for National Geographic News
Rewind to April, 1999. The hype for The Phantom Menace, the new Star Wars movie, was reaching fever pitch as fans began to line up outside Hollywood's famous Chinese Theater, even though the opening was still a month away.
Then, The Matrix arrived.
Soon, the buzz was spreading faster than a Love San virus. Between its groundbreaking special effects and religious riddles, this sci-fi flick rocked. Even the casting of a wide-eyed Keanu Reeves as the Christ-like savior Neo made sense. Suddenly, Star Wars seemed like yesterday's cool.
The Matrix, of course, went on to become a box-office smash hit. The inevitable video game spin-offs soon followed. Internet chatrooms lit up with passionate debates about the meaning of it all. (If Neo were really Jesus, who would his father be?) The discourse even bounced into the halls of academia.
But these are fickle times. By the time the first sequel, the cleverly titled The Matrix Reloaded, finally plugged into movie theaters this spring, the cultural phenomena had already peaked. Now, as the third, and presumably final, installment in the trilogy—The Matrix Revolutions—arrives, the buzz is gone.
Such is the cyclical nature of pop culture.
"The first film was visually startling, and tapped into the strong perception of artificiality in our world," said Marita Sturken, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "But it's hard to sustain that sense of visual innovation. Now, it seems like its moment has faded."
A Rebel Yell
The premise of the The Matrix went something like this: The world as we know it isn't real, it's just a computer simulation of the now-destroyed "real world," which is run by machines that use human bodies as an energy source.
Enter a rebel band of freedom fighters, among them Reeves' Neo, who have learned the unreality of the Matrix, and seen the ugly truth of the real world.
Seeking to destroy the Matrix, they travel into the computer program, where the normal laws of physics don't apply. Cue the action.
The movie featured high-flying warriors and impossible stunts. Its most famous effect involved slowing the action to show a bullet's flight in mid-air.
