Its been a good few years since the Matrix trilogy was released so I’m going to assume that you have seen the films and as such this review alludes to vital elements of the story, in the words of English news-readers pre-paring to read football reports on a Saturday afternoon, ‘if you don’t want to know the score, look away now’.

Imagine being shackled in chains by the hands and feet and trapped indefinitely in a cave from birth, your only visual stimulation coming from shadows which are cast on the cave wall before you, illuminated by a fire out of your line of vision. Sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it? But consider this, if this is the only reality that you have ever known then how can you lust for anything that is ‘better’, for you would have no concept of what is ‘other’.

This is my poor attempt of a tribute to the ‘allegory of the cave’ as penned by Plato, and its one of many philosophical texts which are woven by the Wachowski brothers into the fabric of the matrix film. That’s the beauty of it, there are so many philosophical strands of meaning of varying clarities within the Matrix tapestry that make up the cipher for the viewer to decode.

Now I’m not saying that I fully understand the Matrix film, indeed the Wachowski brothers have been dedicated in not revealing their full intentions in making the film, and there’s no doubt that the Matrix is open to endless interpretation, so simply this is how I understand the film, rightly or wrongly, enjoy.

The base meaning of understanding the Matrix (film #1) is fairly clear relative to the trilogy. Here you have an archetypal story of good (Neo, Trinity, Morpheus) against bad (the agents, sentinels), the only exception to the rule being the Oracle, but her characterisation as such a tender, warm woman clearly aligns her as a ‘goodie’.

Its portrayed that everything in the Matrix (as a simulated construct) is bad, whereby machines have imprisoned man-kind within invisible restraints from birth, and agents as guardians of this all-powerful dream-world attempt to prevent rebels of the framework from waking up from the dream shown before them, which would hinder the cycle of life for the machines who feed upon the energy of the cocooned humans.

On a metaphorical level, as I understand it, Matrix (film #1) is basically Christian analogy. It puts forth a story of dogma through Morpheus as ‘believer’ in a prophecy that the chosen one will one day free man-kind of there bondage by defeating there mechanistic masters.

Neo as Jesus and saviour is a fairly conspicuous symbol throughout, he’s referred to biblically an uncanny amount of times, ‘Jesus Christ he’s fast’ as mouse points out, and most potently he is resurrected from death to overpower the agents who are sent to kill him by the Judas figure, Cypher.

Which brings me onto my most prominent thought about the film; is the real-world so good, is it so bad?

Having been released from the imprisonment of the machine-world and sampled the rebelliousness and war effort against the machines, Cypher chooses to defect and assume his original position within the hallucination of the Matrix. On initial viewing I thought categorically that he was wrong to do so, choosing ‘ignorance is bliss’ is presented as the easy, mindless alternative to the grim life on the nebukadnessar where they have ‘slop’ for food and are in constant danger of sentinels. As with a lot of elements in the narrative in Matrix #1 the perspective changes of this opinion upon seeing the two sequels – which I will go into further in the forthcoming reviews of Reloaded and Revolutions.

The construct isn’t only heaven for Cypher within this context however, its heaven for everyone – before I get complaints I’m not saying its heaven relative to life as we know it, but it is within the context of the film. Taking Cypher as an example in his meeting with Agent Smith he gives a detailed description of how he wants his life to be, ‘I wanna be someone important, someone famous like an actor’ thus fulfilling his ideas of a perfect self (if you needed any more proof of the idyllic symbolism of the scene then you can even hear a harp being plucked in the restaurant simultaneous to Cypher’s demands).

That parallel between Cypher’s idea of the Matrix as heaven is prominent, what’s not so obvious is how it’s a subliminal heaven to everyone else. In my opinion Morpheus’ offering of the red pill to Neo as an escape is comparable to the snake of the Garden of Eden. Just as the serpent presented the option of knowledge, so does Morpheus who says ‘no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself’ hence the function of the pill, the symbolic apple, the truth that Mr Anderson has been questing for.

In the same way that God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge in paradise, Agent Smith tells Mr Anderson not to scower the 21st centuries alternative quintessential source of information: the Internet and stop hacking computers in search of Morpheus.

The aesthetic idea of heaven, in biblical terms is one of naturistic perfection and grandeur, with towering trees, waterfalls, lakes, all magnificent, all sizably superior to man, and for me this is clearly mimicked in the Matrix by the puroposeful and constant employment of towering sky-scrapers in the always urban setting of the matrix. It is thus the will of both Adam and Eve and Neo to bypass this uniform grandeur in favour of something that is ‘other’, something that is not ‘perfect’, something that is somehow real. – This idea of ‘impefect’ (by extention suffering) is vital in understand Reloaded and Revolutions, which I will go into when I write the reviews.

This notion of a perfect world is briefly alluded to by Agent Smith in this first film though, ‘Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster.’ - This is another example of a somewhat surprising characterization of the machines (as caring) – to be explored in later reviews. The implied meaning of Smiths projected theory of the universe thus corresponds with the theory of Adam, Eve and Neo which I have put forward as seekers of the imperfect, which brings me back to my initial description of that ‘allegory of the cave’ in that perfection cannot exist without imperfection, you cannot know what it is to be intrinsically ‘good’ until you are aware of something intrinsically ‘bad’. What I’ve tried to get across in this review – which I hope I’ve been successful in doing – is the cyclical universe of the matrix – machine and mankind – which will comes across, at least in my opinion, prominently in the following sequels.

Thanks for reading and like I said earlier in the review no interpretation of the film is concrete so let me know whatever is on your mind in the comments, thanks again, Sam.




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older