The first thing anybody does when you say you don't like The Matrix is roll their eyes. "Oh great," they think, "Some kind of hipster. You're going to name some obscure sci-fi movie or book that 'did it first,' and look down on anyone who hasn't heard of it, all while twirling an unlit pipe in your fingers."
I can't argue that those people aren't out there, but my dislike of The Matrix has nothing to do with being special or feeling smarter than everybody. I hate it because it spends what feels like three hours of its 136-minute runtime (take that, math!) explaining what you'd think is a pretty simple concept. Morpheus is using Alice in Wonderland metaphors and walking Neo through all these different virtual environments while talking, talking, talking like this concept is so hard to grasp that you need to come at it from all these different angles.
"Actually, the real world you lived in was a virtual reality simulation. If you know that world is fake, and really really believe it, you can do anything you want and be a wizard." There. Now you can skip to the part where you can do magic instead of running out of time and doing only like one magic thing.
Warner Bros. PicturesThis is the only time in the first movie they actually used the premise of being able to do "anything," when "anything" didn't just mean "fight like a regular person except faster and stronger." You wait two hours for this.
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