The Matrix Retrospective
In September 1982, Prince released the title track from his fifth album, 1999. To risk sounding like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, it’s a song so upbeat and catchy that the doom-laden nature of the lyrics barely register. Inspired by a TV show about Nostradamus, the song sets nuclear annihilation and Judgement Day to funky vocals and an irresistible hook.
1999 wasn’t a huge success at first, only reaching #44 in the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. But it would become a hit in the UK three years later, peaking at #2 in the charts. To name check another Prince song, perhaps it was a sign o’ the times during the tail-end of the Cold War: By the time 1999 found its audience, we Brits had already given the world Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes and the harrowing BBC drama Threads.
Skip forward to the title year and fears of Armageddon and Mutual Assured Destruction had largely been quelled by the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but Generation X was still a-quiver with pre-millennial angst. The world was changing fast, the internet was on the rise, and increasing reliance on computer technology led to rumours of an impending Y2K bug. Dire predictions followed that financial crisis, nuclear plant meltdowns, and planes falling from the sky awaited when the clock ticked past midnight on 31st January 1999.
Those fears never came to pass, but on a less cataclysmic scale it was a time when many people were facing more inward-looking crises. What exactly was our place in the world? What would a new millennium hold in store for a young, restless, and introspective cohort?
Cinema of the ‘90s was full of movies touching upon these questions, from the navel-gazing of Reality Bites to the Slacker ethos of Clerks. 1999 was the year that cinematic generational angst came to a head. Mike Judge’s Office Space prefigured what many people would come to feel about working in a cubicle all week to earn a bum paycheck after the COVID-19 pandemic. It was also the year of two landmark movies that summed up the mood: David Fincher’s edgelord manifesto, Fight Club, and the Wachowski Sisters’ The Matrix.
Who could forget The Matrix trailer when it first dropped? It promised dark conspiracy, reality-rippling hidden truths, gravity-defying leaps, Keanu Reeves saying “Whoa!’ and a first glimpse at a startling special effect that we’d come to know as Bullet Time. Oh, and guns. Lots of guns. Otherwise, it looked like it might also incorporate elements from T2: Judgement Day, Hackers, and Dark City – unsurprising in the latter case, as some sets from Alex Proyas’s gloomy mind-bender were recycled for the Wachowski’s movie.
The question on everyone’s lips became “What is the Matrix?” Whatever it was, the trailer made clear that this wasn’t your dad’s action movie, coming along at a time when Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were relinquishing their grip on the box office and our perceptions of what an action blockbuster could be were changing significantly.
The modern approach of The Matrix was also evident from the cast. While the “Whoa!” moment in the trailer called back to his Bill & Ted days, Keanu Reeves had already made the transition to action movies with films like Point Break and Speed. But he was clearly a different breed from Sly and Arnie. Far from the musclebound lunk, he was more in the everyman mould of Bruce Willis.
Although it is hard to imagine anyone else playing Neo now, several other actors almost got the gig over Reeves. Will Smith, riding high after Bad Boys and Independence Day, turned it down for the disastrous Wild Wild West instead. Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, and Nicolas Cage also passed. Leonardo DiCaprio initially took the part but backed out because he didn’t want to do another effects-heavy blockbuster so soon after Titanic. Reeves eventually won out over Johnny Depp, who was the Wachowskis’ first pick. Interestingly, the screenplay was also sent to Reeves’ Speed co-star Sandra Bullock, with the notion that the Neo role could be gender-flipped.
For Morpheus, Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Val Kilmer (again) were considered before the part went to Laurence Fishburne, a familiar face but decidedly less starry than the others who were all coming off high-profile Hollywood roles.
Of the four main actors, Carrie Anne-Moss was a virtual unknown although she had appeared in several movies and TV shows, including a Canadian production called Matrix. The role of Trinity made her career, but she had competition; Sandra Bullock turned it down after she was previously in the frame for Neo. Salma Hayek and Jada Pinkett Smith (who would have a part to play in the sequels) auditioned, and other possibilities are enough to make one shudder – Rosie Perez also showed interest and Janet Jackson was initially approached.
Rounding out the principal cast, Aussie actor Hugo Weaving was an inspired choice to play the film’s main villain, Agent Smith, after Jean Reno turned down the part. Up until that point, Weaving was best known to international audiences for his breakthrough role as a drag artist in The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. He certainly made the potentially one-note character of Smith something special, relishing every line and adopting a peculiar delivery. You can probably hear him saying “Mr. Anderson” right now!
Orchestrating it all was a writing-directing duo who had seemingly come out of nowhere: Two unassuming dudes who looked like they’d wandered onto set delivering pizza and were somehow upgraded to calling the shots on a major motion picture. After a decade of talented slacker types like Tarantino, Smith, and Rodriguez short-circuiting the Hollywood system to become indie filmmakers, it just made sense that the Wachowskis were the fresh way forward in action cinema.
The Wachowskis' rise to writing, directing, and executive producing a generation-defining action blockbuster was nothing short of meteoric. Lana and Lilly, formerly known as Larry and Andy, were born in Chicago in 1965 and 1967 respectively. Both were college dropouts who started a construction company in their hometown before a fateful intervention changed the course of their lives. Lana read How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, the memoir of famously thrifty B-movie producer and director Roger Corman. It inspired the Wachowskis to write their first screenplay, Carnivore. It never got made into a movie, but it did get them noticed in Tinseltown.
Prior to making their first film, there was a detour via New York where they got into the comic book business. They worked together on Ectokid and comic book versions of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed and Hellraiser. During that time, they started developing ideas for a comic run of their own – involving concepts that would later feed into The Matrix.
These ideas became a screenplay and the first draft was completed in 1994, the year they got their big break. Their script for hitman thriller Assassins (1995) was sold, although the finished film starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas was very different to their original vision. The screenplay was re-written by Brian Helgeland (director of LA Confidential) and the Wachowskis were so incensed that they wanted to take their names off the movie. Luckily, they were persuaded otherwise, and it led to their attention-grabbing directorial debut, Bound (1996).
Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilley starred as two lovers plotting to rip off a mob boss, receiving typically scene-stealing support from Joe Pantoliano, the prolific character actor who would have a significant part to play in The Matrix. Bound wasn’t a massive hit, but it was an ultra-stylish calling card notable for its noir-ish atmosphere and frank lesbian sex scenes.
The Wachowskis took advantage of the buzz to get the greenlight on their next picture, The Matrix. They wanted a trilogy from the get-go, but the producers persuaded them to make one movie to start with. Armed with a $60 million budget and a 600-page storyboard to help the cast, crew, and special effects wizards visualise what they were trying to achieve, the Wachowskis set about making their masterpiece in early 1997.
As groundbreaking as The Matrix was at the time, it wasn’t completely unique. Like they say, there is no such thing as an original idea and the Wachowskis drew heavily from their comic book background, kung fu movies, anime, and steeped their screenplay in philosophy. Keanu Reeves and the other main actors had a pretty intensive reading schedule including theoretical works by Kevin Kelly (Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World) and Dylan Evans’s academia related to evolutionary psychology. Reeves said he was asked to read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation before he even got a look at the script, which was also laced with references to Descartes, Plato’s Cave, Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi.
Ideas about simulated worlds had been explored before in film, most notably Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973). The internet is intrinsically linked with The Matrix, and as the world wide web was becoming a reality for more people in the ‘90s, Hollywood movies were focusing on its perils, hackers, and virtual worlds. Reeves’ Speed co-star logged onto The Net in 1994, followed by the cyberpunk thriller Hackers (1995), while Keanu Reeves starred in Johnny Mnemonic in the same year, based on a story by William Gibson.
As for the visual style of The Matrix, influences on the moody cityscapes and goth-inflected costume design (particularly the long coats and figure-hugging PVC) can be traced from Edward Scissorhands (1990) and The Crow (1994) through Dark City and Blade (both 1998). The latter, starring Wesley Snipes as a leather-coated vampire killer, somewhat anticipated the style and action beats – there is even a gunfire-dodging moment that prefigures the Wachowski’s revolutionary Bullet Time technique.
All that said, The Matrix still seemed so utterly fresh because it was the complete package. Under the determined gaze of the Wachowskis, the movie blended slick action sequences unlike almost anything seen before in live-action American cinema with heady philosophical concepts, assured storytelling, and instantly iconic performances.
Once the actors had given their brains a hefty workout, it was time to get into shape for the film’s vigorous action set pieces. To help with this, the Wachowskis drafted in Yuen Woo-Ping, a master martial arts choreographer who had worked for many years in Hong Kong action cinema. He and his team flew to LA, where they tailored intensive training routines to suit the individual style of each of the four main actors: Reeves’s determination and hard work while recovering from spinal surgery; Fishburne’s natural affinity for jumping and bouncing; Moss’s femininity and grace; and Weaving’s robot-like directness.
They all had to start from scratch and Woo-Ping allowed four months, although he feared at times that it might not be long enough. Apart from working out the complex fight routines that would be achieved largely in-camera, the actors also had to prepare for extensive wire work for the film’s more gravity-defying moments.
Once the actors were ready for action, the production moved to Australia to keep costs down. There, real-world locations melded with impressive physical sets and cutting-edge visual effects. Some of the CGI looks dated now, but the show stopping Bullet Time scenes still look fantastic.
The effect was achieved by setting up dozens of still cameras in a sequence around the actors. When triggered, the cameras simultaneously captured images that could be seamlessly stitched together by computer to create a moment of frozen time as the perspective whirls around the action. Regular movie cameras were placed at the beginning and end of the array to capture live motion leading in and out of each sequence. Arguably, The Matrix would have still been successful without the signature effect, but it was Bullet Time that made it stand out from everything else.
The Matrix premiered at Mann’s Village Theatre in Los Angeles on March 29th 1999. It wasn’t the typical release slot for a sci-fi action blockbuster – since Jaws, the summer months had become traditional for tentpole movies. That didn’t prevent it from becoming a major box office success, taking $467 million worldwide against a final budget of $63 million.
Critics were just as thrilled as the public and the movie became an instant classic, paving the way for the Wachowskis to expand the universe of the film. Four video games, officially part of the franchise and beginning with Enter the Matrix (2003), fleshed out the story while two sequels completing the initial trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, were released six months apart in the same year. Also released in 2003 was The Animatrix, an anime-style anthology – we truly had reached the point of Matrix saturation across various media.
Although the Wachowskis always visualised The Matrix as a trilogy, the first two sequels were something of a disappointment. They continued pushing the envelope with action and effects sequences by going bigger, louder, more; however, there was a muted sense that the first film perfected the formula and would have been just fine as a standalone movie. Worse still, the plot became more convoluted and pacing suffered as characters ended up spouting reams of expository dialogue, most notably in Reloaded’s often-parodied Architect scene.
Reloaded made even more money than the original but Revolutions suffered somewhat, making the least at the box office despite costing over two times more than The Matrix. Perhaps it was over-familiarity with the Wachowskis’ dark cyberpunk world, or maybe it was because it came too soon on the heels of the second movie. Whatever the reason, I definitely felt that the Wachowskis had created themselves a hugely ambitious puzzle that was too hard to solve in a satisfactory manner. I haven’t felt it necessary to revisit either film.
The Wachowskis moved onto other things. They wrote and produced V for Vendetta, a capable adaptation of Alan Moore’s dystopian graphic novel which also starred Hugo Weaving as the eloquent freedom fighter in the Guy Fawkes mask. Their next dual directing project was Speed Racer (2008), a spectacular version of the cult anime series that flopped at the box office and garnered a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-off, or Sequel. That was followed by the wildly ambitious Cloud Atlas (2012) and the much-derided Jupiter Ascending (2015). During all that time, the studio pushed for a further Matrix film, although the Wachowskis remained adamant that they didn’t want to return to that world.
Lana eventually had a change of heart. She came up with the story for The Matrix Revolutions (2021) after the siblings’ parents and a close friend had passed away within a short period of each other. She later said that the idea of bringing Neo and Trinity back offered comfort after the loss of her mum and dad, and she returned to direct the film without Lilly also at the helm. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss reprised their roles but, despite the overall feeling of goodwill, it was met with middling reviews and failed to make back its $190 million budget.
The Wachowskis have never quite managed to reach the same heights as The Matrix. Perhaps they never will. The original was pretty much a perfect movie and remains eternally popular. Like all the best science fiction, it only seems to get more relevant with age. Watching it back again, it is oddly comforting; now we’re all living in The Matrix to a certain extent and the time for taking the blue pill is long past, it’s reassuring to still see Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus kicking butt on our behalf.
So there you have it, our retrospective on the groundbreaking The Matrix. What are your thoughts on the film? Does it still hold up, and do you have any love for the sequels? Let us know!
