). This is the flick that proves you really can have a mainstream cult classic.
It's around the year 2199. Our hero is Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a white-collar worker by day and by night a computer hacker named Neo. One day he receives a phone call from a mysterious man named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), convinced Neo is the messianistic "One" (note how "Neo" is an anagram of "One"). Then upon meeting Morpheus and his band of young outcasts including Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss, who broke her ankle filming one of the fight scenes), Neo discovers his "reality" is actually a massive simulated utopia known as the Matrix, constructed and ruled by supercomputers which are farming humans for our body heat. For years Morpheus and his crew have been trying to liberate their fellow humans from this construct and now Neo must decide whether to join them in the imminent war against the machines.
I must admit, for some years the obsession with this movie was just beyond me, even as a lifelong SF nut. When I first saw it aged 11, I just could not follow it, and I found the mostly action-free second act quite boring. But then in 2001 my dad got the DVD for Christmas and then he and my siblings played it AD FUCKING NAUSEUM. When things are shoved down your throat growing up like that, you either warm to them or hate them for life, and obviously The Matrix took the former route for me.
Seeing why it proved so instantly influential is simple. Writer-directors the Wachowskis, with the help of renowned Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping and still-dazzling visual effects, created action scenes that were imagined and realized with painstaking detail but nonetheless look thoroughly smooth and assured, with the perfectly matched heavy metal/electronica soundtrack. They also direct it very suspensefully, and Zach Staenberg's Oscar-winning editing is some of the best you'll ever see.
But less attention, unfortunately, has gone to The Matrix's flawlessly plotted and very truthful narrative. The Wachowskis' script, while it has some dull dialogue, covers very precarious territory but sidesteps any chance of plot holes or far-fetched shit, and despite the futuristic setting it strikingly evokes many pre-Millennial tensions and concerns which are no less omnipresent now: terrorism, exploitation, corruption (especially in Hugo Weaving's brilliantly conceived and played sentient policing program Agent Smith) and, of course, technological enslavement.
The Matrix hasn't aged a day since 1999, and despite the Wachowskis having drawn it from many previous texts (namely Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime gem Ghost in the Shell and William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz also being explicitly referenced) and genres (martial arts films and Eastern and French philosophies), the end result is unmistakably theirs, and absolutely timeless. (Even with those sequels.)
Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky said it best: "I walked out of The Matrix... and I was thinking "What kind of science fiction move can people make now? The Wachowskis basically took all the great sci-fi ideas of the 20th century and rolled them into a delicious pop culture sandwich that everyone on the planet devoured."
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