The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film written and directed by the Wachowskis. The first installment in the Matrix film series, it stars Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, and Joe Pantoliano. It depicts a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside the Matrix, a simulated reality created by intelligent machines. The plot follows the computer hacker Neo, who is recruited by Morpheus into a rebellion against the machines.
Following the success of the Wachowskis' 1996 film Bound, Warner Bros. gave the directing duo the go-ahead to make The Matrix. The film's action scenes were influenced by anime and martial arts films, particularly fight choreography and wire fu techniques from Hong Kong action cinema. Other influences include Plato's cave, 1990's Telnet hacker communities, and William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. The Matrix popularized terms such as the red pill, as well as a novel visual effect known as "bullet time" in which a character's heightened perception 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.
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. The film was a box office success, grossing over $460 million on a $63 million budget. It became the highest-grossing Warner Bros. film of 1999 and the fourth-highest-grossing film of that year. The Matrix received Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Sound Effects Editing. It was also the recipient of numerous other accolades, including Best Sound and Best Special Visual Effects at the 53rd British Academy Film Awards. The Wachowskis were awarded Best Director and Best Science Fiction Film at the 26th Saturn Awards.
The Matrix is considered to be among the greatest science fiction films of all time. In 2012, it 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 sequels by the Wachowskis, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both released in 2003. The Matrix franchise was further expanded through the production of comic books, video games, and an animated anthology film, The Animatrix. 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, The Matrix Resurrections, was directed by Lana Wachowski and was released in 2021.
Plot
In 1999, in an unnamed city, Thomas Anderson, a computer programmer known as "Neo" in hacking circles, investigates the mystery of the "Matrix", bringing him to the attention of hacker Trinity. She tells him that Morpheus can answer Neo's questions. At his workplace, Neo is pursued by Agents led by Agent Smith, while Morpheus, able to somehow observe their movements, guides him by phone, but Neo ultimately surrenders.
The Agents interrogate Neo about Morpheus, but he refuses to cooperate. In response, they seal his mouth shut and implant a robotic tracking device in his abdomen. Neo awakens at home, believing the encounter was a nightmare until Trinity and her companions remove the device and take him to Morpheus. Morpheus offers Neo a choice: a red pill to uncover the truth about the Matrix or a blue pill to return to his normal life. Neo takes the red pill and awakens in the real world, submerged in a mechanical pod and connected to invasive cables. He sees countless humans similarly encased and tended by machines before he is ejected from the building and rescued by Morpheus aboard the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar.
Morpheus reveals that the year is approximately 2199. In the 21st century, humanity lost a war against its artificially intelligent creations, leaving Earth a devastated ruin. Humans blackened the sky to deprive the machines of solar power, but the machines retaliated by creating vast fields of artificially grown humans, harvesting their bioelectric energy. To keep their captives pacified, they built the Matrix, a simulated reality modeled on human civilization at its peak. The remaining free humans founded an underground refuge called Zion, surviving on scarce resources. Morpheus and his crew hack into the Matrix to liberate others, exploiting its rules to gain superhuman abilities inside it. Even so, they remain outmatched by the Agents—sentient programs that protect the system—and death in the Matrix means death in the real world. Morpheus freed Neo because he believed him to be "the One", a prophesied figure destined to free humanity.
The crew enters the Matrix to seek guidance from the Oracle, who foretold 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 is ambushed by Agents after being betrayed by Cypher, a disillusioned crew member who longs to return to the virtual comforts of the Matrix. Convinced of Neo's importance, Morpheus sacrifices himself to confront Smith and is captured. Meanwhile, Cypher exits the Matrix and begins disconnecting the others, killing them. Before he can kill Neo and Trinity, he is killed by Tank, a wounded crew member, who extracts the survivors.
Smith interrogates Morpheus to obtain access codes for Zion's mainframe, which would enable the machines to destroy the human resistance. Determined to rescue Morpheus, Neo re-enters the Matrix with Trinity. They free Morpheus, who escapes the Matrix with Trinity, but Smith intercepts Neo. Realizing his potential, Neo fights Smith as an equal and kills him. However, Smith resurrects in a new body and kills Neo.
In the real world, machines called Sentinels attack the Nebuchadnezzar. Standing by Neo's body, Trinity confesses her love for him and reveals that the Oracle prophesied she would fall in love with the One. In the Matrix, Neo revives with the ability to perceive and manipulate its code. He effortlessly destroys Smith and escapes the Matrix just as the Nebuchadnezzar's electromagnetic pulse disables the Sentinels. Later, within the Matrix, Neo communicates with the system, vowing to show humanity a world of limitless possibilities, before flying away.
Cast
Keanu Reeves as Neo: A computer programmer, born Thomas Anderson, who secretly operates as a hacker named Neo. 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". 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-heavy film directly after Titanic. The studio pushed for Reeves, who won the role over Johnny Depp, the Wachowskis' first choice. Lorenzo di Bonaventura said the screenplay was also sent to Sandra Bullock, with the suggestion of rewriting Neo as female.
Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus: A human freed from the Matrix and captain of the Nebuchadnezzar. Fishburne said that once he read the script, he did not understand why other people found it confusing. However, he doubted that the film 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.
Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity: A human freed by Morpheus, a crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, and later Neo's romantic interest. 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 launched Moss's acting career. Janet Jackson was initially approached for the role, but scheduling conflicts prevented her from accepting it. In an interview, Jackson stated that turning down the role was difficult for her, so she later referenced The Matrix in the 'Intro' and 'Outro' interludes on her 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) also auditioned for the role.
Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith: A sentient "Agent" program of the Matrix whose purpose is to destroy Zion and stop humans from getting out of the Matrix. Unlike other Agents, he has ambitions to free himself from his duties. Weaving stated that he found the character amusing and enjoyable to play. He developed a neutral accent for Smith, wanting him to sound neither robotic nor human, and said that the Wachowskis' voices also influenced Smith's voice. Jean Reno was offered the role, but declined, as he was unwilling to move to Australia for the production.
Gloria Foster as The Oracle: A prophet who still resides in the Matrix, helping the freed humans with her foresight and wisdom.
Joe Pantoliano as Cypher: Another human freed by Morpheus, and a crewmember of the Nebuchadnezzar, but one who regrets taking the red pill and seeks to be returned to the Matrix, later betraying the rebels to Agent Smith. Pantoliano had worked with the Wachowskis prior to appearing in The Matrix, starring in their 1996 film Bound.
Marcus Chong as Tank: The "operator" of the Nebuchadnezzar and Dozer's brother; they are both "natural" (as opposed to bred) humans, born outside of the Matrix.
Paul Goddard as Agent Brown: One of two sentient "Agent" programs in the Matrix, who works with Agent Smith to destroy Zion and stop humans from escaping the system.
Robert Taylor as Agent Jones: One of two sentient "Agent" programs in the Matrix who works with Agent Smith to destroy Zion and stop humans from escaping the system.
Julian Arahanga as Apoc: A freed human and a crew member on the Nebuchadnezzar.
Matt Doran as Mouse: A freed human and a programmer on the Nebuchadnezzar.
Belinda McClory as Switch: A human freed by Morpheus, and a crew member of the Nebuchadnezzar.
Anthony Ray Parker as Dozer: Pilot of the Nebuchadnezzar. He is Tank's brother, and like him was born outside of the Matrix.
Rowan Witt as The Spoon Boy, a young prophet who has learnt how to manipulate the world of the Matrix. Seemingly wise beyond his years, he teaches Neo how to develop his powers and provides him with wisdom and motivation across the films and graphic novels.
Ada Nicodemou as DuJour: A reference to the White Rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Production
Development
In 1994, the Wachowskis presented the script for the film Assassins to Warner Bros. Pictures. After reading the script, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the company's president of production at the time, decided to purchase it and included two more films, Bound and The Matrix, in the contract. The Wachowskis first directed Bound, which became a critical success. Using this momentum, they asked to direct The Matrix. Keanu Reeves said that in an early draft of the script, "the Matrix avatar would be a different sex than the Zion reality", but he claimed the studio was not 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. Brad Pitt also turned down the role of Neo. Madonna also turned down an undisclosed role, a decision she would later regret.
Joel Silver soon joined the project as producer. Although the film had key supporters, including Silver and Di Bonaventura, The Matrix was still a big gamble for Warner Bros., according to Screened. The studio was investing $60 million in a script by a pair of relatively inexperienced directors who wanted to use complicated special effects that had never been achieved before. The Wachowskis therefore hired the underground comic book artists Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce to create a 600-page, shot-by-shot storyboard for the entire film. The storyboard eventually earned the approval of Warner Bros., and the decision was made 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, after the production team sent an edit to studio executives of the film's first few minutes—featuring Trinity's encounter with police and Agents—the project had "total support" from Warner Bros.
Pre-production
The cast were required to be able to understand and explain the premise of 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 and Carrie-Anne Moss 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 before they read the film's script. Moss commented that she had difficulty with this process.
The Wachowskis 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 rigorously. The Wachowskis initially scheduled four months of training, beginning in October 1997. Yuen was at first optimistic about the training, but began to worry when he realized how unfit the actors were.
Yuen focused on developing each actor's strength. He built on Reeves's diligence, Fishburne's resilience, Weaving's precision, and Moss's grace. He designed Moss's moves to suit her deftness and lightness. Prior to pre-production, Reeves underwent spinal fusion surgery on his cervical spine to address disc problems that were causing him to lose his balance. 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, he was unable to kick for two out of four months of training, and so did not kick much in the film. Weaving had to undergo hip surgery after he sustained an injury during training.
Filming
All but a few scenes were filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, as well as in the city proper, although recognizable landmarks were not included 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. Some filming also occurred at Culver Studios.
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, halfway 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 performed 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.
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 before 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, lightweight mock-up suspended by a wire rope operated by a tilting mechanism mounted to the studio roof beams. The helicopter had a real minigun side-mounted to it, which was set to cycle at half its regular (3,000 rounds per minute) firing rate.
To prepare for the scene in which Neo wakes up in a pod, Reeves lost 15 pounds (7 kg) 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.
Sound effects and music
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.
The film's score, The Matrix: Original Motion Picture 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: Music from the Motion Picture 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.
Production design
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 spaceship 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 arts actions in their costumes, 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.
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 is 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's 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.