Why does it work?

Rating: Null/10 (25 June 1999)

Themes: telephones, resurrection, world as illusion, messiah, cult, hacking, bullets, time, machines, identity, leatherwear, sunglasses, reincarnation, Alice Is the oracle a helpful A1?
Since rogue hackers seem to form the main source of challenge to the A1 running the Matrix, why does it maintain a 1999 culture full of digital technology and repressive Microsoft style employers, making the ideal breeding ground for the above? A simple agrarian society would have kept things a lot quieter for it ..
Where is the appeal of The Matrix? It's not a particularly clever film in terms of plot, and treads the line very close between epic tradition and lazy no-brainer, mostly landing well into the latter. The strength is in the sheer quantity of references that comprise in to the web of visual and stylistic elements, and that they are not drawn in simply to fill space, but with affection and awareness. The plot pivots on the premise, familiar to eastern (and to some extent western) philosophical traditions, that the world we know is an illusion, and that only awareness of that can enable us to transcend it. This high concept is then pushed into the mindworld occupied by cults and the paranoid - the illusion is deliberately maintained by malevolent intelligence outside our awareness, except when revealed to the initiate by the the informed, or accidentally discovered by the innocent. The former happens here. In a classic cult recruitment, the misfit hero is escorted to a disorienting environment, told he is special in a way he senses but cannot understand, told his sense of unease in life has a real basis that can be solved, and offered the choice of believing, being part of a group, or continuing in unhappy isolation. A mind-changing drug completes the transaction, severing the convert's psychological links with his former life.
In this film the paranoid is correct, the cult is indeed a brotherhood offering a more real reality to the few, the misery of the world is down to the Moriarty of hackerdom, a control-f reak Artificial Intelligence, despising (but fascinated by) the biological kind, and maintaining humanity in uncomfortable stasis, and in ignorance of the true nature of reality. However, in the film, reality can be identified and clearly distinguished from illusion