The Matrix

The Matrix (1999) changed both what action cinema looked like and what science fiction was asking. Neo is a programmer by day and a hacker at night. He senses something is wrong, and Morpheus finds him. What he learns is that the world he lives in is not real, that humanity is being farmed by machines for energy, and that everything he sees is a simulation fed into his mind. Visually there is bullet time: the camera circling a frozen moment. The technique was produced by firing hundreds of still cameras in sequence, and it was imitated everywhere for years afterwards. Yuen Woo-ping was brought from Hong Kong for the fights and the four leads trained for months. Keanu Reeves did it having just come out of neck surgery. How the film is read has shifted over time. Both Wachowskis later transitioned, and Lilly Wachowski has said plainly that reading the film as a trans allegory is correct: living in a body that is not yours and crossing into your actual self. That reading is now one of its main interpretations. The phrase red pill was also detached from the film and adopted online by groups the Wachowskis have objected to. It runs 136 minutes. Good for: science fiction, action, and philosophical narrative. Less good for: the violence is heavy, some effects have dated, and the explanatory passages run long.