I was ten years old when I first saw The Matrix. My family had just recently gotten a DVD player, and the 1999 sci-fi film was one of our first DVD purchases. My parents were very permissive about letting me watch R-rated films, but I usually avoided them because I associated them with tense, scary scenes and “disgusting” acts of human affection like sex and kissing. However, my parents and brothers told me that The Matrix was a fantastic movie, and I had to see it. So one weekend when I had nothing to do, I went up into my playroom where the DVD player was, and watched the movie. I fell in love that day.
- Bullet time, one of the most iconic special effects in the movie.
The appeal of the movie was quite simple to a ten-year-old. It had guns. It had cartwheels and wall-runs. It had explosions. It had bullet time. It had a kick-ass soundtrack that showcased the finest electronic music that the late 90s had to offer. It had… the lobby scene. Back then, I didn’t care all that much about the hour-and-a-half of movie that comes before Keanu Reeves utters his famous line, “Guns… lots of guns.” I cannot count the number of times that I popped in the DVD just to watch that scene. But that was all that The Matrix needed to be catapulted into the distinctive honor of the best movie ten-year-old me had ever seen.
I was wimpy but hyper-competitive in the fifth grade, so I often found myself on the losing end of competitions of strength and athleticism, much to my chagrin. I escaped from this cruel reality through Neo’s heroic and superhuman feats, dreaming of a day where I’d be able to do the same. I’d pretend that I could cartwheel, wall-run, and shoot guns with pinpoint accuracy like Neo and Trinity did in the lobby scene. I bought into the notion that a man could dodge bullets by waving his arms around in slow motion, and I fell flat on my ass many times while trying to mimic the scene. I was completely entranced by and immersed within the world of The Matrix.
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