The Matrix

it’s hard to explain my antipathy towards the Matrix, maybe it’s tied to my dislike of all things popular. I’ve never watched it. It’s right there with Napoleon Dynamite which I have successfully avoided my whole life.

It probably has to do with my problems with paranoia. That and bullet time. There’s also a thing about chosen one narratives, in that they are lazy writing. So you’ve got a movie that validates every paranoid schizophrenic, and it is a chosen one narrative which is the laziest writing strategy a writer can use.

Remember I was a teenager when this thing came out and I was reading every book I could get my hands on, I knew good narrative when I got my hands on it. Heck I’ve seen B-movie horror with better plots and I’m not kidding, I’ve read better terrible horror novels than my understanding of the story.

Humans make terrible batteries, okay, let’s just start there from the jump. So if your sinister plan is to use humans as batteries, that’s the ultimate why you are keeping everyone in a simulation…….. Go read Battlefield Earth, seriously, L. Ron Hubbard has a better concept of science than the writers of the Matrix……. my God.

You know I actually liked Jupiter Ascending, it was at least a good story going through it. Everyone was awake, they were harvesting Earth for live forever juice, at least I could BELIEVE that garbage science.

I just could never get on board with the whole species being under the spell of people so incompetent that they thought humans made GOOD batteries.

I like Keanu Reeves too. He’s not the problem with those movies for me. The problem has been and will always be that I spent too much time studying other things, and appreciating narratives that made way better sense.

Everyone always looks at me weird when I shit on the Matrix, because everyone loves the Matrix. I’m like, well, how about you just grow up as an outsider in Oklahoma, you don’t need a stupid movie to feel paranoid, there’s plenty to be afraid of in the real world.

The creators of it aren’t exactly well respected in the film community, and there’s a reason for that.

The Coen Brothers they sure aren’t.

Thousands of movies out there, many of them created by people with talent you can see evident throughout, and I just don’t hear a lot of people bringing up the Matrix when they talk about spectacular films.

Thankfully Napoleon Dynamite is also one I don’t hear talked about in that group either. When you watch a lot of films, you develop hatred for a select few, and it has a lot to do with other filmmakers you respect.

I wouldn’t say I directly hate the Matrix, more that I hate what it has come to represent in popular culture, and that it has eclipsed many other better movies.

I understand why people like it, in the same why I understand why people like the DaVinci Code, which I also do not respect at all.

I do hate Napoleon Dynamite, unapologetically. No one has ever challenged me on it so I get away with that one.