The Matrix at 20 – How this high-tech clas­sic hacked Hollywood

‘What is The Matrix?’ In ear­ly 1999, this ques­tion began to flut­ter around inter­net forums and flash up on TV screens, dec­o­rat­ing cryp­tic posters in cin­e­ma foy­ers every­where. It also sprung up in the form of a web­site – whatis​the​ma​trix​.com – as Warn­er Bros amped up antic­i­pa­tion for a futur­is­tic action sci-fi few knew any­thing about. What is The Matrix? The answer, even now, depends on who you ask.

Some see the Wachowskis’ film as a cyber­punk ​‘Alice in Won­der­land’, or an Asian mar­tial arts movie trans­plant­ed into a dystopi­an Amer­i­can set­ting. To oth­ers it’s a philo­soph­i­cal med­i­ta­tion dis­guised as a slick, bul­let-laden block­buster, ask­ing Carte­sian ques­tions about fate and free will. To this writer, a 12-year-old from a small sub­ur­ban town where life seemed to unfold in bul­let time, it was the most mind-blow­ing thing I’d ever seen.

This week marks the 20^th anniver­sary of a mod­ern sci-fi clas­sic whose endur­ing impact on film cul­ture not even The Ora­cle could have pre­dict­ed. Star­ring Keanu Reeves, Lau­rence Fish­burne and Car­rie-Anne Moss, The Matrix swerved con­ven­tion like Neo dodg­ing bul­lets atop a sky­scraper, bring­ing high-con­cept exis­ten­tial­ism to the action genre.

The film hacked Hol­ly­wood, alter­ing its code for­ev­er. It ush­ered in not only a new era of spe­cial effects but also a smarter, more ambi­tious type of block­buster. In a time of Face­book algo­rithms derail­ing elec­tions and online echo cham­bers obscur­ing the very notion of truth, the film’s dark warn­ings about the cor­rup­tive poten­tial of tech­nol­o­gy feel more per­ti­nent than ever.

The Matrix remains at the fore­front of the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion. It is reg­u­lar­ly vot­ed among the best block­busters ever made, and its dis­tinct visu­al style shim­mers through con­tem­po­rary box office smash­es like Incep­tion, Doc­tor Strange and Ready Play­er One. Its influ­ence has even reached hip hop: Kendrick Lamar, Nas, Dan­ny Brown and Nic­ki Minaj are just a few to have name-checked the film and its char­ac­ters in their music.

The lan­guage of The Matrix has crept into our polit­i­cal dis­course too. Among men’s rights activists and alt-right extrem­ists, the term ​‘blue pill’ – a ref­er­ence to the scene in which Mor­pheus offers Neo a route back to bliss­ful igno­rance – is used as a short­hand for peo­ple who deny that there’s a giant world­wide con­spir­a­cy to oppress white men, the true vic­tims of this real­i­ty. (What the Wachowskis, who have both come out as trans­gen­der women in the years since the film’s release, make of it becom­ing a cul­tur­al touch­stone for idiot men-babies, I dread to think.)

So how did two rel­a­tive­ly unknown direc­tors turn an ani­mé-inspired sci-fi about a world enslaved by machines into a pop cul­ture phe­nom­e­non that would res­onate for decades to come? Why does The Matrix still matter?

The answer in part lies in the tim­ing. The late ​’90s saw a fog of exis­ten­tial­ist pan­ic descend on main­stream Amer­i­can cin­e­ma. The new mil­len­ni­um was creep­ing ever clos­er, and as fears swelled about a so-called Y2K virus drop­ping planes from the sky and caus­ing unprece­dent­ed chaos, Hol­ly­wood found itself swept up in the tech­nol­o­gy-dri­ven crisis.

The Tru­man Show, Dark City, The Thir­teenth Floor and eXis­tenZ each inter­ro­gate the var­i­ous ways tech­nol­o­gy might dis­as­so­ci­ate human­i­ty from itself, wedg­ing itself between our rela­tion­ships and grip on real­i­ty. The Matrix was the kung fu-kick­ing cli­max of this trend: metaphors for mil­len­ni­um bug pan­ic don’t come much more scream­ing­ly obvi­ous than the insect-like device that’s implant­ed in Neo’s stom­ach in one of the film’s most night­mar­ish moments.

There was also a grow­ing con­cern in the news media about the amount of time young adults were spend­ing in dig­i­tal worlds. Video games had become main­stream, a major pop cul­ture pas­time for the first time thanks in large part to the PlaySta­tion. Sony’s home con­sole launched in 1997 and was mar­ket­ed at 18 – 24 year olds, set­ting up con­soles in night clubs and sound­track­ing games with puls­ing cut­ting-edge tech­no. As graph­ics had grown more impres­sive and gam­ing worlds ren­dered more and more immer­sive, moral pan­ics ensued that chil­dren were soon to be swal­lowed by these attrac­tive realms of unreality.

The Matrix man­i­fest­ed some of this fear, of plugged-in peo­ple lost to dig­i­tal unre­al­i­ties, but it also assim­i­lat­ed a lot of video game cul­ture – the train­ing sequence in the dojo is shot side on like a scene from Tekken. One of the film’s qui­et core attrac­tions, the fan­ta­sy of being able to instant­ly ​‘down­load’ new abil­i­ties that would oth­er­wise require years of train­ing, is essen­tial­ly the entire thrill­ride of gam­ing. By both embrac­ing and warn­ing against video game cul­ture, The Matrix tapped into a con­ver­sa­tion that reached a vio­lent crescen­do a few months lat­er, when video games were blamed for two teen gun­men mas­sacring 12 stu­dents and one teacher at a high school in Columbine, Colorado.

Plen­ty of action films boast kick-ass moments of heroes tak­ing down face­less foes, but The Matrix’s bat­tle scenes are chore­o­graphed liked bal­lets. Heav­i­ly indebt­ed to John Woo’s Hard Boiled, the Wachowskis bring a sense of beau­ty to the bru­tal­i­ty. Cam­eras spin ele­gant­ly around char­ac­ters frozen in mid-air, intro­duc­ing West­ern fans of action and sci-fi cin­e­ma to a very dif­fer­ent kind of visu­al language.

Bul­let time was more than just a flashy effect to under­line the film’s futur­ism. As Joshua Clover points out in his BFI com­pan­ion to The Matrix, bul­let time was ​“the film’s sig­na­ture not sim­ply because of its visu­al ecsta­sy, but because of its apti­tude, hold­ing all the strands of the film togeth­er.” As Mor­pheus points out onboard the Neb­uchad­nez­zar, those plugged into the Matrix per­ceive the year as being 1999. In truth, it’s clos­er to 2199. The Matrix is a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion reboot­ed and reloaded over and over again. Bul­let time reflects how human­i­ty are a civil­i­sa­tion frozen in time in The Matrix, ​“trapped in the amber of the spectacle.”

All this gave The Matrix a momen­tum that car­ried well into the new mil­len­ni­um. The Y2K bug nev­er quite mate­ri­alised, but two Matrix sequels did: Reloaded and Rev­o­lu­tions, shot back-to-back and dou­bling down on the phi­los­o­phy estab­lished in the first film. Actu­al­ly, make that quadru­pled down. Long debates about the nature of exis­tence ensued as the Wachowskis did away with much of the action movie gloss of the orig­i­nal. A scene involv­ing the Matrix’s archi­tect was par­o­died by Will Fer­rell, Justin Tim­ber­lake and Sean William Scott at an MTV awards cer­e­mo­ny. A sex scene set dur­ing a rave in Zion was met with wide­spread ridicule. Crit­ics and fans were for the most part unimpressed.

The dis­ap­point­ment of these sequels reduced Matrix mania to a sim­mer. It prob­a­bly didn’t help that by the ear­ly 2000s soci­ety had moved on; the Apple renais­sance in full swing. In 1999, com­put­ers and the inter­net were still com­plex unknowns to vast swathes of the pop­u­la­tion, stok­ing a tech-pho­bia The Matrix ben­e­fit­ed from. By the time the sequels came out, Steve Jobs had been appoint­ment per­ma­nent CEO of Apple, the iMac had giv­en home com­put­ers a clean, user-friend­ly makeover (“There’s no step 3!” Jeff Gold­blum yells in ads designed to show off how sim­ple they were to oper­ate, unlike clunky, techy PCs) and iPods had become a phe­nom­e­non. Com­put­ers and the inter­net no longer rep­re­sent­ed the unknown. They were fun, colour­ful, easy.

And yet The Matrix nev­er real­ly went away. With every news head­line about AI advances over the last decade, it’s been there: a punch­line, a meme, a warn­ing. In 2019, the idea that we’re liv­ing in a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion is now a cred­itable sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry. Giant social media cor­po­ra­tions have admit­ted to exper­i­ment­ing with con­trol­ling users’ behav­iour via the con­tent pumped into their feeds. There’s no pri­va­cy scan­dal we won’t for­give, no data min­ing deba­cle that will stop us from ham­mer­ing our ​‘like’ buttons.

What is The Matrix? ​“It is all around us, even now in this very room,” Mor­pheus intones in the film. ​“You can see it when you look out your win­dow or when you turn on your tele­vi­sion. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your tax­es.” Twen­ty years on, it’s sure start­ing to feel that way.