Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. 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. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
‘The Matrix’ used to be really big — people used to talk about it and say how much they like it, how much they enjoyed it. And I recently decided to watch the movie again because I remembered having liked it the first time round. What I didn’t realize before I watched it was that it was an entire fourteen years ago that it was big. Fourteen years! It certainly doesn’t feel like fourteen years…
Having watched it again, I have to say I still enjoy the premise of the movie — that of a future and a dream. The science fiction side of the story is very compelling: after all, what is this world? Can it be that we live in a dream? And what is the difference between a dream one cannot wake up from and the reality? How do we know the truth?
Of the characters present, my favour falls upon Agent Smith. Hugo Weaving’s portrayed agent has so much style and elegance that, after everything, he is the most memorable. Morpheus is great fun and Neo isn’t too bad either, but Agent Smith has a certain charisma that none of the others do. And his dialogue is superb.
So, what is the main value of ‘The Matrix’? I think that the answer there is the thoughts present. Like so much of good science fiction, this film manages to raise quite a few questions. These questions may not seem relevant in our everyday lives, and they indeed probably are not — but they certainly have a value when we start thinking about why we are here. And those thoughts are worth pondering over every now and then.
And it is for these radical thoughts (and I say “radical” while I mean “interesting”) that I would say ‘The Matrix’ will also be worth watching in 2019 when twenty years will have passed from its original release.
I’d like to share a revelation I’ve had during my time here.
