Review:

Oh boy. I first watched The Matrix in 2000 or 2001 and it was way not as cool as I remember. The Matrix has a great idea at its heart and I can tell that love and effort went into the film but there are some key details that just don't work. Right away, The Matrix is dated. Apparently, when future people get to wear whatever they want, they all choose black leather and black sunglasses and Laurence Fishburne dresses for the job he wants, selling pistachios in a commercial during The Talk. The CGI definitely looks like it's from 1999. The effects are pretty bad. Even the practical stuff has problems. There is a throwing knife and had a matte grey blade and is obviously a cheap fake. They don't show the whole scenario, so how hard would it have been to have the guy have a metal, or at the very least lustrous, blade sticking out of his stomach? The fight scenes are too long and repetitive and really don't look nearly as cool now as they did twenty years ago. I can forgive a certain amount of bad CGI just because old, but The Matrix has far too much CGI to overlook entirely. What gets no pass is the terrible acting. Laurence Fishburne was good and Marcus Chong gave a strong performance. Keanu Reeves is a total blank slate. I don't buy "but he's the avatar for the viewer" crap, because even when he's supposed to be displaying emotion, he's blank. He has no emotions. He's monotone, robotic, and lethargic. Carrie-Anne Moss is almost as bad. I at least believe that she was trying, she just can't do it. She suffers a pretty big loss and reacts with a half-hearted "no" or whatever and then moves on. She's instantly over it. I've seen her in other things and she was okay, so maybe they told her that her character is a block of wood? You can probably chalk some of my disappointment to me being ten or eleven when I first saw it, but The Matrix is like brick GameBoy with the green screen. You can recognize how cool it was when it came out, but eight bit isn't cool anymore. Black and green squares look bad. The characters needed better actors and a movie where CG is so essential needs good CG and this stuff just doesn't hold up.