The Matrix Best Movie Ever

I know, the old guys all like Citizen Kane and Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, I like movies made after the fifties. Not that there is anything wrong with Citizen Kane, it’s a great movie, just not my favorite. In the old movies category, It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite. I still cry when George is standing on the bridge after seeing a world where he was never born.
The Matrix is not a tear-jerker. For the two or three of you that has not watched this modern masterpiece, here it is in a nutshell. The world we live in is a computer generated dream, the real world is a wasteland, and Neo is The One that can save humankind.
There are some really amazing special effects in The Matrix, but I’m here to tell you that if this film had been made in 1982 instead of 1999 using the same kind of effects that Cameron used in The Terminator, it would still have been a great film. This is a classic hero story, Neo is a normal office drone who hacks software in his spare time. His boss tells him that he is wrong in thinking the rules do not apply to him. But this is his last day at work, and his last day in the only world he has ever known.
The film is all about choice and freedom and the endless struggle against forces we can’t hope to defeat or understand, but still try anyway. I have always liked the idea that our world is not the real world. After all, don’t all religions tell you that this world is just a prelude to the one to come? The real one?
Neo is weak and doesn’t believe in his own power, yet by the end of the film he is a veritable god who can manipulate the Matrix at will. He destroys an Agent, one of the invincible bad guys in the film, and turns into a living translator of the code that is the Matrix. In the finial scene of the movie he blocks a trace program the Matrix tries to run and tells the Matrix that he will not destroy them, for now. He then flies into the sky like Superman.
Most of the effects in The Matrix were good, solid, real world effects. There is only one effect that was overtly phony, the one when a helicopter crashes into the side of a building and it ripples like water on a pond. We all know what an aircraft crashing into a building looks like, and this ain’t it. It’s a small problem that can be easily overlooked. Overall the look of the film is very impressive.
This was a self-contained film. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The tiny scene at the end where he talks to the Matrix is the only hint at a sequel. He is The One and now has the power to do whatever he wants within The Matrix.
The two sequels to this great movie were total and complete junk. They were filled to the gills with extremely phony special effects, much as the last three Star Wars movies were. But if bad effects that been the only problems, it might still have been ok. But the stories made no sense, said nothing worth being said, and invalidated the first movie. For one thing, they totally ignored the last fifteen minutes of The Matrix where Neo became a god. There should have been no fight scenes in the sequels, the bad guys should have just ‘de-ressed’ when Neo looked at them, like a deleted program in Tron. But that wouldn’t be too interesting would it?
The Matrix has three main heroes, Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus. By the end of the last sequel, Trinity is dead, Neo is blind and then dead, and Morpheus is cowering in the basement of Zion with the rest of the cowards. This is totally unacceptable.
I still hope that someone will make a sequel to The Matrix someday. I’d really like to see it.


Jon Herrera
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1 Reply on “The Matrix Best Movie Ever

  1. OMG, you bring up the point I have been SCREEMING in my mind FOREVER now. HOW can there be any fight scenes in any of the movies after the last 15 mintues of The Matrix? Neo can see the code, alter it, delete it, recreate it… With that ability, he could simply imagine EVERY agent Smith shattering into a thousand pieces and that’s what would happen. If he can freeze a bullet with his mind, he can freeze every agent into a statue. If he can control the Matrix with his mind, then there is no way to even suggest that there could be a fight from then on worth watching. He could have cloned himself, flew into the body of every agent Smith and imploded them like he did in The Matrix… how can you defend against that? That makes every subsequent movie’s fights total BULLSHIT!