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The Matrix

The Matrix
Directed by	The Wachowskis
Written by	The Wachowskis
Produced by	Joel Silver
Starring	Keanu Reeves Laurence Fishburne Carrie-Anne Moss Hugo Weaving Joe Pantoliano
Cinematography	Bill Pope
Edited by	Zach Staenberg
Music by	Don Davis
Production companies	Warner Bros. Village Roadshow Pictures Groucho II Film Partnership Silver Pictures
Distributed by	Warner Bros. (worldwide) Roadshow Entertainment (Australia)
Release dates	March 24, 1999 (1999-03-24) (Mann Village Theater) March 31, 1999 (1999-03-31) (United States) April 8, 1999 (1999-04-08) (Australia)
Running time	136 minutes
Countries	United States Australia
Language	English
Budget	$63 million
Box office	$467.2 million

The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film written and directed by the Wachowskis. It is the first installment in the Matrix film series, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, and Joe Pantoliano, and depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside the Matrix, a simulated reality that intelligent machines have created to distract humans while using their bodies as an energy source. When computer programmer Thomas Anderson, under the hacker alias "Neo", uncovers the truth, he joins a rebellion against the machines along with other people who have been freed from the Matrix.

The Matrix is an example of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. The Wachowskis' approach to action scenes was influenced by anime and martial arts films, the use of fight choreographers and wire fu techniques from Hong Kong action cinema influenced the Matrix film series and some other Hollywood action films, Plato's Cave, and 90's Telnet hacker communities. The film popularized terms such as red pill, and introduced a visual effect known as "bullet time", in which the heightened perception of certain characters is represented by allowing the action within a shot to progress in slow-motion while the camera appears to move through the scene at normal speed, allowing the sped-up movements of certain characters to be perceived normally.

The Matrix opened in theaters in the United States on March 31, 1999, to widespread acclaim from critics, who praised its innovative visual effects, action sequences, cinematography and entertainment value, and was a massive success at the box office, grossing over $460 million on a $63 million budget, becoming the highest-grossing Warner Bros. film of 1999 and the fourth highest-grossing film of that year. At the 72nd Academy Awards, the film won all four categories it was nominated for, Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, and Best Sound Editing. The film was also the recipient of numerous other accolades, including Best Sound and Best Special Visual Effects at the 53rd British Academy Film Awards, and the Wachowskis were awarded Best Director and Best Science Fiction Film at the 26th Saturn Awards. The film is considered to be among the greatest science fiction films of all time, and in 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant."

The film's success led to two feature film sequels being released in 2003, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which were also written and directed by the Wachowskis. The Matrix franchise was further expanded through the production of comic books, video games, and an animated anthology film, The Animatrix, with which the Wachowskis were heavily involved. The franchise has also inspired books and theories expanding on some of the religious and philosophical ideas alluded to in the films. A fourth film, titled The Matrix Resurrections, was released on December 22, 2021.

Plot

In 1999, in an unnamed city, Thomas Anderson, a computer programmer known as "Neo" in hacking circles, delves into the mystery of the "Matrix". His search brings him to the attention of female hacker Trinity, who discloses that the enigmatic Morpheus can answer Neo's questions. At his workplace, Neo is pursued by police and Agents led by Agent Smith. Morpheus guides Neo's escape by phone, able to somehow remotely observe their movements, but Neo ultimately surrenders rather than risk a hazardous getaway.

The Agents interrogate Neo about Morpheus but he refuses to cooperate. In response, Neo's mouth suddenly seals shut and the Agents implant a robotic device in his abdomen. Neo awakens at home, initially dismissing the encounter as a nightmare until Trinity and her allies arrive, extract the implanted tracker, and bring Neo to Morpheus, their leader. Morpheus offers Neo a choice: a red pill to uncover the truth about the Matrix or a blue pill to forget everything and return to his normal life. Opting for the red pill, Neo's reality distorts, and he awakens submerged in a mechanical pod with invasive cables running throughout his body. Neo witnesses countless inert humans similarly encased and tended to by machines before he is ejected from the facility and rescued by Morpheus aboard the hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar.

Morpheus reveals that several hundred years prior, in the 21st century, humanity lost a war with their artificially intelligent creations, leaving the Earth a devastated ruin. As a last resort, humans blackened the sky to eliminate the machines' access to solar power and, in response, the machines developed farms of artificially grown humans to harness their bioelectric energy. The Matrix is a simulated reality based on human civilization at its peak, designed to keep the subjugated humans oblivious and pacified. The remaining free humans established an underground refuge known as Zion, living a harsh existence on scarce resources. Morpheus and his rebel crew hack into the Matrix to free others and recruit them, manipulating the rules of the simulation to gain superhuman physical abilities. Even so, they are outmatched by the overwhelmingly powerful Agents—sentient programs protecting the Matrix—and dying in the Matrix causes death in the real world. Morpheus liberated Neo because he believes him to be "the One", a prophesied figure destined to dismantle the Matrix and liberate humanity.

The crew enter the Matrix to seek guidance from the Oracle, the prophetic figure who foretold the existence of the One. She implies that Neo is not the One and warns him of an imminent choice between his life and Morpheus's. The crew are ambushed by Agents after being betrayed by Cypher, a resentful crew member who wants to be reinserted into the Matrix to enjoy its comforts. Convinced of Neo's importance, Morpheus sacrifices himself to confront Smith, only to be overpowered and captured. Meanwhile, Cypher exits the Matrix and begins forcefully disconnecting the others, killing them. Before Cypher can kill Neo and Trinity, Tank, a subdued crew member, regains consciousness and kills Cypher, before safely extracting the survivors.

Smith interrogates Morpheus to obtain access codes for Zion's mainframe, which will allow them to end the human resistance. Determined to rescue Morpheus, Neo re-enters the Matrix with Trinity. They successfully free Morpheus, who escapes the Matrix with Trinity, but Smith intercepts Neo. Gaining confidence in his abilities, Neo fights Smith, demonstrating comparable power and eventually killing him. However, Smith resurrects in a new body and kills Neo.

In the real world, machine forces called Sentinels attack the Nebuchadnezzar. By Neo's body, Trinity confesses her love for him and that the Oracle prophesied she would fall in love with the One. In the Matrix, Neo revives with newfound abilities to perceive and control the Matrix. He effortlessly destroys Smith and exits the Matrix just as the Nebuchadnezzar's electromagnetic pulse disables the ship's power and the Sentinels. Sometime later, within the Matrix, Neo communicates with the system, promising to show the enslaved humans a world of limitless possibilities, before flying away.

Cast

See also: List of Matrix series characters

Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne (both pictured in 2009), and Hugo Weaving (2003)

• Keanu Reeves as Neo / Thomas Anderson: An office worker and hacker who discovers he is living in a simulated reality
• Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus: The charismatic captain of the Nebuchadnezzar leading his group in the fight against the machines
• Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity: A skilled hacker and Morpheus's second-in-command
• Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith: A sentient program, in the form of a dark-suited authority figure, designed to protect the Matrix
• Joe Pantoliano as Cypher: A standoffish and sarcastic member of the Nebuchadnezzar
• Gloria Foster as The Oracle: A wise and enigmatic resident of the Matrix who guides those with potential to be the One

The cast also includes the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar: Apoc (Julian Arahanga), Mouse (Matt Doran), and Switch (Belinda McClory) are humans raised in and freed from the Matrix, while brothers Tank (Marcus Chong) and Dozer (Anthony Ray Parker) are humans born naturally in Zion.

Paul Goddard and Robert Taylor portray Agent Brown and Agent Jones, Smith's fellow agents. Ada Nicodemou appears as Dujour, an acquaintance of Neo's bearing a white rabbit tattoo, and Marc Gray appears as Choi. Fiona Johnson portrays the Woman in Red, a program in the form of an attractive woman. Rowan Witt appears as Spoon Boy, a "potential" One who can manipulate the Matrix's simulated reality; his fellow potentials are portrayed by Elenor Witt, Tamara Brown, Janaya Pender, Adryn White, and Natalie Tjen.

Production

The Wachowskis’ edgy second feature, which also stars Laurence Fishburne, is based on a script they had tried to get made for several years, and which Warner Bros. has owned since 1994. “They had an idea for something different and we finally said yes,” says the film’s producer, Joel Silver, who had previously worked with the Chicago-born Marvel comic-book writers-turned-moviemakers on the screenplay for “Assassins,” the Sylvester Stallone action film. After cutting their directorial chops on the $4-million thriller “Bound”--”almost an audition tape for them,” says Silver--the brothers tried again, presenting Warners and its new Australian financing partner Village Roadshow with an jentirely storyboarded project. Because it was filmed in Australia, the effects-laden film wound up costing about $60 million, “about a third of what it would have cost if we’d made it here,” says Silver.

the Chicago-based former Marvel Comics writers, have become Hollywood’s latest Cinderella story after the breakout success of their film “The Matrix.”

But according to “Matrix” producer Joel Silver and Warner Bros. production chief Lorenzo di Bonaventura, it was just a fulfillment of the promise they’d seen in the brothers’ first script, the thriller “Assassins” that was turned into a rather indifferent Sylvester Stallone vehicle in 1995. The “Assassins” script was so strong, says Di Bonaventura, that he signed the brothers to a multi-script deal. “Every year I read maybe one or two scripts that are singular and outstanding, scripts that make you say I have to be in business with these writers.” The Wachowskis’ script for “Matrix” further confirmed Di Bonaventura’s instinct. Still, the studio was not about to take a serious leap of faith on letting them direct the film, “not unless they were willing to shoot it for a much lower budget, which they didn’t want to do,” says Silver. So an escape plan was hatched. The Wachowskis were freed from their deal in order to shoot a $4-million script called “Bound” for Grammercy, a 1996 crime caper that takes place largely in the confines of two rooms. The film starred Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon and became a cult favorite for its neo-noir look and kinky sexual twist. “ ‘Bound’ showed me their ability to elevate material,” says Di Bonaventura. “It was incredibly stylish and gripping and showed they could direct actors. It was very mature piece of work for a young director. It was even mature for a more experienced director.” (Larry Wachowski is 33, Andy is 31.) Warners had held on to the “Matrix” script and tried to attach a cast to it. But the project was not offered to other directors. After “Bound” the studio decided to take the leap of faith--within limits. The $63-million film was shot entirely in Australia to keep down costs.

So a studio executive and a producer are sitting in a room. ”Hey,” they say to Warner Bros. chairmen Bob Daly and Terry Semel, ”here’s an idea. We’ve signed these two brothers who direct and write together. They made Bound, a randy lesbian crime caper, for $4 million. Now they want to do a $60 million science-fiction film.

They’re going to take our $60 million and go make this movie in Australia.” Although The Matrix, cost nearly $70 million, the movie, with its special effects, is not considered as lavishly expensive as similar films. Warner Brothers executives said it would have cost close to $95 million if it had been made in the United States instead of in Australia, where film production is cheaper.

Warner Bros. President of production Lorenzo di Bonaventura and producer Joel Silver when they were asking for a greenlight on Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix two years ago. But nuance aside, here’s a sure fact: This project was so risky, it might as well have come with a suicide note attached.

Warner Bros. began placing its bets on The Matrix five years ago. In 1994, Di Bonaventura read the brothers’ script of Assassins, a tale of two hitmen, and immediately signed the former Marvel comic-book writers to a three-picture deal. While 1995’s Assassins, rewritten as a mainstream thriller with Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas, took a bullet at the box office, the brothers went on to direct their script of Bound for Gramercy. A critical hit about two women (Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly) who fall for each other and foil the Mob, Bound earned the Wachowskis reputations as edgy, energetic talent.

Now the brothers were asking to direct a script of theirs that Warner Bros. had also bought in 1994. Intended to be the first of a sci-fi trilogy, The Matrix was a futuristic extravaganza that would use elements of the Bible, philosophy, mythology, Alice in Wonderland, and Hong Kong-style fighting to suggest that reality — or ”the Matrix” — was in fact a computer-generated universe created by evil creatures committed to keeping human beings enslaved.

The whole thing was a little confusing. Nevertheless, “Lorenzo and Joel were very enthusiastic about it,” says Andy, 31, who, like his 33-year-old brother, speaks as if he’s watched Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure one too many times. “Actually, they were the only people who were enthusiastic.” Says Di Bonaventura, “I knew if I was going to make a leap of faith, this was the one to make.”

But Di Bonaventura needed more to go on, and sent the Wachowskis off to do their homework. The brothers called on their comic-book colleagues, and over the next year sketched out every scene in the movie, from terrifying biomechanical bugs breeding humans in a “fetus field” to actors battling in midair. They even illustrated what “bullet time” might look like, though the technique — which would enable characters to move faster than bullets — had yet to be.

The detailed storyboards and the brothers’ enthusiasm, says Di Bonaventura, were so persuasive that by spring 1997 the Wachowskis were given a $60 million budget (sufficient if they filmed in Australia, where capable crews come cheap) and permission to begin casting the three starring roles. Warner Bros. even agreed that the actors could perform their own stunts — as long as they were prepared in training — in order to avoid the use of cutaway shots with stunt doubles.

For The Matrix the Wachowski brothers studied the work of directors as varied as John Woo and other Hong Kong filmmakers, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Ridley Scott, George Lucas and Fritz Lang. They also read and reread their favorite book, The Odyssey. Larry said: I read it all the time. I always get something out of it. The film grew out of the brothers' longtime fascination (since they were teen-agers) with ideas that challenge current perceptions of reality. They said they were also intrigued by the way mythology and the Internet informed culture. The script was a synthesis of ideas that sort of came together at a moment when we were interested in a lot of things: making mythology relevant in a modern context, relating quantum physics to Zen Buddhism, investigating your own life, said Andy, the bigger and quieter half of the Wachowski team. We started out thinking of this as a comic book. We filled notebook after notebook with ideas. Essentially that's where the script came from.

But Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the studio's 42-year-old president for worldwide production, tracked the script for four years and pushed it through. When you read the script, you knew it was a new and different kind of movie, Mr. di Bonaventura said. It had great action and great characters, and you got a sense of how important these filmmakers would become. He added, A few of us didn't find it incomprehensible and felt the brothers would be able to execute visually what some people had a hard time understanding when they read it.

Even before the studio agreed to make the movie, the brothers hired two cartoonist friends -- Geof Darrow, who created the well-known comic book Hard Boiled, and Steve Skrose, who once drew Spider-Man comic books -- and made a 600-page, scene-by-scene comic book, based on the script. What Larry Wachowski called this gigantic comic book was shown to the studio, which then approved the film. It was virtually identical to the movie, said Joel Silver, producer of The Matrix.

The cleverness of the writing stirred interest among studio executives, however, and led the Wachowskis to write Assassins (1995), a Sylvester Stallone action film about a hit man dogged by a rival. The film was a dud, and the brothers loathed it. Their careers rebounded in 1996 when they wrote and made their directorial debut with Bound, a stylish and violent action drama with a lesbian twist: two women conspire to run off with a suitcase containing millions of dollars.

After 'Bound' we were offered a lot of lesbian thrillers, Andy Wachowski said. With the success of Bound, the Wachowskis returned to The Matrix, the script they had been working on for years. They credited Mr. di Bonaventura, the Warner Brothers executive who lobbied on behalf of the script, as well as Mr. Silver, the producer, for getting the movie off the ground. Although Mr. Silver also produced Assassins, Larry Wachowski said, We forgave him. The brothers said that, for the moment, they had no idea what to do next. Maybe we'll just retire with a two-film retrospective, Larry said. We're just so tired at this point. The two seem to get along well, and said they rarely argued during the writing and directing process, or engaged in the kinds of fistfights that took place while they were growing up in Chicago.

The Matrix” took years to get off the ground. Studio executives couldn’t visualize the movie from the script, which di Bonaventura went through at least 11 rewrites.

After debuting at Sundance in January 1996, the lusty, grisly Bound was released that fall, becoming a minor hit—especially at the offices of Warner Bros. The studio had just watched its own erotic revenge thriller, an expensive remake of the '50s French stunner Diabolique, fail to turn on viewers. According to Lorenzo di Bonaventura, then a top development executive at the studio, Warner Bros. cochairman Terry Semel saw Bound and exclaimed, "Goddamnit—this thing probably cost a fraction of our picture, and it's so much more interesting." Di Bonaventura already knew what film the Wachowskis wanted to make as their follow-up. In fact, he'd already bought the screenplay— one that had stumped nearly everyone who encountered it. The Wachowskis' new story was so audacious, so future-forging, that all you could do was read it and wonder: What is the Matrix? For much of the early '90s, when they weren't writing spec scripts or building elevator shafts, the Wachowskis fantasized about creating a sci-fi comic book that would allow them to sample all of their cultural obsessions. "We were interested in a lot of things," said Lilly, reeling off a list of the siblings' shared pursuits: "making mythology relevant in a modern context, relating quantum physics to Zen Buddhism, investigating your own life." They were also into Hong Kong action movies; early film fixations such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 French sci-fi noir Alphaville; the power of the still ascending internet; and Homer's The Odyssey, which each sibling had read multiple times.

Writing by hand, the Wachowskis filled up multiple notebooks with ideas for what they called The Matrix, their creative sessions soundtracked by the aggro-rock white noise of Rage Against the Machine and Ministry. Eventually they scrapped the comic book concept and decided to download years' worth of concepts and sketches into a screenplay. Their elaborate script for The Matrix follows a bored young office worker who moonlights as a hacker named Neo. One night, Neo meets Morpheus, a cryptic sage who reveals that we're all living in an evil computer-run simulation called the Matrix. Morpheus offers Neo a choice: He can swallow a blue pill and return to his dull office job, living happily (and obliviously) ever after in a fake reality. Or he can swallow a red pill and set off on a conscious-shifting transformation, acquiring all sorts of new powers before taking down the Matrix for good—and fulfilling his prophecy as "the One." Neo chooses the red pill, and as he begins his journey toward becoming a gun-wielding, kung fu–fighting supersoldier, his reaction is relatably real: "Whoa."

Mattis, who had studied philosophy in college, recognized similarities between The Matrix and the ideas of René Descartes, the 17th-century French thinker who wrote about man's inability to know what is truly reality. "When I first read the script, I called them and said, 'This is amazing! You wrote a script about Descartes! But how do I sell this thing?'" Mattis began circulating their script in 1995, right around the time that the internet—once the dial-up domain of academics, hackers, and military employees—was on its way to becoming a broadband phenomenon. Online, reality was becoming bendable. From the moment users picked a screen handle or even an email address, they were getting the chance to rewrite their own existence and create a whole new version of themselves—new name, new gender, new hometown, new anything. People were stepping into their own virtual worlds every day, and the Wachowskis' script for The Matrix had a question for them: Now that we can create as many realities as we want, how do we know which one is actually "real"?

t was a timely query, one wrapped in an otherwise action-filled script, full of twists, chases, endless gunplay, and even a helicopter slamming into the side of a skyscraper. Yet there was no pill that could convince most studio execs to see The Matrix as a viable movie. The only company to show any real interest was Warner Bros., which had already bought the script for The Matrix years earlier, and then let it languish while the duo worked on Bound.

"Nobody understood it," says di Bonaventura, who, along with producer Joel Silver, was an early supporter of the movie. "They would go, 'How does this work? I’m sitting in a room, but I'm actually living in a machine? What the fuck are we doing?'" Di Bonaventura asked the Wachowskis to pare down the screenplay—which had enough ideas for three movies—and suggested they go off and make Bound, in order to prove they could direct. But even after that movie's success, the heads of Warner Bros. needed more convincing. So the Wachowskis enlisted the hyperdetailed comics artist Geof Darrow to design much of the foreboding technology of The Matrix, including the Sentinel, a war machine that resembles an electric, spermlike insect, and the body-harvesting Power Plant. The Wachowskis also hired artist Steve Skroce to draw nearly 600 detailed storyboards, breaking down the movie shot by shot.

Finally the Wachowskis laid out all of their Matrix materials for Warner Bros. cochairmen Semel and Bob Daly. "It was an unusual show," says di Bonaventura. "One of the Wachowskis was explaining the story, and the other was making sound effect noises." Afterward, di Bonaventura remembers, Semel asked the exec if the company was going to make money on The Matrix. "I thought for half a second and said, 'We're not going to lose any money.'" The Matrix's budget was estimated at around $60 million, a huge investment in an idea that couldn't be distilled to a single-sentence pitch. But that amount was far less than what Warner Bros. had spent on Batman & Robin, a disastrously overpriced franchise entry that would be all but scoffed out of existence before 1997 was over. Warner Bros., like the rest of the major studios, had watched moviegoers grow increasingly tired of unsolicited remakes and retreads. They wanted new adventures, new ideas. "Sequels were faltering," says di Bonaventura. "And a lot of genres were dying: action-comedy movies, buddy-cop movies. We knew we needed to do something different."

His bosses agreed. The Wachowskis would get their $60 million budget—as long as they filmed in Australia, where it would be cheaper. After years of waiting, the schmoes from Chicago would finally be able to construct the Matrix. Now they just had to find the One.

Development

In 1994, the Wachowskis presented the script for the film Assassins to Warner Bros. Pictures. After Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the president of production of the company at the time, read the script, he decided to buy rights to it and included two more pictures, Bound and The Matrix, in the contract. The first movie the Wachowskis directed, Bound, then became a critical success. Using this momentum, they later asked to direct The Matrix.

Reeves said that the Matrix avatar would have been a "different sex than the Zion reality" in the early draft of the script, but the studio wasn't ready for that version.

In 1996, the Wachowskis pitched the role of Neo to Will Smith. Smith explained on his YouTube channel that the idea was for him to be Neo, while Morpheus was to be played by Val Kilmer. He later explained that he did not quite understand the concept and he turned down the role to instead film Wild Wild West.

Producer Joel Silver soon joined the project. Although the project had key supporters, including Silver and Di Bonaventura, to influence the company, The Matrix was still a huge investment for Warner Bros., which had to invest $60 million to create a movie with prominent actors and difficult special effects.

The Wachowskis therefore hired underground comic book artists Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce to draw a 600-page, shot-by-shot storyboard for the entire film.

The storyboard eventually earned the studio's approval, and it was decided to film in Australia to make the most of the budget. Soon, The Matrix became a co-production of Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures.

According to editor Zach Staenberg on the DVD audio commentary track, the production team sent an edit of the film's first minutes (featuring Trinity's encounter with police and Agents) to Warner executives, and secured Warner's "total support of the movie" from then on.

Pre-production

The cast were required to be able to understand and explain The Matrix. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation was required reading for most of the principal cast and crew. In early 1997, the Wachowskis had Reeves read Simulacra and Simulation, Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, and Dylan Evans's ideas on evolutionary psychology even before they opened up the script, and eventually he was able to explain all the philosophical nuances involved. Moss commented that she had difficulty with this process.

The directors had long been admirers of Hong Kong action cinema, so they decided to hire the Chinese martial arts choreographer and film director Yuen Woo-ping to work on fight scenes. To prepare for the wire fu, the actors had to train hard for several months. The Wachowskis first scheduled four months for training, beginning in October 1997. Yuen was optimistic but then began to worry when he realized how unfit the actors were.

Yuen let their body style develop and then worked with each actor's strength. He built on Reeves's diligence, Fishburne's resilience, Weaving's precision, and Moss's feminine grace. Yuen designed Moss's moves to suit her deftness and lightness. Prior to the pre-production, Reeves underwent a two-level fusion of his cervical (neck) spine due to spinal cord compression from a herniated disc ("I was falling over in the shower in the morning"). He was still recovering by the time of pre-production, but he insisted on training, so Yuen let him practice punches and lighter moves. Reeves trained hard and even requested training on days off. However, the surgery still made him unable to kick for two out of four months of training. As a result, Reeves did not kick much in the film. Weaving had to undergo hip surgery after he sustained an injury during the training process.

Casting

Carrie-Anne Moss in 2016

at the time of the Matrix casting, Reeves wasn't high on the studio's wish list for Neo. According to di Bonaventura, the role had been passed on by Will Smith (who wanted to make Wild Wild West), Brad Pitt (who'd just been through Seven Years in Tibet), and Leonardo DiCaprio (who didn't want to do another special effects movie after Titanic). "It got to the point where we offered it to Sandra Bullock and said we'd change Neo to a girl." She too said no. In early 1997, Reeves found himself at Warner Bros.' headquarters in Burbank, California. He'd arrived at the lot for his first meeting with the Wachowskis, who'd recently sent the actor their screenplay of The Matrix. "When I first read that script," Reeves said, "it made my blood happy." That day, the siblings showed Reeves some of their designs, and as the conversation continued, it became clear that it wouldn't be their last. "They told me they wanted [me] to train for four months prior to filming," Reeves recalled. "And I got a big grin on my face and said, 'Yes.'" Noted Lana Wachowski, "We knew it would take a maniacal commitment from someone, and Keanu was our maniac." Reeves was also a lover of sci-fi and philosophy, one who didn't flinch when the Wachowskis asked him to prepare by reading such treatises as Jean Baudrillard's perception-bending 1981 Simulacra and Simulation. "One of the great misunderstandings about Keanu is that people don't think he's smart," says di Bonaventura. "Maybe it’s because of the Bill & Ted movies. But Keanu gives me books I cannot make heads nor tails of. And in Keanu, the Wachowskis found somebody who was an intellectual searcher."

The hunt to find who would play Morpheus, Neo's calm, clinical guide to the Matrix, would be even more drawn out. Warner Bros. offered the role to such stars as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Douglas, who both declined. The Wachowskis, meanwhile, were pushing for Laurence Fishburne, who as a teenager had starred in Francis Ford Coppola's carnage-filled Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now and had earned an Oscar nomination as the abusive Ike Turner in 1993's What's Love Got to Do with It. They'd met the actor in Las Vegas in the summer of 1997, at the boxing match in which Mike Tyson had bit the ear of Evander Holyfield. "I had a dream about a man who wore mirrored sunglasses and spoke in riddles," Lana Wachowski would later tell Fishburne, "and when I met you and heard your voice I knew that you were that guy." But studio execs worried that Fishburne, despite having won both an Emmy and a Tony, wasn't well enough known overseas for the role. Their choice was Val Kilmer, who'd recently played the Dark Knight in 1995's hit Batman Forever but who'd earned a reputation as a not-worth-the-drama nuisance during the filming of a recent remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau (quite a feat, considering that his costar was the legendarily impossible Marlon Brando, who spent part of the Moreau shoot waddling around with an ice bucket on his head). "The Wachowskis had heard all the stories about Val," says di Bonaventura, "and I said, 'Yeah, but it gets the movie made.' So we have a meeting with him at the Bel-Air Hotel, where he proceeds to pitch why Morpheus should be the lead of the movie. I knew within two minutes of the meeting we were dead." Kilmer was soon out of contention, and the job went to Fishburne, who said he had always thought of Morpheus as "Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader rolled into one—and maybe some Yoda."

The third major Matrix role to fill was Trinity, a high-flying, fast-kicking operative who assists Morpheus aboard their underground ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. Jada Pinkett Smith auditioned for the part, "but Keanu and I didn't click," she said. "We just didn't have any chemistry." The Wachowskis ultimately went with Carrie-Anne Moss, a Canadian-born actor who'd starred in such '90s TV dramas as Models Inc. and F/X: The Series. (She'd also performed in a Canadian fantasy series called Matrix.) As part of her days-long screen test, Moss sparred and practiced with stunt performers. Afterward, she said, "I couldn't walk for days." The Wachowskis wanted the actors to do most of their own physical work so the camera wouldn't have to cut away to stunt performers. Still, Moss said, "I remember thinking, 'They don’t really think I'm gonna do this stuff, like jumping from one building to another. Of course I'm not going to do that!'"

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who fought to get “The Matrix” made at Warner Bros., said the studio insisted on a big name for the Wachowskis’ epic, especially since they had only one prior directing credit prior to their dense, philosophical masterpiece. In 2009, she told NBC’s “Today” that she was also considered for the part of Trinity and regretted not taking it. The role famously went to Carrie-Anne Moss, and Bullock told “Today”: “It was sexy and great because of Carrie-Anne and Keanu.”

“The first movie star who says yes is Brad Pitt, he’s doing ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ and then he’s coming out of it and he’s like ‘I’m way too exhausted to take this on,’ so he’s gone,” di Bonaventura said. “Then we go to Leonardo [DiCaprio]. He says yes, we have meetings with him and then he goes, ‘You know, I can’t go do another visual effects movie having just finished ‘Titanic,” and he drops out. Then Will Smith joins it and he drops out.”

“Keanu [Reeves] was perfect. Laurence Fishburne was perfect,” Smith said. “If I had done it then Morpheus wouldn’t have been black, because they were looking at Val Kilmer.” Di Bonaventura said the producers not only looked to Kilmer, but several others: “We went to Arnold Scwarzeneger hoping he’d say yes for Morpheus. We to Michael Douglas for Morpheus.”

But even then, Di Bonaventura told TheWrap, his bosses at Warner Bros. were uncomfortable green-lighting the film with Reeves as Neo. That began to change, Di Bonaventura said, when he landed additional financing to ease the studio’s risk and the film added Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith, and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trin

They'd also insisted on bringing along many of their Bound collaborators, including cinematographer Bill Pope, editor Zach Staenberg, and Joe Pantoliano, whom the siblings cast as Cypher, the teammate of Morpheus and Trinity. Cypher is the most skeptical inhabitant of the Matrix—and, in some ways, its most relatable one. After years of living in the techno-shithole of the real world, he ultimately sells out his friends in order to escape to the blue-pill life of the Matrix. Pantoliano had played pragmatic weasels for years, most famously in '80s hits such as The Goonies and Risky Business, the latter of which found him tormenting Tom Cruise as Guido, the Killer Pimp. Yet he'd never prepared for a movie quite as strenuously as he did for The Matrix. "They wanted me to be in the best shape of my life," says the actor, who was in his mid-forties at the time of filming. "No drinking, eating steamed vegetables, working out at a gym. I'm a fucking character actor! This trainer they hired said to me, 'You can do three thousand sit-ups a day, but that ain't going nowhere.' So I talk to my buddy, a plastic surgeon, and decide I'm going to get an $8,000 liposuction procedure." Pantoliano sent the bill for the surgery to the studio, claiming that the liposuction counted as "research and development." (He says he was never reimbursed.)

The three leads to be cast were Neo, a young recruit who comes to know that reality isn’t what it seems; Morpheus, the sage who guides Neo back and forth between a spaceship and the Matrix, teaching him that mind can control matter; and Trinity, a female kick-ass warrior who will carry on the race with the help of the Chosen One, who may or may not be Neo himself.

The brothers had only two requirements for their actors: They had to be able to explain the Matrix, and they had to be willing to suffer for it. Both criteria were a little problematic. Few actors were willing to sign up for the six months of hardcore physical training, and few actors could grasp the movie’s concept. “We’d go through the whole process of trying to explain the movie,” says Andy, “which was like sitting through the movie. It would take two and a half hours.” After getting nibbles from Leo DiCaprio, Will Smith, and Brad Pitt, the directors met with Reeves, 34, and felt they had found their Neo. “We sat around discussing the philosophy and the metaphors of the script,” says Andy. Adds Larry, “We knew it would take a maniacal commitment from someone, and Keanu was our maniac.”

But in June 1997, pleased with Reeves’ work in the recently wrapped Devil’s Advocate, Warner Bros. offered him The Matrix, and the star bit. “Neo is trying to figure out his life,” Reeves says. “He feels something’s wrong. He doesn’t trust what’s around him, so he removes himself from the world and is seeking his answer kind of monastically. I was working on those questions at the time.”

They were million-dollar questions: Reeves received a reported $10 million against a percentage of the action. While the salary was worthy of a box office draw, his casting “made all the people who were nervous more nervous,” admits one person involved with the production. “You couldn’t say, ‘Hey, [it’s] got Will Smith, relax.'”

Brad, Leo, and Will were interested, but we got Keanu Reeves, who’s so over he’s in again.

the producers faced their own pivotal choice when it came to casting the role of Neo, though there were far more than two options to choose from. One of the possibilities, it turns out, was Sandra Bullock. “We went out to so many people I don’t remember. We were getting desperate,” The Matrix producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura told The Wrap in a new interview to mark the 20th anniversary of the Wachowskis’ breakout film. “We went to Sandy Bullock and said ‘We’ll change Neo to a girl.’ [Producer] Joel Silver and I worked with Sandy on Demolition Man and she was and continues to be a very good friend of mine. It was pretty simple. We sent her the script to see if she was interested in it. And if she was interested in it we would try to make the change.”di Bonaventura continued, “It just wasn’t something for her at the time. So really it didn’t go anywhere.”

Aside from Bullock, other A-listers were considered for Neo, including Will Smith. Smith explained his side of the story last month on his YouTube channel, where he told viewers that the Wachowskis’ pitch to him did not fully convey what the movie would become: “As it turns out, they’re geniuses. But there’s a fine line in a pitch meeting between genius and what I experienced in the meeting.” Smith added that “I did y’all a favor,” because if he had been cast as Neo, he says, then a white actor like Val Kilmer would have been cast as Morpheus in lieu of Laurence Fishburne. di Bonaventura confirmed Smith’s potential involvement and revealed that a couple other actors were also in the mix. “The first movie star who says yes is Brad Pitt, he’s doing Seven Years in Tibet and then he’s coming out of it and he’s like ‘I’m way too exhausted to take this on,’ so he’s gone,” di Bonaventura told The Wrap. “Then we go to Leonardo [DiCaprio]. He says yes, we have meetings with him and then he goes, ‘You know, I can’t go do another visual effects movie having just finished Titanic,’ and he drops out. Then Will Smith joins it and he drops out … The good news was, Keanu said yes and he was awesome.

Reeves described his character as someone who felt that something was wrong, and was searching for Morpheus and the truth to break free. Will Smith turned down the role of Neo to make Wild Wild West, because of skepticism over the film's ambitious bullet time special effects. He later stated he was "not mature enough as an actor" at that time, and that if given the role, he "would have messed it up". Smith praised Reeves for his portrayal. Nicolas Cage also turned down the part because of "family obligations". Warner Bros. sought Brad Pitt or Val Kilmer for the role. When both declined, Leonardo DiCaprio initially accepted the role, but ultimately turned it down because he did not want to do a visual effects film directly after Titanic. The studio pushed for Reeves, who won the role over Johnny Depp, the Wachowskis' first choice. Lorenzo di Bonaventura stated that the screenplay was also sent to Sandra Bullock, with the suggestion of rewriting Neo as a female.

Fishburne stated that once he read the script, he did not understand why other people found it confusing. However, he doubted if the movie would ever be made, because it was "so smart". The Wachowskis instructed Fishburne to base his performance on the character Morpheus in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics. Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson and Val Kilmer were also considered for the part.

After reading the script, Moss stated that at first, she did not believe she had to do the extreme acrobatic actions as described in the script. She also doubted how the Wachowskis would get to direct a movie with a budget so large, but after spending an hour with them going through the storyboard, she understood why some people would trust them. Moss mentioned that she underwent a three-hour physical test during casting, so she knew what to expect subsequently. The role made Moss, who later said, "I had no career before. None." Janet Jackson was initially approached for the role but scheduling conflicts prevented her from accepting it. In an interview, she stated that turning down the role was difficult for her, so she later referenced The Matrix in the 'Intro' and 'Outro' interludes on her tenth studio album Discipline. Sandra Bullock, who was previously approached for the role of Neo, was also offered the role of Trinity, but she turned it down. Rosie Perez, Salma Hayek and Jada Pinkett Smith (who would later play Niobe in the sequels) auditioned for the role.

Weaving stated that he found the character amusing and enjoyable to play. He developed a neutral accent but with more specific character for the role. He wanted Smith to sound neither robotic nor human, and also said that the Wachowskis' voices had influenced his voice in the film. When filming began, Weaving mentioned that he was excited to be a part of something that would extend him. Jean Reno was offered the role, but declined, unwilling to move to Australia for the production.

preproduction

In the fall of 1997, the stars showed up in L.A. for Matrix boot camp, where they would be trained by a posse of Hong Kong martial-arts experts. Val Kilmer had passed on Morpheus, and Laurence Fishburne had been hired; Carrie-Anne Moss, who starred in the syndicated television series F/X, won the part of Trinity; and Hugo Weaving (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) was in as the key bad guy. While a San Francisco special-effects team began designing the creatures and experimenting with “Flow-Mo,” or “bullet time,” the actors began testing their bodies.

It was not an auspicious beginning. Reeves appeared for the first day of training in a neck brace, thanks to surgery for a herniated disc only weeks earlier. Two days into training, Weaving began experiencing pain in his hip; the trauma would ultimately require surgery in January.

When the stars arrived in Australia, with two more months of training ahead, Reeves’ neck was still nagging him and Weaving was on crutches. Ross, whose fight scenes were at the start of production, sprained her ankle cartwheeling into a wall. Weaving recovered from his hip injury, but then hurt his wrist and cracked two ribs. “At that point,” he says, “I thought, ‘Oh, who cares?'”

While the actors bulked up for fight scenes and trimmed down — via strict dieting — for others, t

In the fall of 1997, before filming began, the Matrix team spent months in a massive, frills-free warehouse in Burbank, where the film's cast endured daily training sessions overseen by Yuen Woo-ping, a legendary Chinese director and martial arts choreographer who'd steered such overseas hits as Drunken Master, Jackie Chan's 1978 kung fu breakthrough. Working with Yuen's team of stunt technicians, the actors stretched, kicked, and sparred for hours on end. Sometimes they were strapped to wires and flung through the air—the stars of a high-tech, high-ambition action film hovering over a pile of dinky mattresses. "After the first day, I was so shattered and so shocked," said actor Hugo Weaving, who'd been hired to play Agent Smith, Neo's obsessive nemesis. "I realized I was so unfit." (Not long into training, Weaving injured his femur, requiring him to walk on crutches until he could heal.)

Reeves also had to be handled delicately. In the late '90s, the actor learned he'd done some serious damage to his spine: "I was falling over in the shower in the morning, because you lose your sense of balance," he said. He eventually discovered that two of his vertebrae were fusing together. "Keanu's doctor told him that he had to have this operation, or he'd become a quadriplegic," says Barrie M. Osborne, a Matrix executive producer. Reeves underwent surgery before filming, and once he arrived in Burbank for training, he wore a neck brace and was forbidden to kick for several months. Luckily, there were other ways to prepare: During preproduction and filming, the actor said, "kung fu dojos" were set up, in which the cast members could "stretch and watch kung fu movies."

Filming

The first few weeks of filming in Sydney were grueling. “We were on this rooftop, and every day you’d have to get up [there],” says cinematographer Bill Pope (Bound). “It’s not like L.A., where buildings have helicopter pads. There was just a single-file staircase and a narrow pathway and swinging cranes. It’s raining, it’s not raining, the wind is blowing in gale force, then it’s not blowing. The logistics were incredible.”

for others, the shooting schedule went into flux as well. The 90 days stretched to 118, but the Wachowskis were no longer hearing “What are you doing?” from the studio, thanks to eight minutes of footage sent to Warner Bros. one month into filming. Warner Bros. even gave Gaeta permission to raise his special-effects shot count from 200 to 415. “A lot of times studio executives get uptight because we don’t understand why [the filmmakers] are doing something,” says Di Bonaventura. “We understood.”

The unprecedented special effects made for an especially difficult production, with one scene taking as long as three weeks on location to film. Says visual-effects supervisor John Gaeta, “You’d have these crazy rigs around [the actors], and then you have these three wires on each of them, and then the wire guys in fluorescent ninja suits so they blend into the screen.”

First, the studio sends a check for $4 million plus to the directors, along with the request that the movie be ready months earlier, thereby getting it the hell away from the Star Wars trajectory. Then, while the directors are busy hurtling through postproduction,

All but a few scenes were filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, as well as in the city itself, although recognizable landmarks were not included in order to maintain the impression of a generic American city. The filming helped establish New South Wales as a major film production center. Filming began in March 1998 and wrapped in August 1998; principal photography took 118 days.

Due to Reeves's neck injury (see above), some of the action scenes had to be rescheduled to wait for his full recovery. As a result, the filming began with scenes that did not require much physical exertion, such as the scene in Thomas Anderson's office, the interrogation room, or the car ride in which Neo is taken to see the Oracle. Locations for these scenes included Martin Place's fountain in Sydney, half-way between it and the adjacent Colonial Building, and the Colonial Building itself. During the scene set on a government building rooftop, the team filmed extra footage of Neo dodging bullets in case the bullet time process did not work. The bullet-time fight scene was filmed on the roof of Symantec Corporation building in Kent Street, opposite Sussex Street.

Moss performed the shots featuring Trinity at the beginning of the film and all the wire stunts herself. The rooftop set that Trinity uses to escape from Agent Brown early in the film was left over from the production of Dark City, which has prompted comments due to the thematic similarities of the films. During the rehearsal of the lobby scene, in which Trinity runs on a wall, Moss injured her leg and was ultimately unable to film the shot in one take. She stated that she was under a lot of pressure at the time and was devastated when she realized that she would be unable to do it.

Fishburne later said that while being in Sydney to shoot the film, he experienced a racist vibe and that it felt like America in the 1950s.

The dojo set was built well before the actual filming. During the filming of these action sequences, there was significant physical contact between the actors, earning them bruises. Reeves's injury and his insufficient training with wires prior to filming meant he was unable to perform the triple kicks satisfactorily and became frustrated with himself, causing the scene to be postponed. The scene was shot successfully a few days later, with Reeves using only three takes. Yuen altered the choreography and made the actors pull their punches in the last sequence of the scene, creating a training feel.

The filmmakers originally planned to shoot the subway scene in an actual subway station, but the complexity of the fight and related wire work required shooting the scene on a set. The set was built around an existing train storage facility, which had real train tracks. Filming the scene when Neo slammed Smith into the ceiling, Chad Stahelski, Reeves's stunt double, sustained several injuries, including broken ribs, knees, and a dislocated shoulder. Another stuntman was injured by a hydraulic puller during a shot in which Neo was slammed into a booth. The office building in which Smith interrogated Morpheus was a large set, and the outside view from inside the building was a large, three story high cyclorama. The helicopter was a full-scale light-weight mock-up suspended by a wire rope operated a tilting mechanism mounted to the studio roofbeams. The helicopter had a real minigun side-mounted to it, which was set to cycle at half its regular (3,000 rounds per min) firing rate.

To prepare for the scene in which Neo wakes up in a pod, Reeves lost 15 pounds and shaved his whole body to give Neo an emaciated look. The scene in which Neo fell into the sewer system concluded the principal photography. According to The Art of the Matrix, at least one filmed scene and a variety of short pieces of action were omitted from the final cut of the film.

budget

• $60 million, but maybe 64?
• $63 million
• $65 million
• 70 million

end of filming

Throughout the making of The Matrix, that unified front never wavered. Filming in Australia gave the siblings a geographic distance from Warner Bros., as well as plenty of autonomy: "It felt like we were a secret," says costume designer Kym Barrett. Yet there were still moments when they found themselves at odds with the studio. "Warners was worried about the budget," says Matrix producer Osborne, who notes that the studio had already chosen scenes it would ax if the movie started racking up costs.

Crunch Time It was a threat the studio tried to make good on at least once. About two-thirds of the way into filming, the Wachowskis pulled aside Matrix editor Zach Staenberg and showed him an email they'd received from a Warner Bros. exec. It said the filmmakers were running over budget and that certain scenes would need to be cut. "They shot that morning and then broke for lunch," says Staenberg. "And they did not return from lunch."

A producer eventually dispatched Staenberg to visit the siblings in their office, where they were watching a Bulls game. "They had a way of talking that was very much like twinspeak," remembers Staenberg. "And they said, in their almost offhanded way, 'If we don't have those scenes, we don't have the movie—and they can get someone else to finish it.'" After a few hours, the Wachowskis received a call from the studio, telling them not to worry about the cost overruns. "They basically played poker, feeling they had a strong hand—and they were right," says Staenberg. He adds: "The Matrix was made over-schedule and over-budget, but it was made on the Wachowskis' terms." It helped that Staenberg had edited together a few early sequences and sent them back to Burbank, in order to calm execs' nerves. "The studio could see the movie was going to be really special," says Osborne, "and that took a lot of the heat off."

One moment that especially excited Warner Bros., even in rough form, was a wall-pulverizing shoot-out that takes place in a cavernous skyscraper lobby. It's an intensely physical scene, with Neo executing a quadruple kick, and Trinity cartwheeling off the side of a wall. Moss had been especially nervous about the lobby stunt: "The weekend before I had to do it, I was in the training center in tears, saying: 'I can't do it! I can't do it!'" she said. An hour before the cameras rolled, while practicing with her trainers, she injured her ankle and fell to the ground, moaning "Oh no, oh no,” as a team of stunt workers rubbed her back. She was able to perfect the cartwheel later that day during rehearsals but struggled once the cameras were rolling, letting out what sounded like a loud, anguished "FUCK!"

The lobby sequence found Moss and Reeves running and fighting while clad in what appeared to be impossibly tight-fitting leather get-ups. Matrix costume designer Barrett had rummaged through fabric suppliers in New York City, seeking out affordable, lightweight materials, such as vinyl, that could give the characters their cool, shiny S&M style—while also being true to the Wachowskis' story. "In the script, it talks a lot about people appearing and merging into worlds," says Barrett, who before The Matrix had worked on director Baz Luhrmann's rococo 1996 film Romeo + Juliet. "I thought, 'How can you do that and not get seen?'" The shiny black Lycra outfit worn by Trinity was a solution. "I wanted her to move like an oil slick on water," Barrett says, "with layers of reflection."

All of the Matrix outfits were intended to signify the characters’ respective journeys. Reeves' long black jacket, which he wears during the rooftop battle—donning it almost like a cape as he confronts the Matrix head-on—was designed to "have an ancient feeling, as well as a slightly ecclesiastical feeling," Barrett says. "I wanted him to change from the reluctant hero to someone who had taken on this responsibility." Barrett's Matrix work also required her to design multiple pairs of sunglasses, one for nearly every lead character—a nod to the film's bigger theme of obscured identities. "All of our lenses were reflective," she says. "You couldn't see their eyes unless we wanted you to."

Like many of the Matrix cast and crew, Barrett wound up working on the movie longer than she'd expected. Warner Bros. had allowed the shoot to extend from 90 days to 118, giving the siblings enough time to film nearly every scene they wanted. Reeves' final day of filming, in late summer 1998, found him nearly naked in a giant techno-pod, as Neo's energy is sucked away by spiderlike robots—the grim reality that awaits all of us in the Matrix. Reeves had already endured major surgery, as well as months of body-altering training, for the role. But his final day as Neo would require one last transformation: Right before filming, he’d sat in a bathtub shaving his head, eyebrows, and body.

Music

See also: The Matrix: Original Motion Picture Score and The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture

The film's score was composed by Don Davis. He noted that mirrors appear frequently in the film: reflections of the blue and red pills are seen in Morpheus's glasses; Neo's capture by Agents is viewed through the rear-view mirror of Trinity's motorcycle; Neo observes a broken mirror mending itself; reflections warp as a spoon is bent; the reflection of a helicopter is visible as it approaches a skyscraper. Davis focused on this theme of reflections when creating his score, alternating between sections of the orchestra and attempting to incorporate contrapuntal ideas. Davis' score combines orchestral, choral and synthesizer elements; the balance between these elements varies depending on whether humans or machines are the dominant subject of a given scene. In addition to Davis' score, The Matrix soundtrack also features music from acts such as Rammstein, Rob Dougan, Rage Against the Machine, Propellerheads, Ministry, Lunatic Calm, Deftones, Monster Magnet, The Prodigy, Rob Zombie, Meat Beat Manifesto, and Marilyn Manson.

Design

Sound effects

Dane A. Davis was responsible for creating the sound effects for the film. The fight scene sound effects, such as the whipping sounds of punches, were created using thin metal rods and recording them, then editing the sounds. The sound of the pod containing a human body closing required almost fifty sounds put together.

Production design

See also: Matrix digital rain

In the film, the code that composes the Matrix itself is frequently represented as downward-flowing green characters. This code uses a custom typeface designed by Simon Whiteley, which includes mirror images of half-width kana characters and Western Latin letters and Arabic numerals. In a 2017 interview at CNET, he attributed the design to his wife, who is from Japan, and added, "I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes". "The color green reflects the green tint commonly used on early monochrome computer monitors". Lynne Cartwright, the Visual Effects Supervisor at Animal Logic, supervised the creation of the film's opening title sequence, as well as the general look of the Matrix code throughout the film, in collaboration with Lindsay Fleay and Justen Marshall. The portrayal resembles the opening credits of the 1995 Japanese cyberpunk film, Ghost in the Shell, which had a strong influence on the Matrix series. It was also used in the subsequent films, on the related website, and in the game The Matrix: Path of Neo, and its drop-down effect is reflected in the design of some posters for the Matrix series. The code received the Runner-up Award in the 1999 Jesse Garson Award for In-film typography or opening credit sequence.

The Matrix's production designer, Owen Paterson, used methods to distinguish the "real world" and the Matrix in a pervasive way. The production design team generally placed a bias towards the Matrix code's distinctive green color in scenes set within the simulation, whereas there is an emphasis on the color blue during scenes set in the "real world". In addition, the Matrix scenes' sets were slightly more decayed, monolithic, and grid-like, to convey the cold, logical and artificial nature of that environment. For the "real world", the actors' hair was less styled, their clothing had more textile content, and the cinematographers used longer lenses to soften the backgrounds and emphasize the actors.

The Nebuchadnezzar was designed to have a patched-up look, instead of clean, cold and sterile space ship interior sets as used on productions such as Star Trek. The wires were made visible to show the ship's working internals, and each composition was carefully designed to convey the ship as "a marriage between Man and Machine". For the scene when Neo wakes up in the pod connected to the Matrix, the pod was constructed to look dirty, used, and sinister. During the testing of a breathing mechanism in the pod, the tester suffered hypothermia in under eight minutes, so the pod had to be heated.

Kym Barrett, costume designer, said that she defined the characters and their environment by their costume. For example, Reeves's office costume was designed for Thomas Anderson to look uncomfortable, disheveled, and out of place. Barrett sometimes used three types of fabric for each costume, and also had to consider the practicality of the acting. The actors needed to perform martial art actions in their costume, hang upside-down without people seeing up their clothing, and be able to work the wires while strapped into the harnesses. For Trinity, Barrett experimented with how each fabric absorbed and reflected different types of light, and was eventually able to make Trinity's costume mercury-like and oil-slick to suit the character. For the Agents, their costume was designed to create a secret service, undercover look, resembling the film JFK and classic men in black.

The sunglasses, a staple of the film's aesthetics, were commissioned for the film by designer Richard Walker from sunglasses maker Blinde Design.

Visual effects

As for artistic inspiration for bullet time, I would credit Otomo Katsuhiro, who co-wrote and directed Akira, which definitely blew me away, along with director Michel Gondry. His music videos experimented with a different type of technique called view-morphing and it was just part of the beginning of uncovering the creative approaches toward using still cameras for special effects. Our technique was significantly different because we built it to move around objects that were themselves in motion, and we were also able to create slow-motion events that 'virtual cameras' could move around – rather than the static action in Gondry's music videos with limited camera moves.

— John Gaeta

The film is known for popularizing a visual effect known as "bullet time", which allows a shot to progress in slow-motion while the camera appears to move through the scene at normal speed. Bullet time has been described as "a visual analogy for privileged moments of consciousness within the Matrix", and throughout the film, the effect is used to illustrate characters' exertion of control over time and space. The Wachowskis first imagined an action sequence that slowed time while the camera pivoted rapidly around the subjects, and proposed the effect in their screenplay for the film. When John Gaeta read the script, he pleaded with an effects producer at Mass.Illusion to let him work on the project, and created a prototype that led to him becoming the film's visual effects supervisor.

The method used for creating these effects involved a technically expanded version of an old art photography technique known as time-slice photography, in which an array of cameras are placed around an object and triggered simultaneously. Each camera captures a still picture, contributing one frame to the video sequence, which creates the effect of "virtual camera movement"; the illusion of a viewpoint moving around an object that appears frozen in time.

The bullet time effect is similar but slightly more complicated, incorporating temporal motion so that rather than appearing totally frozen, the scene progresses in slow and variable motion. The cameras' positions and exposures were previsualized using a 3D simulation. Instead of firing the cameras simultaneously, the visual effect team fired the cameras fractions of a second after each other, so that each camera could capture the action as it progressed, creating a super slow-motion effect. When the frames were put together, the resulting slow-motion effects reached a frame frequency of 12,000 per second, as opposed to the normal 24 frames per second of film. Standard movie cameras were placed at the ends of the array to pick up the normal speed action before and after. Because the cameras circle the subject almost completely in most of the sequences, computer technology was used to edit out the cameras that appeared in the background on the other side. To create backgrounds, Gaeta hired George Borshukov, who created 3D models based on the geometry of buildings and used the photographs of the buildings themselves as texture.

The photo-realistic surroundings generated by this method were incorporated into the bullet time scene, and algorithms based on optical flow were used to interpolate between the still images to produce a fluent dynamic motion; the computer-generated "lead in" and "lead out" slides were filled in between frames in sequence to get an illusion of orbiting the scene. Manex Visual Effects used a cluster farm running the Unix-like operating system FreeBSD to render many of the film's visual effects.

Manex also handled creature effects, such as Sentinels and machines in real world scenes; Animal Logic created the code hallway and the exploding Agent at the end of the film. DFilm managed scenes that required heavy use of digital compositing, such as Neo's jump off a skyscraper and the helicopter crash into a building. The ripple effect in the latter scene was created digitally, but the shot also included practical elements, and months of extensive research were needed to find the correct kind of glass and explosives to use. The scene was shot by colliding a quarter-scale helicopter mock-up into a glass wall wired to concentric rings of explosives; the explosives were then triggered in sequence from the center outward, to create a wave of exploding glass.

The photogrammetric and image-based computer-generated background approaches in The Matrix's bullet time evolved into innovations unveiled in the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. The method of using real photographs of buildings as texture for 3D models eventually led the visual effect team to digitize all data, such as scenes, characters' motions and expressions. It also led to the development of "Universal Capture", a process which samples and stores facial details and expressions at high resolution. With these highly detailed collected data, the team were able to create virtual cinematography in which characters, locations, and events can all be created digitally and viewed through virtual cameras, eliminating the restrictions of real cameras.

bullet time

Bullet-Time After the Matrix team finished rewiring their bodies in Burbank, they'd be shuttled off to Sydney, where the Wachowskis would be filming their ambitious sci-fi tale. They'd spent years fantasizing about what The Matrix could look like and had planned its production as carefully as possible: Months of physical training. Pages of detailed storyboards. Hours of explanatory meetings. Yet one of the most exhausting challenges of making The Matrix was also one of its biggest revelations: bullet-time.

The term itself appears toward the end of the Matrix screenplay, during a scene in which Neo is under attack on a skyscraper rooftop. A Matrix operative named Agent Jones fires at him from close range—but by now Neo has spent so much time in the Matrix, he's learned to manipulate it. Here's how the moment is described in the film's shooting script, from August 1998:

[Jones's] gun booms as we enter the liquid space of— Bullet-time.

The air sizzles with wads of lead like angry flies as Neo twists, bends, ducks just between them . . . Neo bent impossibly back, one hand on the ground as a spiraling gray ball shears open his shoulder.

The Wachowskis' description of the scene was brief, excitable—and totally puzzling. "Liquid space"? What did that even mean? And how was Keanu Reeves—a guy who'd just undergone neck surgery—going to bend "impossibly back"? For a long time, no one was quite sure how "bullet-time" would play out on the screen—including the Wachowskis themselves. "People would say, 'Well, how are you gonna do that?'" remembered Lana. "And we were like, 'We're working on it.'" The idea behind bullet-time was that the camera would move at regular speed but capture movement in slow motion. That would create the "liquid space" in which it felt as though the all-seeing camera could move anywhere, picking up every detail. What the Wachowskis wanted, Lana said, was for the visuals to "push at the boundaries of reality." But the realities of filmmaking pushed back. The siblings initially toyed with the idea of putting a slow-motion camera on a high-speed rocketlike device—an idea that was nixed for various reasons of safety and practicality. Instead, bullet-time would have to be created with digital effects, which in recent years had allowed filmmakers not only to mint new creatures and galaxies, but also to refurbish the world we already knew.

For decades, the visual effects field had been dominated by Industrial Light & Magic, the San Francisco–based firm George Lucas had founded in the mid-'70s, in order to make the first Star Wars film. But the surge in '90s CGI had launched several scrappy visual effects companies, including Mass Illusions (later renamed Manex Visual Effects). The company's breakthrough effort, the 1998 Robin Williams drama What Dreams May Come, took place inside a sumptuous, digitally created afterlife that earned Manex an Academy Award for visual effects. But by the end of the decade, the company was still working out of an old building at Naval Air Station Alameda, a decommissioned federal base on the San Francisco Bay. The run-down industrial facility was filled with empty weapons-testing areas and the remains of charred computers—what Manex VP of technology Kim Libreri describes as "a weird techno-garden of blacked-out electronics." To work at Alameda was to be reminded that the institutions that were supposed to protect us—and the technologies that kept them running—were just as fallible as we were. Sometimes, they could even turn against us. In Manex's headquarters, "if you blew your nose, black stuff would come out," says Libreri. "It was like we were being eaten by something."

It was a fitting environment within which to create the immersive, invasive 0s and 1s world of The Matrix. Libreri and Manex’s senior visual effects supervisor, John Gaeta, first met with the Wachowskis in 1996, when the directors were still fine-tuning their script. "They were trying to understand how to manifest the things that they saw in their head," says Gaeta, who notes that the Wachowskis wanted to evoke "the feel of virtual reality—the feeling of having power over time and space—while being bound to physical cameras." The concept seemed overly ambitious, especially for two filmmakers who'd never made an effects-intensive film before. "People were super skeptical about the Wachowskis' abilities to pull off bullet-time," says Libreri. "And trying to get artists to work on The Matrix was already hard. Some of them were like, 'Keanu Reeves? Virtual reality? Are you making another Johnny Mnemonic?'"

The bullet-time technology would be needed for a handful of crucial Matrix sequences, including Reeves' rooftop showdown. On an all-green soundstage in Sydney, Reeves was connected to wires and placed amid a cascading semicircle made up of 120 still cameras. The wires pulled Reeves backward to the ground, contorting his torso to a 90-degree angle, as the still cameras went off in quick succession around him—their combined images circling the actor as he fell backward. At the same time, his backward bend was captured by a pair of motion picture cameras. Later, all of these elements were blended together with a digitally inserted background and several airborne bullets.

That single shot would take nearly two years to complete and run an estimated $750,000 in computer costs. It quickly proved to be a worthwhile investment. Libreri remembers one internal screening of Matrix footage during which Reeves—seated in the front row—began lying back in his chair, excitedly re-creating his rooftop bends. At that same session, the team previewed another key effects sequence, in which a camera swirls around Trinity as she leaps up and kicks a cop. According to Libreri, "Joel Silver got up and said, 'That’s it! This is where everybody's going to get up and scream!'"

The Manex team would create more than 400 digital shots for The Matrix, its members sometimes finding themselves in the middle of the film's extravagant action sequences. One weekend, while helping with a complicated helicopter sequence over downtown Sydney, digital effects producer Diana Giorgiutti received a call from her parents, who were nearby. "They said, 'Are you shooting, by any chance?'" Giorgiutti says. "And I'm like, 'Yeah. I'm actually cabled to a railing on the 44th floor of a building.'"

Giorgiutti became close to the Wachowskis during the shoot, hanging out in the siblings' office as they vented about studio headaches and huddling with them during filming. At one point she asked if they were interested in splitting up some of the directing duties, to save time. "We don't do that," one of the Wachowskis told her. "We work together as one."

Throughout the making of The Matrix, that unified front never wavered. Filming in Australia gave the siblings a geographic distance from Warner Bros., as well as plenty of autonomy: "It felt like we were a secret," says costume designer Kym Barrett. Yet there were still moments when they found themselves at odds with the studio. "Warners was worried about the budget," says Matrix producer Osborne, who notes that the studio had already chosen scenes it would ax if the movie started racking up costs.

Release

Marketing

the studio figures out how to make a virtue of the intricate plot in its ad campaigns. “You can’t be told what the Matrix is,” warns the eye-grabbing trailer, “you have to see it.” Finally, the studio sets out to impress the press. While elaborate media junkets, awareness campaigns, and promotional giveaways are standard issue for studios, Warner’s Matrix marketing has been relatively massive, especially for a pre-summer opening. Morpheus’ spacecraft was packed up from its Sydney stage and sent to the lot at Warner Bros. in L.A., where it was then reconstructed for the junket interviews; the stars spent three days being grilled in the ship’s control booth.

Another sign of faith is that Warner Bros. hasn’t waited for the Matrix release to begin negotiations with Reeves to star in another picture, this one a football comedy called The Replacements. But if The Matrix makes Reeves a star once again, the Wachowskis say their professional future is the last thing on their minds.

Exhausted by the movie’s five-year odyssey to the screen, the brothers say they’re trying not to think about the second and third installments that could follow if The Matrix is a box office success. They returned from Sydney only in November, they edited up until a week before the movie’s release, and all they want is to go home to Chicago. “Right now,” says Andy, with his Beavis chuckle, “we’ve got a date with a big bottle of booze.”

In the months leading up to the release of the Wachowskis' strange sci-fi fable, Warner Bros. had one major worry: The Phantom Menace. The first Star Wars movie in more than 15 years was due in the summer of 1999, right around the time Warner Bros. had planned on opening The Matrix. But an R-rated, visually dense cyberadventure was all but certain to be squashed by The Phantom Menace, which was hovering over the competition like a mega-million-dollar Death Star. The studio asked the Wachowskis to speed up the postproduction process, in order to get The Matrix ready for the spring.

Otherwise, Warner Bros. had grown increasingly confident in their more than $60 million investment. After one successful Matrix test screening, the film's creative team was called into a meeting with co-chairs Bob Daly and Terry Semel, as well as dozens of other top staffers. "Terry said, 'We love this movie,'" remembers editor Zach Staenberg. "Their only note to us was to take five to ten minutes out. We ended up taking five and a half minutes out, and they never even looked at that final cut." At that same post-screening meeting, Semel would predict the film was "going to make a lot of money." But Staenberg says that the studio's approach to filmmaking wasn't driven solely by profits. "To me, The Matrix is a studio version of an auteur film. It was handled almost the way Warner Bros. used to handle Stanley Kubrick: They'd send him the money, and then keep their distance."

Box office

See also: 1999 in film

The Matrix was released in the United States and Canada on Wednesday, March 31, 1999. During its opening weekend, the film grossed $27.8 million from 2,849 theaters—an average of $9,753 per theater—making it the number one film of the weekend, ahead of the competing debuts of 10 Things I Hate About You ($8.3 million) and The Out-of-Towners ($8.2 million). This gave The Matrix the highest-grossing Easter weekend opening and the highest-grossing five-day opening in April ($37.2 million, Wednesday–Sunday) of its time. The audience initially skewed towards men, both young and old, but by the end of the weekend The Matrix was evenly attracting most recorded demographics. The Matrix accounted for a third of all tickets sold among the weekends twelve top grossing films.

It retained the number one position in its second weekend with a gross of $22.6 million, ahead of the debut of Never Been Kissed ($11.8 million) and 10 Things I Hate About You ($5 million). It fell to the number two position in its third weekend with a gross of $17.9 million, behind the debut of Life ($20.4 million) and ahead of Never Been Kissed ($8.4 million). It briefly regained the number one position in its fourth weekend with a gross of $12.6 million, ahead of Life ($11.3 million) and Never Been Kissed ($6 million).

In total, The Matrix spent thirteen weeks among the top-ten-highest-grossing films. It grossed a total of $171.5 million during its theatrical release, making it the fifth highest-grossing film of 1999.

Outside of the U.S. and Canada, The Matrix is estimated to have grossed a further $292 million, Worldwide, The Matrix grossed $463.5 million, making it the fourth highest-grossing film of the year, behind Toy Story 2 ($487.1 million), The Sixth Sense ($672 million), and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace ($924.3 million). The Matrix was considered a surprise sleeper success, driven by positive reviews and mainstream popularity, as well as teenage audiences sneaking into the R-rated film.

The overnight success phenomenon has taken hold.

But the deeply complex film became a hit, grossing $463.5 million worldwide

contributing to a record year that drew record crowds and featured the most films earning over $100 million.

hat became clear immediately upon the movie’s release on March 31, 1999. Opening on a Wednesday evening to get a jump start on Easter weekend moviegoing, The Matrix made nearly $37 million in its first five days and instantly reawakened Reeves's leading-man career.

analysis?

hat became clear immediately upon the movie’s release on March 31, 1999. Opening on a Wednesday evening to get a jump start on Easter weekend moviegoing, The Matrix made nearly $37 million in its first five days and instantly reawakened Reeves's leading-man career. More crucially, from the moment it arrived, The Matrix inspired countless theater lobby discussions about the movie's deeper implications—talks that would spill onto the internet for months and eventually years. To some, the movie was simply a dizzying action flick, one that ended on an impossibly id-pumping final scene: Reeves, decked out in his black coat and dark shades, flying through the sky to the righteous roar of Rage Against the Machine's "Wake Up."

But to others, The Matrix was itself a wake-up call, one that tried to make sense of the confusion and unease that were beginning to take hold in the late '90s, a period when things were going a bit too smoothly. "That decade was so comfortable," says Mattis, the Wachowskis' longtime manager. "The stock market was up, and people were making money. But there was a splinter in the mind's eye: Something felt wrong. In all of that comfort, people started thinking, 'There's something missing here.'"

The Matrix nudged viewers to develop their own slowed-down, omniscient, bullet-time view of the world around them: Who controls my life? Am I happy or just happily distracted? Do I even exist at all? Such existential turbulence wasn't exclusive to the '90s. But it had grown deeper during a decade in which technology had become so soothing—and so controlling. When the Wachowskis began writing The Matrix, the mainstream web was still in its modem-wheezing early days. By the time the film was released, more than a quarter of all households in the United States were connected to the internet—a number that would shoot up dramatically in the years that followed. At-home computers that had once been used for word processing, recipe storage, and playing The Oregon Trail could now support webcasts, multiuser games, avatar-cluttered message boards and comments sections, and various other time-slurping satisfactions. (Soon enough, there'd even be hours of free music to graze upon, thanks to the June 1999 debut of Napster, the song-sharing site cofounded by a Matrix-loving college student named Shawn Fanning.) When hacker turned hero Neo describes his ascent into "a world where anything is possible," he's voicing the optimism of the brave new web. "The Matrix was 10 years ahead of its time," says Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer, who cites the film as the first to truly understand the way the online world was becoming "our second home."

But that immersion into a digital nirvana came with all sorts of troubling side effects: system-shattering viruses, an emerging ailment dubbed "internet addiction," and the pre-meltdown panic over Y2K. By the end of the 20th century, there was a lingering belief that the machines might outsmart us. Such a premise had animated sci-fi movies for decades, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Terminator. Now, though, there was a real-world sense that mankind might be losing its edge. In 1996 and 1997, chess legend Garry Kasparov played against Deep Blue, an IBM-created supercomputer, in a series of matches that were treated like a man-versus-machine title bout. "I'm a human being," the frustrated Kasparov declared after losing one of the games. "When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I'm afraid."

The Matrix wasn't alone in augmenting that fear, as a pair of similarly future-shocked films arrived just weeks after its release. In eXistenZ, written and directed by genius sicko David Cronenberg, Jennifer Jason Leigh played a celebrity videogame designer whose latest creation drops players into a fake world so believable, she's targeted by reality-defending terrorists. And in the Blade Runner–referencing noir The Thirteenth Floor, thrill seekers are transported into a fake 1930s Los Angeles, a journey that inevitably results in real-world murders and madness.

Both films took viewers down a virtual-reality rabbit hole. But they were overshadowed by the plausible terrors—and potential empowerment—of The Matrix. It's a movie in which machines keep humans in a comforting trance, while secretly sucking away their very existence ("Be afraid of the future" advised one early Matrix tagline), while also offering a way to fight back: the truth-revealing red pill. In the Wachowskis' world, Neo's acceptance of the pill is a brain-breaking move, one that wises him up to the dystopian reality being camouflaged by the Matrix before setting him on a larger, more hazily defined search for freedom.

"This world has the Matrix all over the place," Lana Wachowski said. "People accept ways of thinking that are imposed upon them rather than working them out themselves. The free-thinking people are those who question every sort of Matrix, every system or thought or belief, be it political, religious, philosophical."

Reality was right in front of you, if you looked hard enough. The question was whether you would want to live in a world that, at times, could be well beyond anyone's understanding.

Reception

Critical response

Reviews were generally strong in the regular media and particularly within the Internet community (appropriate, considering the film’s themes).

strong reviews and white-hot buzz 

The Matrix was praised by many critics, as well as filmmakers, and authors of science fiction, especially for its "spectacular action" scenes and its "groundbreaking special effects". Some have described The Matrix as one of the best science fiction films of all time; Entertainment Weekly called The Matrix "the most influential action movie of the generation". There have also been those, including philosopher William Irwin, who have suggested that the film explores significant philosophical and spiritual themes. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 83% based on 207 reviews, with an average score of 7.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Thanks to the Wachowskis' imaginative vision, The Matrix is a smartly crafted combination of spectacular action and groundbreaking special effects". At Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received a score of 73 based on 35 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. It ranked 323rd among critics, and 546th among directors, in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made.

Philip Strick commented in Sight & Sound, if the Wachowskis "claim no originality of message, they are startling innovators of method," praising the film's details and its "broadside of astonishing images". Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four: he praised the film's visuals and premise, but disliked the third act's focus on action. Similarly, Time Out praised the "entertainingly ingenious" switches between different realities, Hugo Weaving's "engagingly odd" performance, and the film's cinematography and production design, but concluded, "the promising premise is steadily wasted as the film turns into a fairly routine action pic ... yet another slice of overlong, high concept hokum."

Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader reviewed the film negatively, criticizing it as "simpleminded fun for roughly the first hour, until the movie becomes overwhelmed by its many sources ... There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome."

Ian Nathan of Empire described Carrie-Anne Moss as "a major find", praised the "surreal visual highs" enabled by the bullet time (or "flo-mo") effect, and described the film as "technically mind-blowing, style merged perfectly with content and just so damn cool". Nathan remarked that although the film's "looney plot" would not stand up to scrutiny, that was not a big flaw because "The Matrix is about pure experience". Maitland McDonagh said in her review for TV Guide, the Wachowskis' "through-the-looking-glass plot... manages to work surprisingly well on a number of levels: as a dystopian sci-fi thriller, as a brilliant excuse for the film's lavish and hyperkinetic fight scenes, and as a pretty compelling call to the dead-above-the-eyeballs masses to unite and cast off their chains... This dazzling pop allegory is steeped in a dark, pulpy sensibility that transcends nostalgic pastiche and stands firmly on its own merits."

Salon's reviewer Andrew O'Hehir acknowledged that although The Matrix is in his view a fundamentally immature and unoriginal film ("It lacks anything like adult emotion... all this pseudo-spiritual hokum, along with the over-ramped onslaught of special effects—some of them quite amazing—will hold 14-year-old boys in rapture, not to mention those of us of all ages and genders who still harbor a 14-year-old boy somewhere inside"), he concluded, "as in Bound, there's an appealing scope and daring to the Wachowskis' work, and their eagerness for more plot twists and more crazy images becomes increasingly infectious. In a limited and profoundly geeky sense, this might be an important and generous film. The Wachowskis have little feeling for character or human interaction, but their passion for movies—for making them, watching them, inhabiting their world—is pure and deep."

Accolades

Main article: List of accolades received by the Matrix franchise

The Matrix received Academy Awards for Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects and Best Sound. The filmmakers were competing against other films with established franchises, like Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, yet they won all four of their nominations.

The Matrix also received BAFTA awards for Best Sound and Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects, in addition to nominations in the cinematography, production design and editing categories.

In 1999, it won Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film and Best Direction.

In February 2022, the film was named one of the five finalists for Oscars Cheer Moment as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' "Oscars Fan Favorite" contest, for the "bullet time" scene, finishing in fifth place.

Post-release

It also cemented the just-emerging DVD industry as a must-have item for younger, hipper pop culture connoisseurs by being a recent youth-and-tech-skewing blockbuster ideally suited to the new technology.

Home media

The Matrix was released on DVD and Laserdisc in its original aspect ratio of 2.39:1 on September 21, 1999, in the US from Warner Home Video as well as in 1.33:1 aspect ratio in Hong Kong from ERA Home Entertainment. It was also released on VHS in both full screen and widescreen formats followed on December 7, 1999. After its DVD release, it was the first DVD to sell more than one million copies in the US. By 2000, the film went on to become the first to sell more than three million copies in the US. At that point, it became the top-selling DVD release of all time, holding this record for a few months before being surpassed by Gladiator. By November 10, 2003, one month after The Matrix Reloaded DVD was released, the sales of The Matrix DVD had exceeded 30 million copies. It then debuted on both VHS and DVD formats in the UK on November 29, 1999. The Matrix sold more than 107,000 DVD copies in just two weeks, breaking Armageddon's record for becoming the country's best-selling DVD title. The Ultimate Matrix Collection was released on HD DVD on May 22, 2007, and on Blu-ray on October 14, 2008. The film was also released standalone in a 10th anniversary edition Blu-ray in the Digibook format on March 31, 2009, 10 years to the day after the film was released theatrically. In 2010, the film had another DVD release along with the two sequels as The Complete Matrix Trilogy. It was also released on 4K HDR Blu-ray on May 22, 2018. The film as part of The Matrix Trilogy was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on October 30, 2018.

Other media

The franchise also contains four video games: Enter the Matrix (2003), which contains footage shot specifically for the game and chronicles events taking place before and during The Matrix Reloaded; The Matrix Online (2004), an MMORPG which continued the story beyond The Matrix Revolutions; The Matrix: Path of Neo (2005), which focuses on Neo's journey through the trilogy of films; and The Matrix Awakens (2021), an interactive technology demonstration developed by Epic Games using Unreal Engine 5.

The franchise also includes The Matrix Comics, a series of comics and short stories set in the world of The Matrix, written and illustrated by figures from the comics industry. Most of the comics were originally presented for free on the official Matrix website; they were later republished, along with some new material, in two printed trade paperback volumes, called The Matrix Comics, Vol 1 and Vol 2.

Legacy

The trendsetting and zeitgeist-defining picture

The Matrix spawned an entire sub-genre of copycats, everything from Charlie's Angels to Shrek, and stole the pop culture thunder from The Phantom Menace (Star Wars: Episode One’s $434 million domestic/$924 million global gross notwithstanding). It was a last gasp of “original Hollywood IP” before pre-sold brands began to truly take over. 3 spawning two sequels and influencing countless other science fiction films.

a favorite film of David Foster Wallace novelist

Filmmaking

Following The Matrix, films made abundant use of slow-motion, spinning cameras, and, often, the bullet time effect of a character freezing or slowing down and the camera dollying around them. The ability to slow down time enough to distinguish the motion of bullets was used as a central gameplay mechanic of several video games, including Max Payne, in which the feature was explicitly referred to as "bullet time". It was also the defining game mechanic of the game Superhot and its sequels. The Matrix's signature special effect, and other aspects of the film, have been parodied numerous times, in comedy films such as Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999), Scary Movie (2000), Shrek (2001), Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (2002), Lastikman (2003); Marx Reloaded in which the relationship between Neo and Morpheus is represented as an imaginary encounter between Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky; and in video games such as Conker's Bad Fur Day. It also inspired films featuring a black-clad hero, a sexy yet deadly heroine, and bullets ripping slowly through the air; these included Charlie's Angels (2000) featuring Cameron Diaz floating through the air while the cameras flo-mo around her; Equilibrium (2002), starring Christian Bale, whose character wore long black leather coats like Reeves' Neo; Night Watch (2004), a Russian megahit heavily influenced by The Matrix and directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who later made Wanted (2008), which also features bullets ripping through air; and Inception (2010), which centers on a team of sharply dressed rogues who are able to enter other people's dreams by "wiring in". The original Tron (1982) paved the way for The Matrix, and The Matrix, in turn, inspired Disney to make its own Matrix with a Tron sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010). Also, the film's lobby shootout sequence was recreated in the 2002 Indian action comedy Awara Paagal Deewana.

Choreographers and actors

The Matrix had a strong effect on action filmmaking in Hollywood. The film's incorporation of wire fu techniques, including the involvement of fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping and other personnel with a background in Hong Kong action cinema, affected the approaches to fight scenes taken by some subsequent Hollywood action films, moving them towards more Eastern approaches. The success of The Matrix created high demand for those choreographers and their techniques from other filmmakers, who wanted fights of similar sophistication: for example, wire work was employed in X-Men (2000) and Charlie's Angels (2000), and Yuen Woo-ping's brother Yuen Cheung-yan was choreographer on Daredevil (2003). The Matrix's Asian approach to action scenes also created an audience for Asian action films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) that they might not otherwise have had.

Chad Stahelski, who had been a stunt double on The Matrix prior to directing Reeves in the John Wick series, acknowledged the film's strong influence on the Wick films, and commented, "The Matrix literally changed the industry. The influx of martial-arts choreographers and fight coordinators now make more, and are more prevalent and powerful in the industry, than stunt coordinators. The Matrix revolutionized that. Today, action movies want their big sequences designed around the fights."

Carrie-Anne Moss asserted that prior to being cast in The Matrix, she had "no career". It launched Moss into international recognition and transformed her career; in a New York Daily News interview, she stated, "The Matrix gave me so many opportunities. Everything I've done since then has been because of that experience. It gave me so much". The film also created one of the most devoted movie fan-followings since Star Wars. The combined success of the Matrix trilogy, the Lord of the Rings films and the Star Wars prequels made Hollywood interested in creating trilogies. Stephen Dowling from the BBC noted that The Matrix's success in taking complex philosophical ideas and presenting them in ways palatable for impressionable minds might be its most influential aspect.

Cultural impact

See also: Red pill and blue pill

The Matrix was also influential for its impact on superhero films. John Kenneth Muir in The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television called the film a "revolutionary" reimagination of movie visuals, paving the way for the visuals of later superhero films, and credits it with helping to "make comic-book superheroes hip" and effectively demonstrating the concept of "faster than a speeding bullet" with its bullet time effect. Adam Sternbergh of Vulture.com credits The Matrix with reinventing and setting the template for modern superhero blockbusters, and inspiring the superhero renaissance in the early 21st century.

The premise of The Matrix has been repurposed for multiple conspiracy theories and alt-right fringe groups. For example, some online men's rights groups use the term "redpill" to mean men realizing that they are supposedly being subjugated by feminism. The term has been used in discussion forums for right-wing topics such as Gamergate, white supremacy, incel subculture, and QAnon. As of 2021, the verb "pill" and suffix "-pilled" had entered more mainstream use and had come to mean developing a sudden interest in something.

Modern reception

In 2001, The Matrix placed 66th in the American Film Institute's "100 Years...100 Thrills" list. In 2007, Entertainment Weekly called The Matrix the best science-fiction piece of media for the past 25 years. In 2009, the film was ranked 39th on Empire's reader-, actor- and critic-voted list of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time". The Matrix was voted as the fourth best science fiction film in the 2011 list Best in Film: The Greatest Movies of Our Time, based on a poll conducted by ABC and People. In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant." In 2022, The Matrix was determined the most popular tech-themed movie in the United States using search volume data.

Filmmakers and science fiction creators alike generally took a complimentary perspective of The Matrix. William Gibson, a key figure in cyberpunk fiction, called the film "an innocent delight I hadn't felt in a long time," and stated, "Neo is my favourite-ever science fiction hero, absolutely." Joss Whedon called the film "my number one" and praised its storytelling, structure and depth, concluding, "It works on whatever level you want to bring to it." Darren Aronofsky commented, "I walked out of The Matrix ... and I was thinking, 'What kind of science fiction movie can people make now?' The Wachowskis basically took all the great sci-fi ideas of the 20th century and rolled them into a delicious pop culture sandwich that everyone on the planet devoured." M. Night Shyamalan expressed admiration for the Wachowskis, stating, "Whatever you think of The Matrix, every shot is there because of the passion they have! You can see they argued it out!". Simon Pegg said that The Matrix provided "the excitement and satisfaction that The Phantom Menace failed to inspire. The Matrix seemed fresh and cool and visually breathtaking; making wonderful, intelligent use of CGI to augment the on-screen action, striking a perfect balance of the real and the hyperreal. It was possibly the coolest film I had ever seen." Quentin Tarantino counted The Matrix as one of his twenty favorite movies from 1992 to 2009. James Cameron called it "one of the most profoundly fresh science fiction films ever made". Christopher Nolan described it as "an incredibly palpable mainstream phenomenon that made people think, Hey, what if this isn't real?"

Sequels and adaptations

Main article: The Matrix (franchise)

The film's mainstream success led to the making of two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both directed by the Wachowskis. These were filmed back-to-back in one shoot and released on separate dates in 2003. The first film's introductory tale is succeeded by the story of the impending attack on the human enclave of Zion by a vast machine army. The sequels also incorporate longer and more ambitious action scenes, as well as improvements in bullet time and other visual effects.

Also released was The Animatrix, a collection of nine animated short films, many of which were created in the same Japanese animation style that was a strong influence on the live action trilogy. The Animatrix was overseen and approved by the Wachowskis, who only wrote four of the segments themselves but did not direct any of them; much of the project was developed by notable figures from the world of anime.

In March 2017, Warner Bros. was in early stages of developing a relaunch of the franchise with Zak Penn in talks to write a treatment and interest in getting Michael B. Jordan attached to star. According to The Hollywood Reporter neither the Wachowskis nor Joel Silver were involved with the endeavor, although the studio would like to get at minimum the blessing of the Wachowskis. On August 20, 2019, Warner Bros. Pictures Group chairman Toby Emmerich officially announced that a fourth Matrix film was in the works, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss set to reprise their roles as Neo and Trinity respectively. The Matrix Resurrections was released on December 22, 2021, in theaters and on HBO Max.

In September 2022, Danny Boyle was announced to be directing a dance adaptation of the film, titled "Free Your Mind", and it is set to debut in October 2023 in Manchester, U.K.

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• Pegg, Simon (2010). Nerd Do Well. Century. ISBN 978-1-84605-811-0.
• Toropov, Brandon; Hansen, Chad (2002). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-02-864262-8.
• Wachowski, Larry; Wachowski, Andy (2000). The Art of The Matrix. Titan. ISBN 978-1-84023-173-1.
• Wood, Aylish (2007). Digital Encounters. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-41066-3.

REfs to use

https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/cc7edbb1-17e5-509b-935b-725045d722aa/the-matrix https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/matrix-wachowskis-keanu-reeves https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/1/8/16861248/morpheus-neo-the-matrix-red-pill-or-blue-pill-monologue

Themes

• https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3nv78/the-hidden-gems-of-the-matrix-are-its-black-characters
• https://www.vox.com/culture/22816209/the-matrix-4-resurrections-explained-sequels-red-pill-trans-neo-trinity-keanu-reeves-wachowski-lana
• https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/23/why-techno-and-the-matrix-perfect-harmony-resurrections-lana-wachowski
• https://www.npr.org/2021/12/22/1066554369/the-matrix-original-trans-fans-resurrections (maybe influence as well)

other stuff

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-57572152
• https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/matrix-empire-1999-keanu-reeves-interview/
• https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/54675/1/the-original-the-matrix-script-included-a-trans-character
• https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/matrix-empire-1999-keanu-reeves-interview/
• https://screenrant.com/matrix-best-characters-action-scenes-entire-keanu-reeves-sci-fi-franchise/
• https://www.vox.com/culture/22816209/the-matrix-4-resurrections-explained-sequels-red-pill-trans-neo-trinity-keanu-reeves-wachowski-lana
• https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/films/keanu-reeves-says-the-studio-wasnt-ready-for-a-trans-character-in-the-matrix/
• https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190319-the-matrixs-male-power-fantasy-has-dated-badly
• https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/31/movies/film-review-the-reality-is-all-virtual-and-densely-complicated.html
• https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/the-matrix-anniversary-trivia-facts/msdmatr-ec014/

lots of misc bits

nytimes

• https://web.archive.org/web/20230626110712/http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/31/movies/film-review-the-reality-is-all-virtual-and-densely-complicated.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20231230232554/https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/17/movies/home-video-gulliver-travels-to-dvd-format.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20231003064058/https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/16/arts/academy-award-nominees.html

WAPO

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/matrixosullivan.htm
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-09/29/071r-092999-idx.html

variety

• https://variety.com/1999/film/news/warner-loses-daly-double-1117743037/
• https://variety.com/1999/film/reviews/the-thirteenth-floor-1117499802/
• https://variety.com/1998/film/news/star-wars-prequels-to-lense-in-australia-1117488112/
• https://variety.com/1999/film/news/titanic-dvd-sinks-record-1117750778/

making of

• https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/the-matrixs-stunt-coordinators-and-choreographers-reveal-how-the-iconic-fight-scenes-were
• https://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-abstract/59/1/75/41661/Special-Effects-An-Oral-History?redirectedFrom=PDF
• https://screenrant.com/matrix-movie-behind-scenes-details-making-trivia/
• https://ew.com/article/2011/04/01/matrix-groundbreaking-cyberthriller/

Thematic analysis

The Matrix is arguably the ultimate cyberpunk artifact.

—William Gibson

See also: The Matrix (franchise) § Influences and interpretations, and The Wachowskis § Personal lives

woman in red

The Matrix draws from and alludes to numerous cinematic and literary works, and concepts from mythology, religion and philosophy, including the ideas of Buddhism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Hinduism, and Judaism.

Since its initial release on March 31, 1999, “The Matrix” has stood as a forceful example of the encroaching dangers of AI and the need to embrace one’s humanity to stop it. The battle between mankind and the film’s titular machinery, which has been secretly harvesting humans’ bioelectric energy to keep itself afloat, is presented as the fight between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). Reeves’ Chosen One is figured as the great hope for those who have been dormant and fooled. The kind who can stand up against those hoping to keep you entrapped. One of the most terrifying aspects of the film is how mundane it makes AI’s menace appear. As his name suggests, Agent Smith is nothing more than a monotone parody of FBI G-men. During key fight scenes, Agent Smith loses those glasses (they’re broken, tossed). And in his steely eyes you see an exasperation (desperation, even) at odds with the more mechanical traits that distinguish him from the humans he’s trying to control and contain. As Neo’s physicality ends up cannily mirroring Agent Smith’s own, “The Matrix” arrives at an understanding of what’s most disorienting about the rise of AI: Not how easy it is to tell apart from humans, but how difficult. Given the accelerated pace at which technology at the turn of the millennium was advancing (“The Matrix’s” plot hinges on wired telephone connections, after all), it makes sense that the last 25 years have seen narratives about and depictions of artificial intelligence change similarly quickly. No longer is AI (merely) a villainous foe to be vanquished (or unplugged). It has become an ever more sophisticated storytelling device through which to question the nature of our humanity. TV and films alike have asked, with increasing insistence , what will happen to us if we are to empathize with AI, if we are unable to dismiss it as mere tool (or antagonist) and find it, instead, mirroring the very emotions we thought it couldn’t embody. Maybe this is why “The Matrix” now feels more prescient than ever. In their iconic sci-fi flick, the Wachowskis had bottled up what felt so stultifying about our relationship with technology at the turn of the millennium, way before C-suite execs, tech entrepreneurs and would-be “creatives” would reduce artistic talent to a digital prosthetic. Since then, dystopian stories have regularly leveraged our empathy toward AI, framing it as almost-human. There’s no better way to rid ourselves of that notion than to go back into the Matrix and remember that AI is far more dangerous, right now, as a corporate weapon to be wielded against workers — a villain best symbolized by a humorless, middle-aged man in a business suit.

The One In Christian theology: Jesus Christ is the Messiah who saves mankind from its sins. Christ translates from Hebrew into ”Anointed One.” In the movie: Reeves is Neo, supposedly ”the One” who will lead mankind out of computer-generated bondage. An anagram of Neo is One.

Morpheus In Greek mythology: Morpheus is the god of dreams. In the movie: Morpheus is the leader of the rebel forces who fights to awaken enslaved masses from a dreamlike reality.

Zion In the Book of Revelation: Zion is the kingdom of God where the righteous will be saved after the destruction of the earth. In the movie: With earth destroyed, Zion is the only city where humans are free.

Nebuchadnezzar In the Bible: Nebuchadnezzar was a Babylonian king who searched for the meaning of his dreams. In the movie: Morpheus names his ship Nebuchadnezzar and visits an oracle to interpret reality — really a dream.

The Traitor In the Bible: Judas, one of the 12 trusted Apostles, betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. In the movie: The traitor is Cypher (think Lucifer), one of Morpheus’ seven trusted crew members. He betrays Morpheus for a steak dinner.

The Resurrection In the Bible: Jesus dies on the cross, but returns three days later, proving he is indeed ”the One.” It’s a miracle now celebrated as Easter. In the movie: Neo experiences a similar fate, but it’s likely we’ll celebrate it with a sequel.

Film and television

The pods in which the machines keep humans have been compared to images in Metropolis, and the work of M. C. Escher. A resemblance to the eerie worlds of Swiss artist H.R. Giger was also recognized. The pods can be seen in Welcome to Paradox Episode 4 "News from D Street" from a 1986 short story of the same name by Andrew Weiner which aired on September 7, 1998, on the SYFY Channel and has a remarkably similar concept. In this episode the hero is unaware he is living in virtual reality until he is told so by "the code man" who created the simulation and enters it knowingly. The Wachowskis have described Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as a formative cinematic influence, and as a major inspiration on the visual style they aimed for when making The Matrix. Rainer Werner Fassbinders German TV Miniseries World on a Wire from 1973, an adaption of the novel Simulacron-3, served as inspirational source for some details of The Matrix, such as the transfer between the real world and the Matrix-simulation via telephone / phonebooth. Reviewers have also commented on similarities between The Matrix and other late-1990s films such as Strange Days, Dark City, and The Truman Show. The similarity of the film's central concept to a device in the long-running series Doctor Who has also been noted. As in the film, the Matrix of that series (introduced in the 1976 serial The Deadly Assassin) is a massive computer system which one enters using a device connecting to the head, allowing users to see representations of the real world and change its laws of physics; but if killed there, they will die in reality. The action scenes of The Matrix were also strongly influenced by live-action films such as those of director John Woo. The martial arts sequences were inspired by Fist of Legend, a critically acclaimed 1995 martial arts film starring Jet Li. The fight scenes in Fist of Legend led to the hiring of Yuen as fight choreographer.

The Wachowskis' approach to action scenes drew upon their admiration for Japanese animation such as Ninja Scroll and Akira. Director Mamoru Oshii's 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell was a particularly strong influence; producer Joel Silver has stated that the Wachowskis first described their intentions for The Matrix by showing him that anime and saying, "We wanna do that for real". Mitsuhisa Ishikawa of Production I.G, which produced Ghost in the Shell, noted that the anime's high-quality visuals were a strong source of inspiration for the Wachowskis. He also commented, "... cyberpunk films are very difficult to describe to a third person. I'd imagine that The Matrix is the kind of film that was very difficult to draw up a written proposal for to take to film studios". He stated that since Ghost in the Shell had gained recognition in America, the Wachowskis used it as a "promotional tool".

Literary works

The film makes several references to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Comparisons have also been made to Grant Morrison's comic series The Invisibles, with Morrison describing it in 2011 as "(it) seemed to me (to be) my own combination of ideas enacted on the screen". Comparisons have also been made between The Matrix and the books of Carlos Castaneda.

The Matrix belongs to the cyberpunk genre of science fiction, and draws from earlier works in the genre such as the 1984 novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. For example, the film's use of the term "Matrix" is adopted from Gibson's novel, though L. P. Davies had already used the term "Matrix" fifteen years earlier for a similar concept in his 1969 novel The White Room ("It had been tried in the States some years earlier, but their 'matrix' as they called it hadn't been strong enough to hold the fictional character in place"). After watching The Matrix, Gibson commented that the way that the film's creators had drawn from existing cyberpunk works was "exactly the kind of creative cultural osmosis" he had relied upon in his own writing; however, he noted that the film's Gnostic themes distinguished it from Neuromancer, and believed that The Matrix was thematically closer to the work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, particularly Dick's speculative Exegesis. Other writers have also commented on the similarities between The Matrix and Dick's work; one example of such influence is a Philip K. Dick's 1977 conference, in which he stated: "We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs".

Philosophy

In The Matrix, a copy of Jean Baudrillard's philosophical work Simulacra and Simulation, which was published in French in 1981, is visible on-screen as "the book used to conceal disks", and Morpheus quotes the phrase "desert of the real" from it. "The book was required reading" for the actors prior to filming. However, Baudrillard himself said that The Matrix misunderstands and distorts his work. Some interpreters of The Matrix mention Baudrillard's philosophy to support their claim "that the [film] is an allegory for contemporary experience in a heavily commercialized, media-driven society, especially in developed countries". The influence of The Matrixial Gaze, the philosophical-psychoanalytical concept of Bracha L. Ettinger on the archaic matrixial space that resists the field of simulacra, "was brought to the public's attention through the writings of art historians such as Griselda Pollock and film theorists such as Heinz-Peter Schwerfel". In addition to Baudrillard and Ettinger, the Wachowskis were also significantly influenced by Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, and Dylan Evans's ideas on evolutionary psychology.

Philosopher William Irwin suggests that the idea of the "Matrix" – a generated reality invented by malicious machines – is an allusion to Descartes' "First Meditation", and his idea of an evil demon. The Meditation hypothesizes that the perceived world might be a comprehensive illusion created to deceive us. The same premise can be found in Hilary Putnam's brain in a vat scenario proposed in the 1980s. A connection between the premise of The Matrix and Plato's Allegory of the Cave has also been suggested. The allegory is related to Plato's theory of Forms, which holds that the true essence of an object is not what we perceive with our senses, but rather its quality, and that most people perceive only the shadow of the object and are thus limited to false perception.

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant has also been claimed as another influence on the film, and in particular how individuals within the Matrix interact with one another and with the system. Kant states in his Critique of Pure Reason that people come to know and explore our world through synthetic means (language, etc.), and thus this makes it rather difficult to discern truth from falsely perceived views. This means people are their own agents of deceit, and so in order for them to know truth, they must choose to openly pursue truth. This idea can be examined in Agent Smith's monologue about the first version of the Matrix, which was designed as a human utopia, a perfect world without suffering and with total happiness. Agent Smith explains that, "it was a disaster. No one accepted the program. Entire crops [of people] were lost." The machines had to amend their choice of programming in order to make people subservient to them, and so they conceived the Matrix in the image of the world in 1999. The world in 1999 was far from a utopia, but still humans accepted this over the suffering-less utopia. According to William Irwin this is Kantian, because the machines wished to impose a perfect world on humans in an attempt to keep people content, so that they would remain completely submissive to the machines, both consciously and subconsciously, but humans were not easy to make content.

Religion and mythology

Andrew Godoski sees allusions to Christ, including Neo's "virgin birth", his doubt in himself, the prophecy of his coming, along with many other Christian references. Amongst these possible allusions, it is suggested that the name of the character Trinity refers to Christianity's doctrine of the Trinity. It has also been noted that the character Morpheus paraphrases the Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi when he asks Neo, "Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference from the real world and the dream world?"

Matrixism is a fan-based possibly satirical religion created as "the matrix religion".

Transgender themes

Years after the release of The Matrix, both of the Wachowskis came out as transgender women. The red pill has been compared with red estrogen pills. Morpheus's description of the Matrix creating a sense that something is fundamentally wrong, "like a splinter in your mind", has been compared to gender dysphoria. In the original script, Switch was a woman in the Matrix and a man in the real world, but this idea was removed.

In a 2016 GLAAD Media Awards speech, Lilly Wachowski said: "There's a critical eye being cast back on Lana and I's (sic) work through the lens of our transness. This is a cool thing because it's an excellent reminder that art is never static." In 2020, Lilly said The Matrix was intended as an allegory for gender transition, but that "the corporate world wasn't ready". She said it was "all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view", but that she did not know "how present my transness was in the background of my brain" when the Wachowskis were writing it. In an interview with Variety, Reeves said he did not know the film was an allegory for transgender identity during production.