How ‘The Matrix’ changed cinema forever and simultaneously set it back by years
One of the easiest ways to determine just how important and influential any given movie has proven to be in the grand scheme of history is to draw a line. If a clear distinction can be made between the complexion of cinema before the film was released and the way it evolved afterwards, then it’s a true game-changer, and The Matrix was perhaps the single most prominent example at the turn of the millennium.
The 1990s was already one of the finest decades the action genre had ever seen, giving rise to a litany of all-time greats, including Hard Boiled, Speed, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Rock, Heat, The Fugitive, and Men in Black to name just a few, but the Wachowskis made a much larger impact than any of them after exploding out of the blocks and into the cultural consciousness in March 1999.
An intoxicating blend of sci-fi, cyberpunk, philosophy, and spiritualism that displayed effortless cool, utilised jaw-dropping visual effects the likes of which had never been seen before and drew its inspirations from across the world through almost every imaginable medium from literature and video games to anime and existentialism, there had never been anything like The Matrix before.
Unfortunately, in the years to come, there were an awful lot of things like The Matrix. Hollywood is fond of jumping on a bandwagon and running it into the ground by churning out a string of poor, thinly veiled imitators, and every major studio decides that if something so distinct and unique worked for somebody else, then doing much the same thing would work for them, too.
While the Wachowskis had never been shy in admitting their movie was an amalgamation of multiple different things distilled into something entirely their own, one of the immediate after-effects of the film’s success was that virtually every major release was copying The Matrix‘s homework in one way or another.
Bullet time quickly became an overused gimmick in both the action and comedy genres, with the signature slow-motion technique being parodied everywhere from Scary Movie to Shrek, while the majority of protagonists – sci-fi or not – could be found wearing shades and a leather trench coat more often than not.
James Wong’s The One, Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium, McG’s Charlie’s Angels, Len Wiseman’s Underworld, and even Bryan Singer’s X-Men were indebted to the aesthetics of The Matrix, with the latter doubling down on its offences by birthing the early-2000s superhero boom that necessitated dark, gloomy, and atmospheric leather-clad superheroes with a martial arts element. That then became par for the course because Keanu Reeves’ introduction as Neo had seeped so deeply into the minds of studio executives everywhere that expensive features couldn’t possibly look any other way.
The post-Matrix period was hardly the most fruitful creative mainstream Hollywood has ever experienced, thanks largely to the shadow it cast, with the decision-makers overlooking the fact that what made it such a seminal work of cinema is that it dared to do something new and different. Instead, picking and choosing the very things that made it so special was deemed a good enough substitute, leading to a string of turgid spiritual successors that possessed a fraction of the imagination and barely any of the ambition.
