Official trailer
Every fight scene in The Matrix argues about the nature of reality, and every bullet-time sequence shows consciousness learning to perceive differently. The Wachowskis fused the philosophy and the action so completely that you can’t pull the form and the content apart, and most films never get close to that.
My rating: 9 out of 10.
This is the movie I’d hand to anybody who claims blockbusters can’t think. It leaves me wired the way great action should, and then it leaves me arguing with Cypher in my head long after the credits. My one complaint is small, a few middle-act moments where the Wachowskis explain a little more than they need to, and that’s the only thing standing between this and a 10.
This review is for the original Matrix, evaluated on its own terms, with the sequels bracketed entirely. Reloaded and Revolutions exist. They’re irrelevant to the achievement of the first film. The original is a closed argument that stands alone with complete coherence. Evaluate it that way and it comes close to perfect.
Philosophy as Action
The structural underpinning of The Matrix is Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey fused with Plato’s allegory of the cave, and it works because the Wachowskis trusted the audience to absorb the philosophy through experience instead of explanation. Morpheus doesn’t lecture Neo about Plato. He puts Neo in a situation where he has to choose between comfort and truth, watches what he chooses, and then shows him the consequences of that choice.
“There’s no spoon” is the thesis statement of Neo’s entire arc. The moment he understands it, not intellectually but physically, showing it in the bending, is the moment the film’s philosophical argument becomes embodied instead of abstract. The Wachowskis found the cinematic equivalent of comprehension: make the character do the thing instead of understand the thing, and the audience does it with them.
The spoon scene is my favorite moment in the film. It’s a quiet beat with a bent spoon, and it affects me more than any of the gunfights because it’s the second the whole argument clicks into place.
This is the hardest problem in philosophical fiction: making ideas physical. The Matrix solves it completely. Neo doesn’t contemplate reality’s malleable nature in quiet moments of reflection. He fights it, bends it, runs across its surfaces and discovers they’ll hold his weight if he stops believing they won’t. The philosophy is the action. Remove either element and the film ceases to function.
The Performances
Keanu Reeves is perfectly cast as Thomas Anderson in ways that have been consistently underappreciated. Neo’s arc requires a character who begins as someone the audience can occupy, ordinary, slightly disconnected, going through motions without quite believing in them. Reeves’ particular quality of watchful blankness is exactly right for this.
He’s not performing confusion. He looks like someone waiting for something to make sense, and when it finally does, the transformation is visible without being theatrical.
Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus is the performance that holds the film together.
He believes absolutely. That means the audience believes. There’s no ironic distance in Fishburne’s reading, no hint that Morpheus might be deluded or that the mythology he’s operating within might be wrong. He’s the certainty of someone who has seen the truth and can’t imagine that anyone shown it would choose otherwise. That certainty makes Cypher’s betrayal land, someone chose otherwise, and it’s comprehensible.
Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith evolves across the film from antagonist to something more unsettling: a system that’s developed its own contempt for what it’s designed to maintain. The exchange where Smith tells Morpheus that humans are a virus is the film’s darkest idea, delivered by a character who shouldn’t be capable of having ideas.
Smith has opinions. Systems aren’t supposed to have opinions. The emergence of that interiority in an agent of control is the film’s most interesting implication, developed more fully in the sequels and more elegantly here in its first appearance.
Weaving is the performance I’d single out. When Smith tells Morpheus that humans are a virus, there’s a disgust in his voice that chills me more than any effect in the film, and I think that scene is where the film turns from exciting to frightening.
Cypher’s Honest Betrayal
Cypher is the film’s most honest character and its most essential. His betrayal, choosing to return to the Matrix, to not know what he knows, illuminates the cost of the red pill in ways that Neo’s acceptance of it can’t. Neo chose the truth before he knew what the truth was. Cypher chose comfort after knowing exactly what he was trading away. The distinction is the film’s moral center.
The Wachowskis make Cypher someone who has decided that real misery is less valuable than comfortable illusion, a defensible position that most people in most circumstances implicitly hold. “Ignorance is bliss” is the rational preference of someone who has weighed the cost of awareness against the cost of ignorance and made a choice. Cypher makes that choice explicitly and pays for it, but the film doesn’t pretend the calculation is simple.
Without Cypher the film’s central question, would you take the red pill, has only one possible answer. With him it’s two, both of which the film treats as comprehensible. That honesty gives Neo’s choice its weight.
The Action as Argument
The Wachowskis and choreographer Yuen Woo-ping built the action sequences around a single principle: fighting is understanding. Neo’s growing capability is a comprehension curve. He fights better as he understands more, and each fight sequence is staged to visualize one stage in that comprehension.
The training sequences with Morpheus are about learning to question the rules.
The Agent fights are about discovering the limits of the rules. The final sequence with Smith is about understanding that the rules don’t apply at all. Each stage requires different choreography, different spatial relationships, different relationships to the camera. The Wachowskis didn’t design one style of action and apply it throughout. They designed an action language that evolves with the protagonist’s understanding.
Bullet time is the most famous innovation but not the most important one. The more important innovation is using action grammar to communicate psychological state. When Neo starts to perceive things in Matrix code, the film shifts visual tones. When he achieves full understanding, the fight with Smith looks different from every fight that preceded it. Form follows consciousness.
The way the fighting changes as Neo changes is what I’d point to if anyone asked why this film is more than its bullet time. By the final fight with Smith I’m grinning, because the film has taught me, one fight at a time, exactly why Neo can do what he’s doing.
What Costs the Point
The 9 instead of 10 comes down to a handful of moments where the philosophical scaffolding shows through the action. In the middle act the film pauses a beat too long on its own argument, and I can feel the Wachowskis checking that I’ve understood before they move on. It stands out because the rest of the film trusts me completely, and those pauses feel like a flicker of nerves from filmmakers who had no reason to be nervous.
It’s a minor complaint against a film that otherwise trusts its audience completely. “There’s no spoon” isn’t explained. The Oracle’s advice isn’t decoded for the audience. Morpheus’s certainty about Neo is never fully justified. The film works with the confidence that the audience will track these things without assistance. The occasional lapse into over-explanation is the only crack in that confidence.
Is The Matrix as good as people say?
The Matrix gets its 9 as a near-complete piece of science fiction filmmaking, where the visual invention, the philosophical ambition and the narrative momentum all run at the same high level. Taken on its own, without the sequels, it’s a closed argument that doesn’t need expanding to be understood.
The sequels aren’t part of this rating, and they stay out, because they complicate and often undermine what the original did. The first film asked a clean question, built a clean structure around it and answered it with total confidence, and that’s the film I’m scoring.
