The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)
Imdb
Date Watched: 05/13/2020
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: 22nd MoFo Hall of Fame
Rewatch: Yes.
This film was released in theaters in the spring of my senior year of high school. My friends and classmates absolutely raved about it. So I watched it.
With its slick costumes, Sci-Fi premise, slow-motion stunts, characters with names like "Neo," "Trinity," "Cypher," and "Morpheus," and a soundtrack that features the likes of Prodigy, Rage Against the Machine, Massive Attack, and Rob Zombie,
The Matrix came off to me then as tryhard "hey, look how edgy I am!" bulls***. I could not understand what the hell everyone else loved about it. Twenty-one years later, it has left me with that same impression.
There is nothing that I liked about this. Not one damn thing. It's too slick. It's too stylized. It's too cold. It's got so much expositional dialogue that it might as well have had a narrator. And all that green tint just made me think of the scum I had to clean out of my family's fish ponds every summer. I didn't give a rat's ass about any of these characters, I didn't give a rat's ass about the story, and the closest thing to emotion it brought out in me was boredom. Absolute, utter boredom.