Best political film of 1999, for me has to be Matrix, since I didn't see any of the films Nathan Newman mentioned. My son suggested Three Kings, but it came and went before I bothered to walk three blocks to the theater. And, no I don't own a VCR.
With the exception of running what's-his-name as The One in some jesus-like subplot that didn't work, and the bogus, but no doubt marketing committee idea of a love interest which also didn't work, the over arching sweep of the film was stunning. I would guess it will become something like 1984 or Brave New World, in that it's depiction of the future is constructed from an loosely defined paranoia of future angst, but grounded in current conditions.
In the robotic world of The Matrix, human survival has been guarantied by our own efforts to extinguish the power sources for machines by blocking the sun. The machines are ironically compelled by their own energy or economic needs in a dialectical turn to now breed humans as biological power cells in lieu of sunlight. It is a mythic vision that exudes a total evil, without definitive political contours; rather it follows the consequences of a totalized economic determinism. In one direction, Matrix is a grand scaled critique of the entire modernist project in its current postmodern expression. That is, a pragmatic world view wedded to technological progress as the means to an ideal future has been traced out to its logical endgame. It is an endgame where technological progress, rational systems, and economic pragmatism have become embodied as they were perhaps intended to be, in a cybernetic machine world that now breeds its human creators as a food source. The complexity of this metaphor, its subtle flexibility to resemble and sustain just about any interpretation, gives the movie its primal political and artistic force. Whatever our political or philosophical persuasions, in the concrete world we are little more than food to a vast machine in any event, either as labor, as consumers, or as breeding stock. Our own existential and capitalist reduction to mere economically defined parameters as producers, consumers, and producers of future producers and consumers, gives the movie its mirror of depiction.
It doesn't help much to realize as we type away in our pristine cyberspace cacoons, the crumbling streets outside are filled with human refuse and lead to nothing but rusting hulks of deserted industrial complexes and beyond them lay vistas on toxic slews, garbage scows, and mantis like shipping cranes on a bleak horizon.
While the concrete conditions in Matrix are close enough to the above to make the film seem at least dramatically believable, the other direction of Matrix taps into the illusionary world of cyberspace, media, middle class mass consumer culture and other quasi-illusionary visions in the mist of a our broader ruin.
The bio-energy cell humans in Matrix live in their minds via a cyberspace neural net hook-up as if in a world almost identical to our own. While their physical reality is to exist in vast columnar hives composed of living energy cell pods tended by machines. In this future, humans are harvested from tree-like structures as embryonic humanoid buds, and then transfered to their cyber enhanced hives when grown sufficiently in size.
It is the inversion of the cyber enhanced simulacra produced as real life, and a concrete reality which is a hyperreal nightmare that gives Matrix its critical dimension. This is after all a mirror to the illusive wealth and opportunity filled world of upper middle class US-Euro elites, compared to the countless and nameless urban barrios across the earth that house most of the world's people--who function in a globalized economy as mere batterys for production.
The critique turns particularly on the idea that since the cyberworld is in fact a product of mind, the mind can overcome this cyber world's physical logic through acts of an autonomous meta-will. In this meta-physical state the illusory physical parameters of momentum and velocity, for example, can then be arbitrarily manipulated at will to stop bullets and defy gravity.
This latter direction to the film begins to compose a critique of a postmodern condition in which, if the world we know is pure simulacra, then there is no necessarily logical connection between representation and some hyperreal, reality. Instead of pursuing this theme, the film uses the disjunction between the representation and the real, to follow a mystic laden vision in the jesus, buddha, sidartha vain. In doing so, it fails to follow what could have been a more penetrating depiction of our current discursive circumstances which seem be a retracing of the limitless tracts of the noumenal and phenomenal realms in search of the real, or hyperreal as the case maybe.
Chuck Grimes