The Matrix was way ahead of its time. The Wachowskis’ tech-noir mind-bender came out in 1999 – 20 years ago – which meant that it reinvented big-screen superhero action a year before X-Men was released and showcased Hong Kong-style ‘wire-fu’ fight choreography a year before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Its ‘bullet-time’ effects have been copied by blockbusters ever since, and its thoughts about virtual reality and artificial intelligence have been mimicked just as often. Despite all this, though, in some crucial respects The Matrix has dated so badly that it now seems to be a relic. It is a film that, like the human race in the Wachowskis’ story, is trapped forever in the 1990s.

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Its hero is Thomas A Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a software programmer who moonlights as a hacker known as Neo. After receiving some cryptic messages through his computer, he meets two people, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), who are nearly as fond of pretentious names as he is. They give him some disturbing news. The world as he knows it - and everyone else knows it, for that matter - is a virtual-reality simulation called the Matrix, whereas in actual reality, the earth is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Not only has there been a war between humans and artificially-intelligent machines, but the humans lost, and now snooze their lives away in pods full of gunge while “a computer-generated dreamworld” is pumped into their brains. It’s not all bad news, however. Now that Anderson knows that the Matrix is essentially a computer game, he can bend the rules, and make his avatar super-strong, super-fast and super-well-dressed. Even better, he is apparently “The One”, a god-like leader who has been prophesied to save humanity from our robot overlords.