Welcome again to ’99 Rewind, our celebration of twenty fifth anniversaries of the movies, TV, and music from 1999. At the moment, it’s time to as soon as extra return to the Wachowskis’ iconic The Matrix.
Liz Shannon Miller (Senior Leisure Editor): Welcome to a myallmovies Chat that spans generations. 25 years down the road, The Matrix stays a kind of movies the place it’s laborious to overstate its influence on popular culture, particularly when you think about that Keanu Reeves was coming off a sequence of less-than-well-regarded mainstream movies and nobody knew who the Wachowskis have been, except they’d one way or the other managed to see the (wonderful) indie thriller Sure.
Regardless of these points, Warner Bros. created a remarkably efficient promotional marketing campaign, constructed across the very efficient tease “What’s The Matrix?” I’m sufficiently old to do not forget that marketing campaign, and the way the trailers highlighted each the movie’s central mysteries and the revolutionary motion in retailer — which is why my nerdy teenage self couldn’t have been extra hyped to lastly see the film on opening night time, March thirty first, 1999. I used to be prepared, as a sensible man stated, to free my thoughts.
Earlier than I inform the story of that life-changing occasion, although, I’ve a query for my colleague Jonah Krueger — hey Jonah, when did you first see The Matrix?
Jonah Krueger (Editorial Coordinator): Gosh, that is actually gonna out me as an aughts child. I’ve this fuzzy reminiscence of a lazy Sunday afternoon after I will need to have been possibly seven or eight. My dad and I have been flipping by way of the cable channels, probably not paying consideration, once we stumbled throughout some dude in latex and leather-based impossibly dodging bullets.
My dad immediately lit up, main me to ask what we have been watching. “The Matrix,” he stated, to which I responded precisely how Warner Bros. would have wished me to: “What’s The Matrix?”After catching possibly the final 20 minutes (not counting business breaks), I turned obsessive about monitoring down the film. One journey to Blockbuster and a pillow fort-building session later, I lastly settled in to take the crimson tablet for the primary time, subsequently exhibiting it to as a lot of my associates as I may earlier than I needed to return the DVD.
