Is "The Matrix" a good film? Is it a great film? Is it an important film?

[XemaSab]

Thoughts? Feelings? Impressions?

[Capn Sunshine]

1. Good? Subjective. Great? Not even close. Important? For all the wrong reasons

Matrix gave us the state of special effects surpassing story and cinematography as a star of the film. I fucking hate that trend.

Good film, but the whole idea is timeworn and old, except to those under 30.

Don't get me started on Keanu. Whoa.

[Javaman]

35. Probably the most apt description of that movie I have ever read.

and I agree about Can'tact Reeves. All of the characters he portrays are just a variation on Ted.

[Danger Mouse]

2. good but not great.

[pokerfan]

3. could have been better

The story is old hat for anyone who's read much cyberpunk and they really lost their way with the sequels.

[denbot]

4. I liked it.

I would say great, relative to how much I enjoyed it compared to other movies I have seen.
As for message, importance, and the rest.. It's a movie, fantasy, that's all any of them are.

[lazarus]

5. good

A bit of a jumble of all sorts of philosophies, but fun. I'm one of the few that enjoyed all three.

[quakerboy]

8. Same

I think I actually like the third the best.

[Kaleva]

6. Good entertainment.

[tigereye]

7. yes, it's great- the story, the visual effects, the great sci-fi realization

It's just a pleasure to watch.

[Archae]

9. The Matrix in a movie is good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8vvbRovPO4

"You got the touch..." ;-)

[AllenVanAllen]

10. It's a good sci-fi film with some great moments.

It had characters involved in visuals that up to that point had only been seen in anime. It really did break some FX ground.
I liked Reloaded a more than Revolutions but still think they were both a wast of time. The straight to DVD release The Amimatrix was better than both sequels imo. It had a few great Matrix universe stories like The Second Renaissance Parts 1&2 Kid's Story, World Record and Beyond. I would recommend it it you haven't seen it.

[darkstar3]

11. At the time, it was revolutionary.

The Matrix was where they created the video shooting technique known now as "bullet time." It's hellaciously complex, but it yields some incredible action sequences when used appropriately. Of course, this wasn't the only groundbreaking technique used in the movie, but it was the biggest.

Now, whether or not the film is socially important, or great in any way...Well, it brought a lot of interesting ideas out of the fringe sci-fi closet and into a big hollywood blockbuster that a whole lot of people saw. It also provided one hell of a ride for the action junkies.

All in all, I loved it. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I haven't seen it in some time, so I think I'll break out the DVD this week.

[blogslut]

12. I thought it was a good film

...but too self-involved to be great.

[dysfunctional press]

13. it was a helluva lot better than the sequels.

good, not great. important...? maybe for the use of 'bullet-time'(?) :shrug:

[Orrex]

14. It was greatly diminished by its two awful sequels

When The Matrix came out, I was annoyed that people were being "blown away" by concepts that were already decades-old in science fiction novels and short stories, but this annoyance has faded in the decade since then.

I also dislike the idea that they're actually projecting their consciousness into the Matrix, rather than feeding sensory data into their brains.


However, I really do like the film, and it has some terrific moments.

[CBGLuthier]

15. compared to many SF films it was almost literate

I enjoyed the story elements more than the effects driven violence sequences. Not the whole chosen one BS but rather the basic concepts of the story.

That said I have never felt the need to see the sequels.

It may be great to some. I would not say that it was important.

[LanternWaste]

16. Sub-literate interpretation of Poe's Dream Within A Dream

Sub-literate interpretation of Poe's Dream Within A Dream targeted at the angsty tween market which has been done much better in other film incarnations, and also done to death.

[Orrex]

23. Yeah. Well. Fight Club is just a rehash of William Wilson, but it still gets raves.

I don't mind if an idea isn't original, because there haven't been many original ideas in film for eight or nine decades, and in print it's been longer still.

The Matrix brought together a number of ideas that were, in the aggregate and the execution, new to the screen. For this reason I think it stands as a significant film in the genre, even if it's not a truly "great" film in an artistic/historical sense.

[LanternWaste]

31. "Sub-literate" being my overall judgment.

"Sub-literate" being my overall and primary judgment. I love reinterpretation-- if done well, imaginatively and with care.

[Deep13]

17. Good. I like it.

I like the analogy that we are all just parts of the corporate machine and that he are being fooled into thinking that we are free and have any real rights.

[Orsino]

18. It's absolutely incredible eye candy...

...with just barely enough good ideas in the mix to enable a viewer to keep a straight face.

Its writing is intermittently good, and most of the acting is at least passable. Hell, even Keanu has good moments.

[NJmaverick]

19. The first of the series was great, with some new film making techniques

that opened the way for better portrayal of super powers in movies. The second two movies were simply god awful.

[DerekG]

20. One of the worst films I've seen

A supposedly human story with no real humanity. By the time Keanu and What's-Her-Name were shooting up security guards in slow-mo, I was ready to bail.

[Orrex]

22. If you think that The Matrix was one of the worst films you've seen...

then you clearly haven't sat through its sequels!

[DerekG]

25. You couldn't pay me

Spend another five minutes with Keanu and the rest of the soulless vampires in Matrixland?

I'd rather eat broken glass.

[NewJeffCT]

21. It's a very good Sci-Fi movie

A good movie overall in terms of action, special effects & cinematography. I think Keanu's bland on-screen persona/acting fits in perfectly with the movie overall.

[CreekDog]

24. In Matrix 3, I don't get why they load bullets into the machine guns but they come out as lasers

:wtf:

[lazarus]

34. those were tracer rounds

at a high rate of discharge, they look kinda laser-like.

[jobycom]

26. Great story, good film, and important in film terms.

The story is one of the best to come out of a sci-fi flick. The movie was very good for the most part, but dragged out with juvenile fight and shoot scenes and pseudo-badass attitudes and costumes. I liked it a lot, but I've never made it through a second viewing.

As for important, it gave sci-fi a new direction to try out, both story-wise and through FX. In that way it was like Raiders of the Lost Ark, changing what moviemakers saw as possible and impossible. It combined a complicated premise and a somewhat difficult story with kung-fu movie action and CG effects in a way people hadn't really seen before in a commercially successful film.

I even liked the second and third films, for the most part, but not as much. They lost their focus by the third film, and pulled out too many cliches. But I still sat through them and liked them more than a lot of other pop films.

Just my thoughts. Probably wrong. I'm obtuse and contrary like that.

[Writer]

27. The Matrix series was one of several movies that played during the late 1990's...

that reflected on the theme of human alienation in a modernist context, which is nothing new but, during the burgeoning tech economy of the time, became a heavy theme within Generation X.

People's chasing of abstract pursuits of financial success, a bastardized form of happiness, and the growth of fundamentalist Christianity at the time, among many other structures, created a cultural and economic hegemony that didn't agree with many X'ers' palates. The craving for "the real" became huge themes within Fight Club, Dark City, American Beauty, and several more movies. Even the recent reboot of the Batman series, in all of its gritty pretense, is a reflection of (even in the genre of comic book movies) this need to introduce the real into a chaotic and abstract existence. The strive for eschewing empty image for human flesh and real, believable experiences continues to appear in movies today.

The Matrix series forced us into a Sartrian world in which human practice and the material are in constant interaction. The Matrix world is heavily structural, assuming that the way we live our lives is somewhat predetermined by unseen forces, but (as seen in the later movies) we still have the ability to shape that world if we so choose. Our future possibles is determined by how we use the matter around us, which not only structures our human practice, but our human practice also determines how matter is used. The Matrix world is so structural that, as revealed in the last scene of the third movie, that even when a person makes a different decision, reworking matter in order to construct an entirely new totality, that totality is quickly absorbed into the plane of human and machine practice which not only shapes, but also is shaped by, human and machine praxis. In a nutshell you can't truly escape the Matrix's world, much as you can't escape the structure of our own world.

Entertainment-wise, the movies were fun. The first movie was (as I recall) truly groundbreaking in directorial technology; however, the newness of the special effects in the first movie didn't translate into the second and third movies. Some people get easily bored. Also, the first movie's financial success immediately awakened the anti-anything-popular cynics who dismissed the movie as flashy cotton-candy without taking the time to think about its themes. The more esoteric aspects of the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie was dismissed by some movie-goers as well for the same reason. Some people overlook visual entertainment of any kind as being inherently "stupid" because worlds are so swiftly and seamlessly presented. Many cannot see the work and the logic that goes into every frame of a movie. Except for Michael Bay. He doesn't do that very well.

Anywho, I think the Matrix is part of well, a matrix of movies that reflected greater cultural phenomenon. Consider the fact that we're analyzing the importance of this film in this thread than, say, the academy-award winning movie Crash, whose themes were low-hanging fruit for large audiences.

~Writer~

[XemaSab]

28. Thanks for the response!

:D

[midnight armadillo]

29. and as a followup...

Are there marked differences in the popularity of the Matrix between generations? I loved it, and I am a Gen Xer. Maybe the baby boomers couldn't stop gazing at their navels long enough to appreciate it?

[undeterred]

30. Dark, violent, depressing.

I've never been so let down by a film other people told me was wonderful.

[burrfoot]

32. Loved it.

The first one was groundbreaking. I remember walking out of theater with a friend at college and both of us with dopey grins just saying "What the fuck...that was AWESOME." We had never seen anything like it.

I get that the SF ideas/cyperpunk-ality presented in the film were nothing new to SF fans, but as some above have noted this movie really brought them into the mainstream.

The story and ideas felt comfortably familiar- and seeing them on the big screen felt a little like validation, like all the hours I'd spent wrapped up in nerdy sci fi and fantasty novels maybe had some greater relevance to the world after all (not that I needed convincing, but still a nice reassurance); and the film was wonderfully shot, in my opinion- visually just beautiful.

Good- absolutely. Great? In terms of relevance to me, totally. Is it important? That'll be decided be folks years and years down the road. For our time- if you liked it or loved it, don't let anyone dissuade you. If you didn't, also fine. Wonderful thing about opinions, that.

[mochajava666]

33. A very good cyberpunk movie

I thought it was better than Total Recall, Blade Runner, and
Minority Report. It's no Johnny Mnemonic, so its got that
going for it, which is nice...

[fujiyama]

36. I can't believe it came out over a decade ago

I enjoyed it myself and it was more thought provoking than the average sci-fi shoot-em-up. It had a very interesting marketing campaign as well: I remember seeing the ad during the Superbowl with Whatisthematrix.com being the site. I sure do remember pointless things.

Was it a great movie? I don't know if that's the word I'd use to describe it, but it was certainly influential in the genre. In terms of visual effects it broke a lot of new ground. Acting was mediocre though. Whoa! Keanu Reeves is umm...lacking in that department to say the least. The sequels sure were hyped but boy were those disappointments.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

37. Combined with a form of fusion, it would have been great.

I'll say it's right on the border been good and great. Could have been great without the particularly bad sci-fi dialogue.

The plot was overrated, the thing that really made the film was the kung fu action.

Important? Absolutely. Nothing spawns that many imitators, flattering and otherwise, without having made a big impact.

[es350_ibm]

38. It's crap