Tumbling Down The Rabbit Hole

The first time I watched The Matrix was in early 2000. Back then, everyone has been talking about this amazing new movie, the Matrix, for a few months. I'd heard about it, about what a great sci-fi movie it was. About how the "aliens" in the movie did unheard-of things. About how the movie had both superb gun fights and masterful east-asian karate action. If your thinking that the Matrix is not about aliens, you're absolutely right to the point. But you must keep in mind that the mean degree of spoken English proficiency of my fellow Iranians is hopelessly low. Anyway, I rented the film on VHS (yeah!) and started to watch. What I saw in the first five minutes hooked me. It was the most engaging opening sequence I'd seen before or since. When Trinity disapears from the phone booth, my mind was just... well, it was full of question marks. After that came the explosion. How Neo is living in constant twilight, how he is introduced into this new world. Morpheus's monologues, and how he answers questions with questions. Agent Smith's cold manerism and speeches. All in all, Matrix was a new horizon for me, and as I suspect, for many geeks. It has just the right amount of depth and layers that your casual, run-of-the-mill movie goer will only see a fantastic action thriller, while the geeks enjoy as they watch it over and over again and discover new clues, new references and new details. But the best feature of the film is its coolness. All the characters have super bad clothes and cool sunglasses. The action sequences, the chases, the camerawork, the sound effects, the stylish weapons and the stylish fights, all make this movie super cool. That's why movies like the Matrix and Star Wars gather a cult of followers and movies like Dark City and Citizen Kane don't, while the latter group might be enjoying better script structures, etc. I have watched the Matrix literally over a hundred times, and it has always been apealing to me. That first night I watched it three times in a row, because I was mesmerized by it's allure, it's promise that what I saw in this world was not everything. That there is a tiny hope that this drab and uninteresting thing we call reality, may infact be anything but.