Without singling you out or sounding like I'm directly arguing with you...this is kind of what I always say, preemptively, to people who dump on The Matrix or, say, a Christopher Nolan film: I ask them how much they're criticizing the film itself, and how much their distaste for teenage moviegoers who're blown away by it is being smuggled into their assessment, and whether they're trying to provide some kind of critical counterweight to that.
Since this is something of a tangent from our discussion elsewhere of Nolan, I'll assume the position.
I had a similar experience as kgaard, slightly older than "teenage" when the film was released. At the time, it was almost a relief that the film wasn't garbage (the initial trailers had little indication of the sci-fi premise), and it turned out to be great fun and a lot more interesting. It was similar to
Dark City from the prior year, a film that was under-the-radar but proved to be a gem and garnered a cult following. I see these two films as birds of a feather. That's how I felt about
Matrix at the time, great fun and an unexpected gem. 1999 was a fantastic year for cinema though, and it didn't make my top ten or anything.
Matrix is certainly a zeitgeist-triggering film. As Iroquis pointed out, it neatly channeled so many strains of relevant culture - anime, video games, PKD, John Woo - that's it's very easy to see why it would be a Rosetta stone for so many styles and concepts. I will admit that I've had to sit through more than a few dozen arid dissertations on the supposed profundity of the film in various states of psychotropia, but I'm not judging the film based on that. And luckily,
Revelations put an end to that, at least temporarily, because it was the best demonstration that Neo had no new clothes.
And so that's why my judgement is ultimately on the film, rather than its apostles, because despite the excellence of its ability to converge all of these aspects of sci-fi and philosophy as touchstones, in the end, they are just window dressing on an above-average action film. It's pretentious in a literal sense, it pretends to have a meta-significance that never materializes. Maybe in that sense you can say that I'm judging the film on the sequels, because they prove how flaccid its propositions were, as much as the heady theories of the growing cult around the film., and I'm not honestly sure I can divorce all of these elements. The trend of a filmmaker dangling revelation as a superficial bluff (and JJ Abrams is as guilty as Shyamalan of this) only to evaporate into stale woo* has been one of the worst trends in 21st century sci-fi entertainment, and
Matrix happens to be the template for this formula. Maybe that's also unfair, but this association happens to be how
The Matrix became shorthand for these kinds of entertainment based around a revelatory bluff. (And, ftr, I do
not include Nolan in this category, as he, more often than not, supplies the goods on the back-end.)
The film is still a lot of fun, precisely when
not taken very seriously, but it also has some unfortunate aspects that seem market-driven to appeal to teenage disaffection. Some scenes, like the wall of guns at the end, are just embarrassingly juvenile. Anyway, I think there are some built-in appeals in the film that definitely seem to signal "despondent teen" even if I never had a despondent teen chew my ears off about The Simulation
TM like it's the next One Truth. Anyway. Too high, imho.
(*"stale woo" is also my nickname for Dr. Cornel West's hairdo.)
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