revisiting The Matrix in 2021. When Elrond moonlights as an AI program

Nowadays they are just programs.

The movie is slow paced. this is pretty relevant for an era where you had to watch it in theatres, where you have to listen to the lines without the help of a convenient subtitles. You had to listen, or you lost what was said. The action scenes are crisp, yet they are slower than the ones today. Maybe it's just me but movies have gotten faster, with an urge to cram in more and more tropes within a bulging 11/2 - 2 hr window.
Comparing Columbo to Monk can help you see the speed, but also comparing Charlie Chan to Columbo .

Monk has a lot more happening but only a little bit gets shown. With Columbo, and more with Charlie Chan , all thats shown is all that is happening and vice versa.

Each scene in the Matrix is as good as an album cover. Each line has a clean place in the story.

The story evolves nicely along the path of the Hero's Journey. Living a normal life, getting called into an adventure, being told you're the chosen one, discovering powers, finding help, day becomes night and right becomes wrong and up becomes down, a climactic battle, back to normal life , but not as the same person.

If I could've avoided watching the Matrix or the Pirate sequels, I'd have been an accomplished man by now, but my appetite for junk bordering on garbage is a fundamental component of the loser that I am

The oracle told Trinity that she'd fall in love with the one. Falling-in-love is not a quantified scientifically measurable thing - you're just become a spaced out junkie who smiles inside yourself all the time, or so I have been told. It's ludicrous to base a prophesy on 'the coming of the ONE' on such a. thing, and also very irresponsible too.

The Matrix follows the whims of probability nicely. Any system designed to do keep multitudes under delusion via electrical signals to the nervous body will have definite but small percentage of exceptions, and a smaller number aware of this themselves. Such characters form the 'potentials' littering the oracle's house. 
The oracle is a woman baking cookies in a kitchen, holding vast powers of wisdom and prophecy. A very interesting picture that.But we already knew , that our women in our kitchens knew more about the life and the purpose of the universe than we could even dream of.  Yeah, but they won't tell us. We men are pawns in their grand game. Again,  Alice in wonderland.

The call to adventure comes in the form of a "follow the white rabbit' message and a white rabbit tattooed on a random chad's ho.

The meeting with the oracle is amazingly well done. The breaking vase, the corny line about being the One is like being in love, you know it.  She tells him he's got the gift but he's not going all out on it. Isn't this the exact hero's journey pattern ?

The cars are just lovely, the cityscapes are deliciously depressingly  grey-blue. the kind of happy sad feeling I associate with Pink Floyd.

to heal you need space and time

Thinking about the science of the Matrix - the central thing  in the matrix is that humans are immobilised in pods , with simulated reality coming to them via electrodes going into them.

In this simulated reality, they just do what we do in this life of ours, going to work, paying taxes, raising families, getting a little entertainment (ref the Steve Jobs walls quote)

however. the real call to action comes when they have to unplug morpheus to save zion.that's when shit get's real, and Neo steps up

"you're empty, so are you" - truest of Mahayana buddhist revelations !! no they're talking about each others guns being out of bullets

the matrix is the story of a soul attaining nirvana, and the attempts of the entire known universe to destroy him