It might sound strange, but The Matrix is actually a happy movie — rewatch it to shake off the January blues

One of the things I enjoy about being a journalist is that stories, ideas, and thoughts can come from all sorts of places: case in point, when on a date and discussing the topic of movies, it was presented to me that The Matrix is a ‘happy’ movie.

I cracked a smile at that; for those who don’t know thrust of The Matrix is that robots rose up against humans and enslaved our consciousness in a virtual world while they use us as biological batteries, with the few people who escaped from the system now entering the titular Matrix to free chosen humans from this virtual prison. From that premise, and the dark, cyberpunk tone of the movie, I’d never have thought to describe it as happy.

But then, as the discussion went on, I was brought round to my date’s thinking.