The Matrix review – barnstorming sci-fi still calling our

The movie that launched a million memes has lost none of its conspiratorial power, and its action sequences still dazzle – but was it actually trying to tell us something we’ve all missed?

To paraphrase Apu in The Simpsons, this was the year filmgoers were partying like it was on sale for $19.99; it offered the vintage of American Beauty, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense and more. But The Matrix seemed to me then – and seems to me now – more exciting than any of them, first among equals in the previous century’s final graduating class. Rereleased for its 25th anniversary, this barnstorming sci-fi paranoia thriller, produced by action veteran Joel Silver and written and directed by the Wachowskis, holds up tremendously well. The martial arts sequences choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping are gripping and nothing about the bullet-time effects or production design feels dated. Even the ringing payphone – an unexceptional detail in 1999 – now looks like an inspired steampunk touch.

Keanu Reeves, inscrutable, adorable and eccentric in his utterly individual way, plays Thomas Anderson, a talented young software programmer by day, and by night a mysterious online figure on global networks with the handle “Neo”. He has attracted the disapproval of shadowy government forces, led by Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) who are worried by Neo’s anti-establishment posts and technical savvy, and his intuition that the government is keeping secrets, or just one big secret, from the people. But Neo is also being pursued by rebel activists, including Trinity (played with icy severity and style by Carrie-Anne Moss) and led by the charismatic Morpheus (a suavely assured Laurence Fishburne) who, despite his name, wants the whole world to wake up. Morpheus confronts Neo and offers him a fundamental choice in a now legendary scene: a blue pill which will return him to his current state of befuddled but basically placid ignorant acceptance, or the red pill which will irreversibly reveal to him just what is going on: the reality behind the illusion.