The Matrix (1999)

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The Matrix is a film about a guy who works for some software development agency who plays part time as a Red Hat hacker (could be Black Hat, but it’s not really touched upon). He spends his days doing whatever programmers like to do for their day jobs under the thumb of some asshole boss that’s big into punctuality. He spends his nights doing hacky things, particularly searching for an elusive hacker named Morpheus. Things get interesting when he follows a cryptic message to a night club where he begins to learn the truth about the REAL life, universe, and everything. Turns out that everyone lives in a giant computer program called The Matrix and the reality he knows isn’t so real after all, that he along with the rest of humanity is a slave to sentient machines that mine humans for raw energy. More simply put: HUMANITY IS FUCKED.

So The Matrix is one of those ‘capstone’ movies that kind of dawned a new era in filmmaking.  Its message was incredibly profound for the time, arguably the first time the high-level concept of being ‘trapped in a computer simulation’ extended beyond the Kingdom of Nerds and into the realm of popular consciousness.  It also ushered in a new age of visual razzamataz.  I don’t want to sit here and go on and on about its message; that’s probably been done to death already and book reviews are where I generally flex my thinking-hard brain muscles anyway.   My question is rather basic: is this movie still good?

Yep. Still good.  Look, we’ve all grown a little bit older and a little bit wiser since The Matrix arrived on the scene (especially after those, uh, interesting sequels that I will no doubt encounter sometime later). To say that we are all puppets to some kind of higher regime, while thought-provoking, is a pretty self-defeating way to live.  But if you look at this film for what it is: an explosive, action-packed, experimentally fun sci-fi romp with cool as hell special effects and a reasonably light-hearted yet serious tone, hopefully you will find a very thrilling movie that is quite fun to watch.  One riddled with little references, allusions, and nods to films of many many genres that came before.  My personal favorite nod was during the scene where  Neo and Agent Smith prepare to face off in the subway: some trash blows across the battlefield like a tumbleweed.  Little things like this add so much character to the movie to make it more than just a pretentious commentary about the system.  That’s why the film succeeds where perhaps others have failed.  You can connect with it in more than one way, and because of this The Matrix still holds up to this day.

A

Star Trek (2009)

Star Trek is a space action/adventure movie primarily about two guys who argue all the time yet eventually learn to respect each other and work together as a team.  It’s a remake of a classic and corny TV show in the stylings of the modern-day reboot that was arguably established by one Christopher Nolan in his Batman films.  It’s edgier and grittier, brighter and flashier, and in a few minor cases darker and moar violent.

The movie tosses out the timeline established in the TV series when a weird guy called a Romulan arrives from the future to cause a bunch of explosions for what at first is an unknown reason.  The weird guy destroys the USS Kelvin starship, eradicating its lone first officer, another guy named George Kirk (played by Thor) who has at this point successfully evacuated the crew.  The rest of the movie follows his son, one James T. Kirk, as he grows from some delinquent and horny punk-ass to the confident and horny Captain of the flagship USS Enterprise.  Along the way, planets get swallowed by black holes and Kirk gets punched in the face a bunch of times; the weird guy then sets his phasers on Earth, and the crew we are all familiar gradually assembles to depose the threat.

Star Trek is a carefully crafted movie that attempts to appease most hardened series fans while also attempting to steer the series into more of a casual direction. In the TV series, science was laid on pretty thickly in order to help ground things in reality and, as a normal person, I don’t really mind its absence.  The ultimate point of the series was to live on the edge of adventure and explore the unknown while stratifying its concepts in scientific thoughtbubbles to make boldly going where no man has gone before seem a little more feasible.

I don’t think they nailed the spirit of the show in this first movie, but I think it’s likely due its being a gritty reboot and an origin story rolled into one.  The characters need to be re-established with moar gritty personalities and some rough field experiences so that our perceptions of them are reset and then streamlined.  To accommodate this, the script is packed very tightly into a clean little package while the direction is fluid and smooth.  I guess if you’re a hardcore fan you’ll probably dismiss it as just Hollywood once again pissing on an established property to make a quick buck but I have my doubts that we’ll ever see a movie that looks and feels like the original series ever again.

B+