What a lot of people miss...

Rating: 9/10 (4 February 2001)

Dear Matrix Viewer,
With every highly successful film (especially a film involving the Academy Awards(tm)), there is a backlash some time after release. There are several reasons for this backlash, one being that people generally don't like what they perceive to be "too much success," whatever that may be for a person. Some people seem to feel personally diminished when they witness a great success -- or they compare a film to a personal favorite, rather than viewing it 'in isolation' -- for what it is AS IS, not for what it's judged against.
Another reason is that many don't realize a film is *more than the sum of its parts*. When a movie is first released, this fact is generally recognized, and a movie is enjoyed as a whole. Later, people tend to pick the film apart, viewing it as *the sum of its parts*, and concluding that because of the perceived faults in various parts, the movie itself can't be so great. The sense of a film as *the whole banana* gets lost when people pick it apart.
Yet another is that people generally get tired of hype. Many are bothered by commercial hype, and feel that when individuals hype (enjoy/love) a movie, some sort of unforgivable sin has been committed.
The psychology of a successful film could fill a book. Notice how well "Titanic" was received when it appeared on the big screen -- people were seeing it then as a movie, a whole -- and AS a whole, it's a great film. Later, people saw it as the sum of many different scenes, and so it seemed like a poor film. It's just too easy to lose the ability to watch a movie AS a movie after it's been around for awhile, and people pick and pick at it, until even the greatest film can appears flawed and generally worthless.
Anyway, if you understand some of the psychology behind how films are seen by people due to various factors, it all starts to make sense. And (perhaps unfortunately) it gets to be quite dull watching the (at first) intelligent comments on a forum like IMDB turn to black and white -- either it's "the greatest movie ever made" or it's a piece of... well, you get the idea.
THINK, people. And please, try to see how the effects of *time* upon a motion picture operate. Why a film that was initially perceived as a stunning achievement by both the public and the critics can later be viewed by many as "lousy," or alternately become canonized in people's minds as "the greatest movie of all time."
I still rate The Matrix 10/10. I still know how to see it as more than the sum of its parts. I hope you do, too (or will, someday).