The Matrix Review

The technical claim is easy to make and still true: bullet time, built from a rig of stills cameras and interpolated frames, handed action cinema a new grammar within a year. What holds up better is everything around it. The Wachowskis hired Yuen Woo-ping and then made their cast train for four months, so the fights play in long takes with legible geography instead of the choppy cutting that would infect the next decade of imitators. Bill Pope grades the simulation sickly green and the real world steel blue, a decision so clear that the audience always knows which layer it is standing in.

Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith, all clipped disgust and elongated vowels, is the best invention in the script. Keanu Reeves is used correctly, as a blank being written on. The dialogue is where the seams show, since exposition arrives in large undramatic blocks and the philosophy is stated rather than felt. The lobby sequence and the rooftop dodge are why it endures, and the world-building is more coherent than the sequels ever managed.