The Matrix | Film Review

Reviewed by Thomas Scarborough

While the Matrix is not a Christian film, it is an archetypal postmodern film (released in 1999), and for this reason serves as required viewing at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. With this in mind, this review represents a survey of the postmodern themes in the film, with a view to revealing some features of (post) modern culture.

This was an enormously popular film. It is technically excellent, and won several Academy Awards. This having been said, it would seem to be, generally speaking, a rather monochromatic, brooding, unoriginal piece of science fiction, peppered with incomplete insights and gratuitous violence, particularly against “the gatekeepers” of society (hence an R rating in the USA). Its popularity will lie in its extraordinary visual effects, and in a theme which resonated strongly with a generation.

BACKGROUND

The title of the film is taken from “The Matrix”, which represents the world in which we presently live. However, its inhabitants do not really exist in this world. Rather, in the words of the character Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) this world represents “a neural-interactive simulation that we call The Matrix”. While this world’s inhabitants experience the simulation as though it were real, their real essences — with the exception of a few — are being tapped to power the simulation. By implication, as a person’s essence is drained from them, so is the simulation kept alive. The two are co-dependent on each other.

Behind the simulation, a few real humans have survived in Zion, “the last human city, the only place we have left.” However, not all are convinced that this reality is better than The Matrix. While Morpheus considers that “as long as The Matrix exists, the human race will never be free,” Cypher (played by Joe Pantoliano) considers, “I think The Matrix can be more real than this world.” That is, the unselfconscious illusion may be preferable to the postmodern condition.

RECURRING ISSUES

Several issues recur in the film, and it is on these I shall focus here, rather than the more superficial progression of the plot.

The film would suggest that the true nature of reality is such that it lies beyond decipherment. Cypher states: “There’s way too much information to decode The Matrix.” That is, our world is “larger” than can be contained in any codified system, and for this reason it cannot be understood, or effectively controlled. The grand project of modernity, namely to discover a single decipherment, would seem to have been mistaken.

At first, when humans sought to impose this deficient system on their world, they “marvelled at our own magnificence” — yet this “spawned an entire race of machines”. One of the major consequences of the construction of systems, ideologies, metanarratives, was the loss of human dignity and freedom. The Matrix drained humanity’s essence, creating a “construct”. According to Morpheus, this is “the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to your truth. . . . a prison for your mind.”

The artificiality of the construct led, in turn, to a sense of alienation among humans. The film’s character Trinity (played by Carrie-Anne Moss) says to Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), “I know why you hardly sleep, and why night after night you sit at your computer. I know because I was once looking for the same thing.” That is, Trinity understands that the constructs of modernity tend to engender an identity of alienation.

The film raises several other issues:

It suggests the arbitrary nature of identity — “from clothing to equipment, weapons, training simulation, anything we need”; it considers the question of “misery and suffering” — conjecturing that this might enable human beings to “define their reality”; it considers that human beings are “a cancer of this planet”, because they have lost “a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment”; and it would seem fixated with determinism, or fate. In the words of Neo: “I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.”

TENTATIVE ANSWERS

The film makes a few attempts to answer the conundrums of the human condition:

It would seem to suggest that we are capable of recognising our enslavement to The Matrix, if we are only ready to do so. There is a reality beyond this world, “a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible.” For the postmodernist, there is a multiplicity of options. The door is there — you only “have to walk through it”.

However, once one has walked through this door, there is no turning back. “I can’t go back, can I,” says Neo. “I feel I owe you an apology,” answers Morpheus. That is, the postmodernist has irreversibly entered a new reality. The “post-” phenomenon is not just a fad.

However, not only do we seem capable of recognising The Matrix. We would appear to have a mission to destroy it — hence, apparently, much of the violence of the film, and arguably, the nagging association of postmodernism with anomie. Agent Smith (played by Hugo Weaving) seethes: “I hate this place, this zoo, this prison, this reality,” while Morpheus explains, “The Matrix . . . is our enemy.”

The ultimate answer to life is tentatively suggested as lying beyond all system and reason. Trinity comments: “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path” — with the implication that there is a better way than the structures of knowledge. “If you’re killed in The Matrix,” she says to Neo, “your body cannot live without the mind.” Neo, however, continues to live despite this (apparently without the mind, yet through the power of love) “because I love you, do you hear me? I LOVE you!”

SYNTHESIS

At the beginning of the film, Neo Anderson (tr. new man) is removed from The Matrix — this illusory world — for the purpose of showing him the true nature of his “reality”. In the closing scenes, he is returned to his original environment — yet now he looks around him apparently renewed. Finally he looks up, and takes to the skies like Superman.

Is Neo truly a renewed man? Does he truly possess new possibilities? Where do we go from here? After all, only Superman can fly. Among his closing words are these: “I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin.” This, too, is a common postmodern attitude — namely that we are presently preparing the way for something we are not yet able to envisage or understand.

Thomas Scarborough is currently studying for a Master’s degree through Fuller Theological Seminary. He ministers at an Evangelical Congregational Church in Sea Point, Cape Town.