- This article is about the film The Matrix. For other usages of the term, see Matrix.
The Matrix is a film first released in the USA on March 31, 1999, written and directed by the Wachowski brothers
(Andy and Larry). It stars Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne
Moss, and Hugo Weaving. It is a renowned Generation Y classic and has a strong following as a cult
film
The story is about a young computer hacker who learns about the true nature of his
reality and gets involved with a band of rebels fighting against its masters, the "Machines", a sentient race of automatons with artificial intelligence.
The Matrix series and franchise
The Matrix earned $171 million in the US and $456 million worldwide. The movie's unexpected success and cult following
led to the next two films (The Matrix Reloaded and
The Matrix Revolutions), a computer/video game
(Enter the Matrix), and a collection of nine animated shorts (The
Animatrix). After these two were created, an online game entitled The Matrix Online was developed and marketed, further expanding the setting and plot of the saga.
It is important to note that the Wachowskis claim to have always intended to make a trilogy and it was only after doing well
that they were allowed to make the next two films, although it was some number of years and several iterations of wholly
different scripts before the second and third movies were approved. All of the ideas were written by the Wachowski brothers,
although five of the nine animated shorts count among their authors noted figures from the world of Japanese animation (anime).
Also, the movie's official website provides free comics, set in the world of The Matrix. Some of these comics are now
available in printed form (on 120 pages), although the creators claim that free comics will be available on the site in the
future.
Awards and nominations
The Matrix received Oscars for film editing, sound effects editing,
visual effects, and sound. Furthermore, the film won these awards in the year
that Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
was released, making it the first film to win the special effects Oscars when competing with an entry in the Star Wars series.
Special Effects
The film is known for popularizing the use of special effects such as the one now known as "bullet-time", which allows the viewer to explore a moment by the use of slow motion and a camera which appears
to orbit around the scene.
While many fans believe the effect was invented for The Matrix, there are artistic precedents for bullet time. Bullet
time is effectively a technically expanded version of an old art photography technique known as time slice photography. In time
slice photography, several cameras are placed around an object and fired in rapid sequence. When the sequence of shots is viewed
as a movie, the viewer sees what is in effect two-dimensional “slices” of a three-dimensional moment. Watching such a
“time slice” movie is akin to the real-life experience of walking around a statue to see how it looks at different
angles.
In his online resume at timeslicefilms.com (http://www.timeslicefilms.com), freelance photographer Tim MacMillan claims to have pioneered
by the mid-eighties “a way of freezing apparent time in a motion-picture tracking shot by means of multiple apertures
registered to the frames of motion-picture film.” The work of Harold Edgerton, who Macmillan pays homage to in one
exhibition, could be considered a yet earlier precedent. The creators of The Matrix have expanded upon Macmillan’s
concept of the spatial exploration of “frozen” time by providing, temporal motion, so that in bullet time a scene
isn’t totally frozen but is rendered in slow motion. There is also an improved fluidity through the use of interpolation
and digital compositing.
Synopsis
A computer software programmer named Thomas A. Anderson, who
prefers his hacker name "Neo," is contacted by a group of humans who resist the Matrix. Morpheus, their leader and a practitioner of
critical pedagogy, explains to Neo that the Matrix is a false reality and invites him to
enter the "real world." There Neo discovers that the year is not 1999, but about 2199 and that humanity is fighting a war against
intelligent machines. Morpheus has rescued Neo from the Matrix because he believes that Neo is "The One," who has been
prophesized to "hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, bring freedom to our people." It turns out that the world which
Neo has inhabited since birth, the Matrix, is an illusory simulated
reality construct of the world of 1999, developed by the machines to keep the human
population docile whilst they are used as power plants to keep the computers running.
Morpheus believes that Neo has the power to free humankind from its enslavement through complete mastery over the Matrix. Neo
is initially skeptical, but learns how he can "bend the rules" of the Matrix. He also forms a close personal relationship with a
female member of the group, Trinity. Inside
the Matrix, the humans are pursued by a group of self-aware programs, called Agents, capable of punching through walls and
dodging bullets, as well as having incredible martial arts skills. Their most powerful skill is their ability to "jump" between
bodies, enabling them to take over any person who has not been disconnected from the Matrix.
When one member of the resistance (code-named Cypher, who is subsequently killed off) betrays them and allows Agents to capture Morpheus, Neo
goes back into The Matrix with Trinity to save their leader. After Morpheus and Trinity exit the Matrix, Agent Smith, the leader of the Agents, destroys the phone booth from which the escape
signal was being broadcasted. Subsequently, Neo engages in a final duel with the program, killing the agent's current body. He
then flees as a new Agent Smith arrives, having just taken over a new person.
Upon reaching the second location of a hard line (a hijacked phoneline which carries the escape sequence necessary for exit
from the Matrix), Neo is shot in the chest by Agent Smith. Neo slumps over, apparently dead. However, in the real world, Trinity
refuses to accept Neo's death, and whispers into his ear that she now believes what the prophecy has foretold. Neo, who is
seemingly awakened by the power of her love, realizes the fabricated nature of the Matrix, and it is only then that he is able to
transcend the world around him. Empowered by this newfound notion of disbelief, Neo effortlessly defeats Agent Smith, thereby
"deleting" him from the Matrix. He returns to the real world and is greeted by Trinity and Morpheus.
Influences
Literature
The story makes numerous references to historical and literary myths, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
Judeo-Christian imagery about Messianism, Buddhism, and the novels of William
Gibson, especially Neuromancer. Gibson popularized the concept of
a world wide computer network with a virtual reality interface, which was named "the matrix" in his Sprawl Trilogy. However the concept and name apparently originated even earlier in the 1976 serial The Deadly
Assassin on the British science-fiction television series Doctor
Who, which featured a virtual reality known as the
Matrix. The first writer about a virtual reality, populated with unsuspecting victims, was Daniel F. Galouye with Simulacron
Three 1964.
The concept of artificial intelligence
overthrowing or enslaving mankind had previously been touched on by hundreds of science fiction stories, cinematically most notably in James Cameron's 1984 film, The Terminator. Many have commented that both films were inspired by the work of Philip K. Dick, not only dealing with issues of Gnosticism and prophetic visions but also the war against the machines in a post-apocalyptic world. The idea of a world
controlled by machines and all of humanity living underground goes back to the 1909
short story "The
Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster.
The plot of The Matrix bears some resemblance to the basic plot of the book Neuromancer. This is not necessarily surprising, since both The Matrix and Neuromancer are roughly in the same genre: cyberpunk. In both stories a computer hacker is recruited to perform a particularly difficult task. Some of the
relevant conventions related to the genre might be the tough-guy hacker/cracker hero, his optional female sidekick, the
more-or-less malevolent artificial intelligences, and so forth.
Some differences are illuminating. Consider, for example, Gibson's Turing Police, as compared to the Wachowski brothers' agent
programs. In Neuromancer, we have human police, tasked to limit the growth of artificial intelligences. The Matrix
world, by contrast, gives us AIs who curtail human development. Gibson shows humans working alongside the AI Wintermute; their
eventual triumph is presented as a victory for the "good guys". Again in contrast, the human-AI collaboration in The
Matrix—Cypher defecting to the agents—appears to undermine all that good and right stand for. From this
standpoint, The Matrix can be seen as an antithesis to Gibson's Neuromancer.
One interesting connection between the two works is the use of a location called Zion.
In Neuromancer, Zion is an orbital
colony founded by Rastafarians, where the main characters dock before
traveling to Freeside, the giant orbital station where the final act of the novel takes place. In The Matrix,
Zion is the underground home of the free humans, and is the topic of a conversation;
however, Zion is never actually visited in the first movie, although it features
prominently in the two sequels. It is possible that this is only a coincidence, and that Zion is used as a metaphor for a mythical city which could be considered to be the last hope for humanity. Given the
obvious influences of Neuromancer on The Matrix, it is more
likely that it is being used both as a metaphor and as a subtle homage.
It is also interesting to take notice of the resemblances to Frank
Herbert's Dune. While the "blind savior/prophet" imagery may
be the most obvious, there are similarities even in the first of the Matrix movies. For example, at the start of both
stories, there are several persons in the story who are seeking out the protaginist (unbeknownst to him), either to make him into
something greater or kill him before he does become greater. Ultimately, he exceeds the expectations and surpasses all of the
training given to him in ways that are beyond anything that anybody dreamed of. The Matrix is only one of several pieces
of fiction that have been inspired by
this book.
Cinematic
The Matrix reused some of the film sets from Dark
City, a movie filmed shortly beforehand that was similar in plot and style. The Matrix has many other cinematic
influences, ranging from explicit homage to stylistic nuances. Its action scenes, with a physics-defying style also drawn
directly from martial arts films, are notable. They integrate
Hong Kong style kung fu hand-to-hand
combat (under the skilled guidance of Yuen Wo Ping) and wire work, the
hyper-active gun fights of directors such as John Woo and Ringo Lam, and classic American action movie tropes, including a rooftop chase. The film also borrows plot
aspects from Strange Days (entering and experiencing a virtual world
as a premise for action sequences) and many other films and novels (our own technology is turned against us, creating a
post-apocalyptic earth in which a small human "resistance" must fight the machines).
It could also be argued that The Matrix was originally based on or inspired by the concept of Ghost hacking, which is taken from the anime science-fiction film Ghost in the Shell. Producer Joel Silver stated in a Matrix making-of documentary that the Wachowski brothers showed him a
"Japanimation" and told him they wanted to make a film like that, but live-action.
Additionally, there are notable influences from Japanese animation (anime). Both a
scene near the end of the movie, where Neo's breathing seems to buckle the fabric of reality in the corridor where he is
standing, as well as the "psychic children" scene in the Oracle's waiting room are evocative of similar scenes from the 1980s anime classic Akira. The title sequence, the
scene late in the movie where a character hides behind a column while pieces of it are blown away by bullets, and a chase scene
in a fruit market where shots hit watermelons, are practically identical to shots in the aforementioned Ghost in the Shell. Here (http://webmirror.kobran.org/matrixgits/page1.html) is a site containing screenshots and more
similar scenes from both movies.
Philosophy
Elements of theology and philosophy are heavily present in The Matrix. Also, students of Gnosticism will notice many of its themes touched upon. There are also many references to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity, with concepts of Enlightenment/Nirvana, and rebirth. Further references to Buddhism/Hinduism include the free will versus fate debate, perception and the concept of Maya, Karma, and various ideas about the nature of existence. In many ways The Matrix is about a kind of reality enforcement, or similarly, hyperreality.
The Matrix follows all phases of the Campbellian heroic
myth arc with near-literal precision, including even minor details like the circular journey, the crucial battle happening
underground, and even the three-headed immortal enemy (the three agents).
The character of the Oracle is strongly
similar to that of the Oracle of ancient Greek legend. In particular, her warning to
Neo that he is faced with a choice between saving his own life, or Morpheus' is very reminiscent of the warning that the Oracle
gave to King Leonidas when setting out for the battle of Thermopylae. In the Greek legend, she warns Leonidas
that either his city will be left in ruins, or that a Greek king must die, thus Leonidas is left with the choice of his own life
or the survival of his city. It could be further argued that had Neo chosen to save his own life, Smith would have gained the
access codes he needed from Morpheus and the city of Zion would have fallen. Thus, ulimately, Neo's choice was the same as that
of Leonidas: his own life, or the fate of a city.
There have been several books and websites written about the philosophy of The
Matrix. One of the major issues in the film is the question of the validity of the world around us, i.e., what is reality, or
whether what is happening is merely sensory information fed to us, is also raised in other science fiction films including eXistenZ, Total Recall, The Thirteenth Floor and peripherally in the film Abre los ojos (remade into Vanilla Sky).
The ideas behind The Matrix have been explored in old philosophical texts on epistemology, such as Plato's allegory of the cave and Descartes'
Meditations on First Philosophy. In a
well-known Solipsistic thought experiment, the subject is a brain in a vat of liquid; in
the Matrix, Neo is a body in a vat.
Postmodern thought plays a tangible role in the movie. In an opening scene,
Neo hides a diskette in a false copy of Jean Baudrillard's
Simulacra and Simulation, a work that
describes modern life as a hyperreal experience of simulation based upon
simulation. Interpretations of The Matrix often reference Baudrillard's philosophy to demonstrate that the movie is an
allegory for contemporary experience in a heavily commercialized, media-driven society.
See also: the philosophy (http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_category.html) section of the official matrix website (http://www.thematrix.com/).
Science
It should be noted that the reason given in the movie for computers enslaving
humans makes no sense from a thermodynamic point of view. The chemical
energy required to keep a human being alive is vastly greater than the bio-electric energy that could be harvested; human beings,
like all living beings, are not energy sources, they are energy transformers. It would be vastly more effective to
burn the organic matter than to power a conventional electrical
generator. On Earth, there are, ultimately, only three energy sources: the light
coming in from the Sun (stated as blocked out in the movie), geothermal energy, and the heat coming from the dissipation of the tidal movements of the oceans and crust. The first is generated by nuclear fusion in the Sun's core, the second by the radio-active decay of some constituents of the Earth's mass, and the third comes from the Earth's kinetic energy of rotation.
Everything else can be traced back to one of those three.
Some people have pointed out the possibility that the laws of thermodynamics could work differently in real life than in the
matrix to make it harder for people to suspect they are being used as a power source, or that the machines have technology not
yet imaginable by humans, and thus the known laws of science are impossible to apply in this situation. On the other hand,
Morpheus speaks of physical laws like gravity applying both to the real world and within its simulation, and the scenes we see
within the real world are certainly consistent with basic physics (it is difficult to imagine how the "real world" would look if
entropy were the machines' invention, for example).
Critical fans have speculated that the machines were actually using the humans' brains as components in a massively parallel
neural network computer, and that the characters were simply mistaken
about the purpose. This error would then be reflected in the "Zion Historical Archive" of "The Second Renaissance". In fact, this was very close to the original explanation. Because
they felt that non-technical viewers would have trouble understanding it, the writers condescendingly abandoned it in favor of
the "human power source" explanation. The neural-network explanation, however, is presented in the film's novelization and the
short story "Goliath", featured on the Matrix website and in the first volume of The Matrix Comics.
It is also established later in the trilogy that the machines and humans are interdependent for reasons more philosophical
than technological.
Principal cast
Trivia buffs should also be interested to learn that Carrie-Anne
Moss also appeared in a short-lived science fiction television series called Matrix[1] (http://imdb.com/title/tt0106062/) in 1993.
The Matrix character names: Document shows
meanings behind certain names.
Sophia Stewart legal case
On October 4, 2004, a California court
granted Sophia Stewart leave to continue her case against Warner
Brothers and the Wachowski Brothers [2] (http://www.slccglobelink.com/news/2004/10/28/Entertainment/mother.Of.The.Matrix.Victorious-785067.shtml)
[3] (http://www.slccglobelink.com/news/2004/11/16/News/Corrections-805777.shtml). The case was
filed by Stewart on April 24, 2003 [4] (http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=58221). Stewart claims that the story of the Matrix
was based on a manuscript she wrote entitled "The Third Eye" which she allegedly submitted to the Wachowskis in response to an
advert. Heavily-publicized accounts misreported the October 4th decision as Stewart winning her lawsuit, rather than simply
winning permission to continue with the case. The case also targets the producers of the Terminator franchise.
Impact
The film has been noted for introducing philosophical and religious concepts into pop culture. The Matrix trilogy joins the
Star Wars sextet of films in spawning a religion from its spiritual gloss. The
religion of Matrixism (http://www.matrixism.org/) emerged from the Bahá'í Faith, the Wachowski brothers' films and the writings of Aldous Huxley. Central to the beliefs of Matrixism are its Four Tenets which are; 1) Belief in the prophecy
of the One. 2) Acceptance of the use of psychedelics as sacrament. 3) Recognition of the semi-subjective multi-layered nature of
reality. 4) Adherence to the principles of one or more of the world's religions until such time as the One returns.
The Matrix upped the ante for cinematic fight scenes by hiring
acclaimed choreographers from the Hong Kong film scene where such scenes had been refined by years of experience. The success of this film put
those choreographers in high demand by other filmmakers who wanted fights of similar sophistication. To many martial arts, action
or SF fans however, an unfortunate side-effect was a sudden and obvious surge in movies, commercials and pop videos blatantly
copying "the matrix look", usually without the training and attention to detail that made it successful in the first place.
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