The Matrix - Reception

Reception

The Matrix received positive reviews from most critics, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a consensus forming that it presented an "ingenious" blend of Hong Kong action cinema, innovative visual effects and an imaginative vision. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 87% of critics gave the film positive reviews, with an average score of 7.4/10, based upon a sample of 129 reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns an average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 73 upon its DVD release, based on 35 reviews.

Philip Strick commented in Sight & Sound, "if the Wachowskis claim no originality of message, they are startling innovators of method," praising the film's details and its "broadside of astonishing images". Roger Ebert praised the film's visuals and premise, but disliked the third act's focus on action. Similarly, Time Out praised the "entertainingly ingenious" switches between different realities, Hugo Weaving's "engagingly odd" performance, and the film's cinematography and production design, but concluded, "the promising premise is steadily wasted as the film turns into a fairly routine action pic ... yet another slice of overlong, high concept hokum."

Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader also reviewed the film negatively, criticising it as "simpleminded fun for roughly the first hour, until the movie becomes overwhelmed by its many sources ... There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome." Film critic Nick Davis strongly disliked The Matrix, criticising aspects such as its unoriginality and its attitudes toward race and gender ("Whatever credit the Wachowskis get for casting a woman and a black man as Neo's superiors they summarily lose by turning them into the same old pigeonholes") and concluding, "The Wachowski Brothers have dreamed up brand-new special effects, have raised the bar of technical accomplishment in filmmaking, only to put a pathetically hackneyed, depressingly impersonal, and politically thoughtless bit of tripe onto the screen."

Ian Nathan of Empire described Carrie-Anne Moss as "a major find", praised the "surreal visual highs" enabled by the bullet time (or "flo-mo") effect, and described the film as "technically mind-blowing, style merged perfectly with content and just so damn cool". Nathan remarked that although the film's "looney plot" would not stand up to scrutiny, that was not a big flaw because "The Matrix is about pure experience". Salon's reviewer Andrew O'Hehir acknowledged that The Matrix is a fundamentally immature and unoriginal film ("It lacks anything like adult emotion... all this pseudo-spiritual hokum, along with the overamped onslaught of special effects -- some of them quite amazing -- will hold 14-year-old boys in rapture, not to mention those of us of all ages and genders who still harbor a 14-year-old boy somewhere inside"), but concluded, "as in Bound, there's an appealing scope and daring to the Wachowskis' work, and their eagerness for more plot twists and more crazy images becomes increasingly infectious. In a limited and profoundly geeky sense, this might be an important and generous film. The Wachowskis have little feeling for character or human interaction, but their passion for movies — for making them, watching them, inhabiting their world — is pure and deep."

In 2001, The Matrix was placed 66th in the American Film Institute's "100 Years... 100 Thrills" list. In 2007, Entertainment Weekly called The Matrix the best science-fiction piece of media for the past 25 years. In 2009, the film was ranked 39th on Empire's reader-, actor- and critic-voted list of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time". The Matrix was voted as the fourth best sci-fi film in the 2011 list Best in Film: The Greatest Movies of Our Time, based on a poll conducted by ABC and People.

Several science fiction creators commented on the film. Author William Gibson, a key figure in cyberpunk fiction, called the film "an innocent delight I hadn't felt in a long time," and stated, "Neo is my favourite-ever science fiction hero, absolutely." Joss Whedon called the film "my number one" and praised its storytelling, structure and depth, concluding, "It works on whatever level you want to bring to it." Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky commented, "I walked out of The Matrix ... and I was thinking, 'What kind of science fiction movie can people make now?' The Wachowskis basically took all the great sci-fi ideas of the 20th century and rolled them into a delicious pop culture sandwich that everyone on the planet devoured." Director M. Night Shyamalan praised the Wachowskis' passion for the film, saying, "Whatever you think of The Matrix, every shot is there because of the passion they have! You can see they argued it out!"