Even After 20 Years, The Matrix Is A Sci-Fi Class Act And Will Never Be Topped Ever Again

I remember the first time I watched 'The Matrix'. I was 11, and it was at the house of a family friend, and their son had decided I absolutely needed to watch this awesome movie I'd never heard of before. And that's when I had my little child brain blown.

With a family home in Goa, we'd come down to Mumbai every so often to visit friends and relatives. During one of these trips, we were visiting with family friends who had a son a couple of years older than me. This was in a spacious house in Andheri so he had a room to himself, and he proceeded to proudly show off some of his cooler big kid toys.

Then, out of nowhere, he turns to me and asks, "Have you seen The Matrix?"

The thing is, again, I lived in Goa at the time. So even though the iconic movie released in 1999, our local cinemas (there were just two of them remotely close by) didn't get the prints till much later. Plus, I was born into the stereotypical middle-class Indian family, which meant a movie in a theater was maybe a biennial treat at best. Also, I was still into cartoons so there's that.

"What's Matrix?" I asked him. The guy almost somersaulted then, trying to get to his VCR and pushing in the cassette. "You're going to love this" was all the preparation he gave me. Two hours and 16 minutes later, my mind was reeling. So we watched it again.

On March 31, The Matrix turns 20, and yet I still can't forget a moment of that movie. It was as weird as pretty much anything Keanu Reeves has done. But the movie, and its sequels that followed, are widely considered sci-fi classics. And if you've watched the trilogy, you wouldn't argue the fact either.

Part of the reason the movie was such a resounding success was because it came out of nowhere. For one thing, adult sci-fi fans at the time would have been focusing on Star Wars Episode I coming out that year. No one had ever heard of this movie or its story before. It was literally a bolt from the blue, but it was enough to capture everyone's imagination and become an important highlight of modern pop culture.

You can't discount the Wachowski siblings (known as the Wachowski Brothers at the time) and their insane directorial skills. Right from the start of the movie, they seemed to capture the essence of a dark reality, without ever directly saying so. Couple this with the later revelation that it's all fake, and you have a gripping narrative already.

It's all a simulation. Nothing is real.

As a kid, apart from this film being a celebration of hacking and computers, what truly blew me away were those oh so cool slow-mo fight scenes. You know what I'm talking about.

Trinity freezes time

When Trinity is cornered by cops in a room, in the very first scene of the original movie, and how she jumps up, the camera warps around her as she's suspended in air, and then snaps back to reality. Where the hell did that come from?!

Then there's Neo doing the limbo to avoid a hail of automatic fire. The next time I saw something as cool was in Max Payne 1, released in 2001. Retroactively though, we end up calling them both "bullet-time".

But as an adult however, my feelings about the Matrix trilogy are somewhat changed. For one thing, the movie series has spawned a number of memes. And where I once loved them for their action and weird cyber horror, I can now parse their subtle messages. And one thing becomes very evident.

Morpheus was a god-damned genius.

Looking back on it, the movie is a bleak look at our own future. We've come to rely on machines so much, we can't function without them. And realizing that, instead of trying to be more self-sufficient, we're pushing forward to make these machines able to do more. Heck, the whole premise of the movie was about how AI enslaved humanity in order to ensure its own survival.

And what are we doing now if not making artificial intelligence smarter in order to save ourselves the trouble? In fact, to save them the trouble, we're developing our own virtual reality technology so we can immerse ourselves in a fake world. In this case, it seems life imitates art to make a sarcastic parody of it.

So this March 31, go back and watch the series. Right from the humble beginnings of 'The Matrix' to the war propaganda-heavy 'Matrix Revolution' to the esoteric 'Animatrix' (yeah that's a thing). Absorb it all once more and marvel at how well the series has aged with the passage of time and the progress of technology.