Nigel Honeybone

Retro Review- The Matrix

Lawrence Fishburne and above Keanu Reeves in THE MATRIX
Lawrence Fishburne and above Keanu Reeves in THE MATRIX

Every month the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace at 380 Military Road Cremorne) holds ‘I ♥ Retro’ sessions featuring some of the best blockbusters of the last several decades.

At 7pm on Friday the 24th of October, the Hayden Orpheum intends to blow our minds with THE MATRIX (1999), an American-Australian science fiction action film that walked away with four Oscars, two BAFTAs and two Saturn Awards.

It has become increasingly popular to bemoan the path of progress, a path that has fallen short of the glorious expectations of post-WWII Popular Science magazines and the like, which predicted a future in which commuters would fly to work using jet packs or tele-operate lunar bulldozers from the comfort of their robot-cleaned homes.

What if, however, it was not just your vision of the future that had derailed, but the very reality in which we all live our lives?! And, what if, the consensus notion of reality was no more than a group hallucination or a construct? These disturbing ideas form the backstory and essence of THE MATRIX.

Within the first few scenes of the film, the world as Neo (Keanu Reeves) has known it is brought crashing down around him. His depressing apartment, his stultifying job, even his black market dealings in computer software are all part of The Matrix, a computer-generated replication of a world that no longer exists. Neo is, in reality, sleeping away his life in a pod in which he is hooked up to a computer program that provides these dreams of a real life. The real world, instead, is now run by machines which live off human energy harvested from vast pod farms – just one of the many memorable and bleak special effects scenes.

Only a small group of humans now live in the real world, a grim and terrifying reality in which they must constantly battle for survival against the machines. These rebels seek to free the imprisoned and are also searching for ‘The One’ – a human about which a prophecy has been told who will lead them to victory against the machines. One of the rebel leaders, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), believes that Neo may be this very person, and much of the film revolves around Neo’s journey toward understanding what his role may or may not be in the approaching revolution against the machines.

Owing some debt to THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE by Plato, new-wave science fiction of the sixties, and the cyberpunk sub-genre pioneered by author William Gibson, THE MATRIX emerged as a strange hybrid,- an adventure combining stunning martial-arts action with an intriguing approach to science fiction.

The film’s two writer-directors, brothers Andy Wachowski and Larry (now Lana) Wachowski, had developed their comic-book writing talents into careers as successful screenwriters.

When the Wachowski’s screenplay for Assassins (1995) was being filmed for producer Joel Silver, the brothers presented him with the script of THE MATRIX. Their visual style – heavily influenced by their comic-book background – featured a startling sense for depicting time, favouring the ultra-slow-motion first used in the thirties by Leni Riefenstahl when filming Olympic athletes. This technique, successfully embraced for the ‘ballet-of-death’ sequences in films like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), had degenerated into a hoary cliche in recent decades, but the Wachowskis succeeded in re-inventing the style.

Not only had THE MATRIX bent the genre all over the place and introduced cyberspace to the mainstream, it had also made the stony-faced Keanu Reeves actually look cool! Hey, it could have been worse! Nicolas Cage turned down the role of Neo because of family commitments, and Will Smith instead chose to star in the lamentable Wild Wild West (1999).

This was the first installment in the comprehensive series of Matrix films, comics, games and animations, containing many references to the cyberpunk and hacker subcultures, philosophical and religious ideas, as well as homages to Alice In Wonderland, spaghetti westerns, Chop-Socky films, dystopian science fiction and good ol’ Anime.

Published by Nigel Honeybone

My stage debut was as Hamlet's dead father, portraying him as a tall posh skeleton. This triumph was followed in Richard III, as the remains of a young prince which I interpreted as a tall posh skeleton. I began attracting starring roles, and was propelled into the film world when, in Psycho (1960), I wore women's clothing for the very first time. The seed of an idea was planted and, after working with director Ed Wood for five years, I realised the unlimited possibilities of tall posh skeletons who dressed in women's clothing. I went on to wear women's clothing in thirteen major motion pictures, including the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Star Wars (1977), heartbreaking as the remains of Aunt Beru. With the onslaught of special effects came the demise of real actors in these sorts of roles. After modeling for CGI skeletons in Total Recall (1990) and Toys (1992), the only possible step forward for a tall posh skeleton was television, imparting my knowledge and expertise of the arts. I currently host THE SCHLOCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW seen on TVS Sydney Channel 44 every Friday evening, presenting the very best of the worst films you're ever likely to see.