The Matrix

Most of the film is required. The opening pursuit plants every law it will use: the agents can occupy anyone, the telephone is the only exit, the impossible leap fails for an ordinary body. The white rabbit, the cat seen twice and the spoon each return to pay. The pill, the pod and the flush are the hinge on which the whole knowledge turns. The subtractive test finds slack in two places. The instruction movement carries long passages in which Morpheus explains in speech what the images have already shown, and the lobby battle runs past the point at which its meaning is complete. The resurrection is the one turn the film’s own law does not compel. The cap is cleared with little room.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the everyday world of work, the alarm clock, the cubicle and the rule may be a consensus kept for the profit of something that does not love us, and waking from it costs comfort. The film finds this in images more than in speech. The field of pods, towers of sleeping bodies harvested in the dark, is a disclosure no lecture equals. Cypher at his steak (“Ignorance is bliss”) gives the condition its human counterweight, a man who knows and chooses the lie. Smith names the machines’ view of the species as a disease. Held below the gate because the thought is borrowed, from Plato’s cave, Descartes’ demon and Baudrillard, and the film shows its shape more than it adds to its content.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The film rises often, and in more than one register. The terror is the pod: Neo waking in a membrane of fluid, cables pulled from his spine, the camera drawing back to a tower of thousands, a machine dropping him into the dark. The transport is kinetic: the dodge on the rooftop, the rescue of Morpheus from the helicopter, the subway fight ended by the train. The grandest height comes last. Neo stands up dead in the hallway, stops the bullets in the air, and sees the corridor and the agents as falling green code: the visual register changes at the instant the hero’s knowledge does. Held at the figure because the height is mostly of power and release, and some of it, the leather and the slow walk into the lobby, is style in place of height.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The archetype is built, and it carries the whole climax. The messianic structure bears load: a prophecy, a forerunner in Morpheus, an Oracle, a betrayer at a meal, a death and a rising. The names bind it, Neo, Trinity, Zion and the ship Nebuchadnezzar. Beneath the Christian figure lies a Gnostic one, also built rather than cited: a false world made by a power that feeds on the souls trapped in it, a messenger from outside, and salvation by knowledge. Alice supplies the threshold (“Follow the white rabbit”). That construction meets the gate’s bar exactly, and no more: the names are stacked so thickly that some of the pattern is allusion as decoration, and Thomas Anderson is particular only thinly, with almost no life before the pill.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The turn is real. A Hollywood studio action film of 1999 took its fight language from Hong Kong, with Yuen Woo-ping training the cast for months, its imagery from Japanese animation, Ghost in the Shell the plainest source, and from cyberpunk fiction, and its argument from philosophy, and made the action itself the philosophy: to fight in the Matrix is to disbelieve its rules. The stake was real too: an original property, not a sequel, from two directors with one small thriller, Bound (1996), behind them, and a long technical gamble on a rig of still cameras at its centre. Held below the gate because each path joined was already proven in its own field, and Dark City (1998) and the cyberpunk tradition had already put the simulated world on screen.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and what the film knows changes. Because the Matrix is a program with rules, the action film’s usual physics, wires, impossible leaps and slowed time, becomes the subject: every stunt is an argument about belief and law. Bullet time is the clearest case. Slowing the world while the camera moves at speed through it puts the viewer inside Neo’s perception at the moment his perception changes; the effect is the knowledge, not its ornament. The colour of the two worlds tells the viewer where they are without a word. The dojo is a lesson in epistemology staged as kung fu (“I know kung fu”): knowledge downloaded, then shown to be insufficient until believed. The cost: in the instruction movement the theory is spoken, and could be lifted out whole as a lecture.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Twenty-seven years of return are evidence, and the evidence is broad: philosophy anthologies and courses built on the film, a long reading of it as Gnostic and Buddhist text, and a later reading of transformation and the false name, Anderson against Neo, that the makers have since endorsed. Its images have been read politically from every side, and the pill of waking has been taken up for uses the film did not intend. That breadth shows a living object of thought. Held at the figure by what a viewer finds on return: the plot is clear, its puzzles are solved within it, and later viewings mostly renew pleasure in the making and the choreography rather than open new meaning in the scenes. The well is wide more than deep, and the depth sits in what the film borrowed.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Released in 1999, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what the American action film could hold, putting philosophical argument at the centre of a blockbuster, making Hong Kong wirework a studio norm, and fusing digital and practical effects into a new grammar of slowed time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: bullet time was imitated at once across action films, parodies and games; Yuen Woo-ping’s method passed into American productions; the long coat, the green code and the choice of pills became common currency; sequels, animation and games followed; and the idea of simulated reality entered ordinary speech. Few films of the decade redirected so much. The force is synthesis more than a new possibility, which holds the axis below the top.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole: one cut exists, and it is in circulation. The colour of some later home-video masters has been disputed against the theatrical grade, a partial question of colour only. Presence across twenty-seven years is continuous and wide: broadcast, every home format, return to cinemas, and a fixed place in teaching and citation. The sequels, the animation and the later uses of its images are other works and alter nothing in the film. The surface is fixed to its moment in places, the payphones, the CRT monitors, the mobile phones and club wear of 1999, and some effects, the bug and the flush, read as of their year; the central idea has grown more current, which offsets them. The bar is met, exactly.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the medium is high and in places bears weight. Bill Pope’s photography holds the colour law of the two worlds throughout and frames the action for legibility, which the decade’s action cinema often lacked. Zach Staenberg’s cutting gives the fights geography: every blow is placed, and the subway fight builds its rhythm to the train. Don Davis’s score and the sound design, the shells falling in the helicopter scene, the agents’ footsteps, the digital whine at each crossing of worlds, carry the shifts between them. The rig for bullet time was engineered for the film. The costs: much dialogue is functional and some stilted, the performances beyond Fishburne and Weaving are narrow, and some digital work has dated. The making is less complete through dialogue and performance than Chinatown (8.6) or The Third Man (8.5).

Score: 8.5 / 10

One physics governs the whole, stated early and kept. Take the two most distant elements, Neo at his cubicle and Neo flying past the camera at the close: one law covers both, that the Matrix is a program whose rules bend for those who know it is one, in proportion to their belief. The agents’ powers, the exits by telephone, the death in the program that is death in the chair, the Sentinels’ race against the ship: all hold. The range is wide, from office drama through philosophical dialogue and martial arts to war film, and one cool register holds across it. Two seams show. The resurrection by Trinity’s love lies outside the stated rules, and the battery premise is a stated falsehood the film does not mark as the machines’ lie or its own.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Several orders are held in one structure, and the premise integrates them: individual consciousness, in the question of what can be known; labour, in the cubicle and the boss; the species, in a war lost and a humanity farmed; technology as a power over life; the sacred, in prophecy, salvation and the One; and a small community, the crew of the ship with its loyalties and its betrayal. The office and the pod are one fact. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the family is absent; history is told in a speech rather than held; the natural order appears only as a scorched sky; and no inner life but Neo’s and Cypher’s is entered. The film encompasses the ideas of these orders more than it holds lives within them.

Score: 7.5 / 10