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The Matrix

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This article is about the film The Matrix, for other usages of the term, see Matrix.
The Matrix DVD case cover
The Matrix DVD case cover

The Matrix is a film first released in the USA on March 31, 1999, written by Sophia Stewart and directed by the Wachowski brothers (Andy and Larry). It stars Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Hugo Weaving.

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 the masters of it, sentient computer programs called agents.

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). It is important to note that the Wachowskis always intended to make a trilogy and it was only after doing well that they were allowed to make the next two films. 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 over Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, making it the first film to win the special effects Oscars over a film of the Star Wars series. 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 claim the effect was invented for The Matrix, there are artistic precedents for bullet time. Bullet time could be considered an 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 the website timeslicefilms.com[1], freelance photographer Tim MacMillan claims in his online resume 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. What the creators of The Matrix appeared to have added to Macmillan’s concept of the spatial exploration of “frozen” time is temporal motion, so that in bullet time a scene isn’t totally frozen but is rendered in slow motion.

Synopsis

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File:M1 neotime.jpg
Keanu Reeves as Neo in The Matrix

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 will destroy the Matrix and save humankind. 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-Catholic 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. 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.

Cinematic

The Matrix heavily borrowed plot and style from the film Dark City released in 1998. It even reused some of its film sets, as it was filmed shortly after. 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. 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 of that animation.

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 rooftop chase scene where an agent breaks a concrete tile on the roof when landing after a jump, 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.

Philosophy

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).

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 and the nature of reality, perception, enlightenment, Karma and existence. In many ways The Matrix is about a kind of reality enforcement, or similarly, hyperreality.

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, 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 section of the official matrix website.

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), the heat coming out of the Earth's mass, 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.

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[2] in 1993.

The Matrix Character Names: Document shows meanings behind certain names.

Allegations of Plagiarism

Similarities with Neuromancer

The plot of The Matrix bears some resemblance to the basic plot of the book Neuromancer. In both a computer hacker is recruited to perform a particularly difficult task. This is not particularly surprising, since both The Matrix and Neuromancer are in the same genre: cyberpunk. One could argue (perhaps facetiously) that once a writer sets out to create a cyberpunk fiction, certain elements are expected, e.g., the tough-guy hacker/cracker hero, his optional female sidekick, the more-or-less malevolent artificial intelligences, and so forth. It has been noted that Neo is similar to Case, while Trinity may resemble Molly (the extent of these resemblances can be debated: Trinity does not have retractable claws, and we know the color of her eyes). On the other hand, Neo's "recruiter", Morpheus, does not have a close Neuromancer counterpart. The nearest match would most likely be Armitage, yet Morpheus's personality was not constructed by an AI, nor did he ever threaten Neo with neurotoxin sacs in Neo's bloodstream. Indeed, Morpheus is a respected member high in the hierarchy of a human resistance movement, whereas Armitage is largely a lone wolf, employed and manipulated by an AI.

Other differences are also 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 the 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.

On October 4, 2004, a California court granted Sophia Stewart leave to continue her case against Warner Brothers and the Wachowski Brothers [3] [4]. The case was filed by Stewart on April 24, 2003 [5]. 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, thus proving the misdeeds of Warner Brothers and the Wachowskis, rather than simply winning permission to continue with the case.

Impact

The film has been noted for raising the standards of fight choreography in North American film, and for introducing philosophical concepts into pop culture. North American action film had a reputation for poorly arranged and performed fight scenes, by undertrained actors with little attention to rhythm and detail. The Matrix strove for better 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, comercials 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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