THE MATRIX

Broadcaster Geoff Lloyd, host of weekly podcasts Adrift and Reasons To Be Cheerful, takes the red pill and watches The Matrix for the first time

OVER TIME, I’VE convinced myself I didn’t see The Matrix on its release because I found the leather trench coats and tinted glasses off-putting. In truth, it was more likely because of my alcoholism, which was at its raging peak in 1999, and didn’t like to be interrupted by annoyances such as personal hygiene, functional relationships, or trips to the cinema. When The Phantom Menace came out that same year — at that point, a film I’d literally waited most of my life for — I’d been day-drinking, and managed to stay awake for the first ten minutes before passing out in a drunken stupor. Alcoholism is widely considered to be a self-destructive behaviour, but surely this example counts as self-preservation.

It wasn’t until watching the thrilling opening sequence of The Matrix (Parkour! Kung fu! Hacking in a chair clearly not ergonomically designed for long periods of sitting at a computer screen!) that I realised I’d seen dozens of parodies without realising it: That thing where the action goes into super slow-motion — Google tells me it’s called “bullet time”. It looks a little dated, but not horrendously so, which is true of the film in general — by setting the simulated world of the Matrix in 1999, our robot overlords rob us of the chance to mock the idea of Minidiscs still existing 200 years in the future.

I was impressed that the first character we meet is a strong woman, but less impressed that she’s called Trinity. Why can’t fictional hackers just use their own name plus a combination of birth year and underscores, like the rest of us? Why must they always have names that sound like they’ve been dreamt up by a team of amateur roboteers from Robot Wars?

It’s a shame that after the first scene, Trinity takes a back seat to our protagonist, Thomas Anderson/neo (the first couple of times, I heard it as ‘Neil’ — now there’s a hacker name I could get behind). Neo is the type of character that makes it hard for me to love an action film: no apparent sense of humour, nor any discernible character trait other than brooding. He’s happy to mindlessly follow a bunch of cyberpunks to a nightclub that’s so disgusting, it made me want to pause the film and go for a shower; and when, the next morning he’s chastised for turning up late to his cubicle-monkey job, I found myself willing his boss to lodge disciplinary measures with HR.

I had a better time with Agent Smith. His manner reminded me of one those mean schoolteachers who, at the time, you assumed was employing some form of tough love, until years later it dawned on you that they just hated children. I wasn’t even mildly disturbed when Smith sealed up Neo’s mouth — partly because it was unlikely anything interesting would come out of it anyway, and partly because I’d been numbed by the trauma of seeing something similar repeatedly happen to Zippy on Rainbow.

Morpheus’ obsession with Neo being The One made me suspect underlying emotional issues, but he made exposition fun with his whistle-stop tour of CG backgrounds, and his natty dress sense. I did struggle to understand why, if he hated the Matrix so much, he wore a tie that was so clearly an homage to it. Was he trying to short-circuit their robot brains? As much as I liked Morpheus, I had a strong instinct that I wouldn’t need to remember the names of the rest of his crew (Prong? Qwerty? Glo-worm? Dinky Dan?), which proved to be prescient.

I failed to see why human beings would be better off emancipated from their cosy little dream-pods. Yes, living unconsciously in an atrophied body fed by the liquidised remains of the dead isn’t ideal, but overthrowing the robots, fixing the sky, rebuilding civilisation and re-learning skills like how to make frozen yoghurt would take generations, and it sounds exhausting.

It’s difficult to watch The Matrix without feeling the weight of its legacy. On its release, the concept must have been mind-bending. Coming to it nearly 20 years too late, those original ideas are now tropes and pop-culture wisecracks. Even without having seen it, I’ve laughed when friends dismissed a déjà vu as a glitch in the Matrix, or at memes about being red-pilled. (Or is it blue-pilled? This is why I was sacked from my job as a pharmacist.) I enjoyed how deep the rabbit hole went, but I ultimately hold The

Matrix responsible for fuelling the paranoia of the type of person who uses phrases like, “That’s what they want you to think,” and “mainstream media”. And for leather trench coats.

The Matrix is available now on DVD, blu-ray and Download