Is the 1999 Matrix overrated?

The reason I voted "yes and no" is because I still hold my initial impression of it from '99, that it's basically a movie written by committee. Toss about 1000 things that were cool in the '90s (wuxia, The X-Files, Massive Attack's "Dissolved Girl"...) into a blender and voila. At the same time, I find it endlessly funny that bro-y morons have latched on to it when, in retrospect, it's obviously an allegory about 2 trans women finding their true selves.

I voted no because I really liked it. Haven't seen it in about 10 years, though. And I never watched the sequels. But I saw the original twice in the theaters and loved it both times.

There was definitely a period of time when I thought it was overrated back before everyone realized, "Oh! It's an allegory for being trans..." when it was just a kung fu movie with leather jackets, a nu metal soundtrack, and freshman philosophy class/bong circle philosophical musing grafted onto it. Yes there were some impressive technical feats in it but a lot of those were just things that Hong Kong movies had been doing for ages but now with Hollywood budgets behind them.

I do think that a lot of backlash to the movie came from the fact that before the Wachowskis came out and everyone was like, "I get it now!" the movie just led to a glut of junk like Ultraviolet and Bloodrayne and that entire subgenre of early to mid-2000s Skinny Women in Leather Catsuits Doing Overly Stylized Sci-Fi Karate and without that last piece of the Matrix puzzle in place there really wasn't a huge difference between Matrix and those Underworld movies but in the years since I think the Matrix has come to be rated exactly as highly as it should be and I have no issue with it being part of a film course at universities because it definitely is important to 21st century American film on both a technical level and in terms of theme.

liebkartoffel seems like playing with dire there (edit meant fire, but yes that too)

I'm not even convinced The Matrix is a good movie, let alone one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made (R-O-F-L-M-A-O).

The most baffling aspect of this movie is when people say (as Nude does here) "oh, I thought this was Underworld-style dopey white-girls-in-leather-catsuits mall-goth beat-em-up hokum, but that was before I realized it was a trans allegory!" Like... literally what the fuck are you guys talking about? I know it's popular to tsk-tsk at the expense of conservative white boys blasting "Bulls on Parade" while they deadlift (hat tip Rep. Ryan), but the redpill brigade are not missing the point here. Neo is a dorky malcontented white-collar white guy with above-average computer skills who discovers that he is in fact the specialest special boy who ever lived, buys a leather trenchcoat and a dozen AR-15s, and ascends to literal godhood after he gets his first kiss from his big-titty goth GF. (Who literally says "God told me my sole purpose in life is to fall in love with you," btw!!!) It is the rotten core of the Hollywood masculine power fantasy, stripped of any sense of physical discipline (Neo's martial arts skills are literally downloaded into his brain, the fucking script kiddie) or sexuality (this is every bit as sexless as the MCU, and those at least have the excuse of being kids' movies in which 0% of the characters are cosplaying as leather queens). It is the cinematic id of the incel.

The spot this wretched film occupies in our cultural consciousness would be better filled by Fight Club*, or Strange Days, or They Live, or literally any of the anime and wuxia films the Wachowski sisters wholesale lifted this movie's cinematography from. Shit, if you're going to hold up a mid-tier live-action anime film with bong-rip-tier philosophy, Inception is just as good as The Matrix, and you don't have to listen to fucking KMDFM in the process.

*p.s., on the topic of trans allegories, surely fight club counts? tyler is explicitly ed norton trying on a hyper-macho persona, but there's nothing in the film to contradict the idea that marla is also a persona that our boy(?) eddie could try on - the persona (s)he wants to adopt, instead electing to become a masculine cartoon rather than embrace a feminine true self. a dear friend of mine turned me on to this reading of the film, saying that it helped him work out his own sexuality as a teen. sounds about right to me.)

I didn't agree with all of this but I enjoyed the hell out of reading it.

Rosa, what is your opinion of the other reality-as-simulation science fiction classic of 1999, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ?

Enjoy the phony internet forum adulation you've received for being roughly the millionth person to come up with "stock hero's journey plot where the main character is super duper unique and special is erm actually reactionary male wish fulfillment." Peppering in enough buzzwords really helps your facile Nostalgia Critic-esque bad faith interpretation seem plausible.

Oh, I'm making an obvious criticism, I don't deny it. But it's the correct criticism in this instance, even if you ignore the whole "redpilled" thing.

I think comparing it to Con Air is perhaps damning with faint praise, yeah.  I still haven’t seen this film (despite owning a DVD of the entire franchise that I picked up for cheap a while back), but I get the sense that Mad Max:  Fury Road, a similarly lauded action film by a filmmaker with broadly progressive politics, is not exactly a subtle and nuanced work, philosophically speaking.  Is that fair to say, and if so, would that perhaps be a good film to bring up as a potential comparison (whether one agrees that The Matrix is overrated or not)?

Also, as far as your takedown of the film goes, I find a lot of it kind of puzzling.  I don’t really see the “what are you talking about with the trans allegory thing” as a good faith argument when this interpretation of the film has been admitted by the trans directors of the film to be a correct reading of the movie.  Like, it is a film informed by the fact that its directors are trans, and I don’t really think that’s contestable? And it’s not a particularly nuanced anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist film, but neither is the music of Rage Against the Machine, whose music iirc plays over the end credits, and I think the comparison of the incel shitheads who took it as an expression of their worldview to the sorts of guys who love RatM’s music but hate how “woke” they are is an apt one.  Both groups are missing the point.

I don’t think it’s a perfect movie or one that has no problematic aspects, and I think there’s plenty of room to critique, among other things, the white savior element of the plot, or the treatment of Trinity’s character.  And obviously nobody’s obliged to like the film either.  But yeah, idk, your comment kinda boiled down to “incels were right about The Matrix and people who view it as a trans allegory are wrong,” which I have a hard time taking too seriously.

And my actual take is that Reloaded and Revolutions are massively UNDER-rated. Great films all.