BEYOND THE MATRIX
Twenty years ago, Lana and Lilly Wachowski unleashed the real phantom menace on cinemas. Released in the year that Star Wars returned, The Matrix left the more lasting mark on movies. Total Film re-enters bullet time to assess the after-effects of The Matrix….
When stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski was interviewed for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, he hinted that Lana and Lilly Wachowski might be returning to a franchise they birthed 20 years back. Sundry news reports have since claimed Stahelski was only speaking hypothetically; others have argued that the sisters might be contemplating retirement, or that it’s writer Zak Penn who is working on the film in question. But the buzz Stahelski generated makes this much clear: it will take more than two decades and two divisive sequels to delete audiences’ hunger for more from The Matrix.
You don’t need pills to see why
The Matrix hit audiences so hard in 1999. Beyond its ability to merge cross-subcultural appeal (to hackers, slackers, black-leather mac-wearers) and mainstream punch via achingly of-the-moment tsunamis of Y2K panic, The Matrix tethered a brain-mash of bullet-time, Baudrillard, body horror and Buddhism to ideas repurposed from martial arts movies, Ghost In The Shell, Cronenberg, Philip K. Dick, Die Hard, Logan’s Run, Grant Morrison, Alice In Wonderland, William Gibson, 1984 and beyond.
A hero’s origin story for anxious millennials, the result was an actionpumped riot for audiences eager to think, and a brain-blast for action fans about to see how much fun paranoid big-think could be. Right from the moment Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity defied gravity, the message rang out: buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye.
Although the Wachowskis’ crowning glory was the offspring of multiple influences, it relocated blockbuster cinema in turn, littering the floor with spent shell casings as it obliterated genre clichés. Even if some of the viewers it inspired warped its message, there’s no doubting the extent of its influence. Once more into the rabbit hole, then: this one goes deep…
KEANU REBOOTED
When Keanu Reeves quoted The Matrix’s “Guns. Lots of guns” in Wick 3, the self-awareness groaned. But it pinpointed one reason for the ongoing appeal of The Matrix. Sure, Reeves had helped reinvent action movies in Point Break and Speed. He’d also had his share of duds in the ’90s, and he was not the only choice to play Neo – Will Smith was wanted, although the script confused him. Happily, that same script mapped a path to the part of Reeves’ brain marked “Whoa” and booted him into action. Immersing himself fully, he used his befuddlement wisely: as a bridge to engage equally befuddled viewers.
In the years since The Matrix and its sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, Reeves struggled with misses such as Constantine. If A Scanner Darkly suggested he was better off on whoa-dude turf, it was a successful return to action that fans wanted. Duly, we got it with John Wick, a reunion of sorts thanks to the presence of his Matrix stunt double Stahelski as director.
CHOREOGRAPHIC VIOLENCE
If the fight scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bills and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon looked familiar after The Matrix, so they should. All films shared the same actor-turned-fight choreographer in Yuen Woo-Ping, whose credits included Fist Of Legend. When producer Joel Silver employed Yuen, the martial arts vet requested months of training for the actors and stunt crew, which Stahelski experienced up-close. Speaking to Vulture, Stahelski recalled enduring “the longest and most arduous audition I’d ever been to” under the watch of Tiger Hu Chen, who went on to work with Reeves on Man Of Tai Chi.
The resulting fight scenes hybridised balletic grace and brutality, with Yuen’s wire-fu skills as a connective thread between deadly dust-ups and a more surreal take on the same. Duly, new possibilities were kicked open for action. “The Matrix literally transformed the industry,” said Stahelski, pointing to how most action movies in the past decade or two have
involved “a bitchin’ fight scene”.
The Matrix, he argues, says, “Look what you can do with your heroes.”
And we’ve been looking ever since, in films from Spider-Man to The Wolverine and elsewhere. The onepunch-takes-all approach of the ’80s action lugs and their ’90s offspring – Nic Cage, say – was gone. A new era in fight flicks opened in mainstream Hollywood, feeding back into the boosted popularity of martial arts movies: arguably, Crouching Tiger, House Of Flying Daggers and others benefitted from the fresh interest.
COMIC-BOOK CLOUT
Neither a comic-book adaptation nor a superhero movie, The Matrix nonetheless helped, as Laurence ‘Morpheus’ Fishburne argued, “to deliver on what comic books always promised.” The Wachowskis had envisioned it as a comic book; Todd Spawn McFarlane, meanwhile, dubbed it “the perfect comic-book movie”.
In practice, it created a world in which miraculous feats of physicality could seem plausible and look rad. If sources included numerous anime titles and Grant Morrison’s mighty mindshagger The Invisibles, The Matrix also looped back into the industry that inspired it. The fight sequences in 2003’s Daredevil adap seemed to copy its moves. More auspiciously, The Matrix suggested a way to leave – for example – Batman’s mid-’90s bigscreen failures behind by taking comic-book material seriously: perhaps its influence lingers in Bruce Wayne’s trippy-mystical tutelage and more of Batman Begins. More recently, the biggest expanded universe around saucered audiences’ eyes via the Wachowskis’ influence. “Doctor Strange,” said MCU-builder Kevin Feige, “needs to be a Ditko/Kubrick/ Miyazaki/The Matrix mind-trip.”
PHILIP K. DICK REBORN
Like the Matrix itself, sci-fi writer and thinker Philip K. Dick is everywhere, his thematic attributes shaping much modern culture. Altered states, fake realities, androids who may or may not be human, paranoia, religions hewn from recreation, corporate control, fate and free will: all these themes frothed around the brain of a writer who once declared that “we are living in a computer-programmed reality”.
Hollywood’s jones for the godfather of epistemological upheaval precedes The Matrix, its most famous adaptations being Blade Runner and Total Recall; although Paul Verhoeven’s film diverged wildly from Dick’s source story, its references to pill-popping and bug implants surely helped provide a bridge to the Wachowskis. But The Matrix arguably helped revivify Dick’s rep, paving the way for adaptations such as Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. The pick of the crop was Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, in which a rotoscoped Reeves returned to the source.
WE ARE NOW ON BULLET TIME
The Wachowskis did not invent bullet time or ‘flow motion’, where the camera eye circles around a character as they strike limber action poses, as if they had frozen time itself. Recent examples had included Lost In Space, Vincent Gallo’s otherwise ultra-DIY Buffalo 66 and a Michel Gondry Rolling Stones video. Vintage progenitors of the practice also known as ‘time-slicing’ included photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. But the Wachowskis and effects supervisor John Gaeta mounted an evolved, ambitious and immersive take on the technology, using 120 still cameras, computer morphing and motion estimation to create a kind of super slow-motion. Post-Matrix, bullet-time-inspired sequences have been sprayed wildly around movies from Charlie’s Angels to Guy Ritchie’s Sherlocks, plus Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Wanted and Deadpool.
FASHION SENSE
Evidence of how wide The Matrix’s influence stretches can be found in the 2013 Saudi Arabian film Wadjda, whose bicycle-loving lead rebel girl compares hospital workers’ garbs to Neo and company’s swish coats. The vests and muscle-clinging tees of ’80s and ’90s action heroes were out. Costume designer Kym Barrett wanted a “modern version of something that could move like a cape”, bridging the gap between the Knights Templar, mythical heroes, cassock-wearing clergy-leaders, Chinese warriors and a self-idealised, superheroic fantasy vision for the Wachowskis’ rebels, who also sported chunky boots and custommade mini-shades. Barrett worked to embed the clothes in character and practicality, comparing Trinity to “an oil slick” and making sure the costumes could be used for wire work. The look caught on, if not always the underlying meanings. Films such as Charlize Theron misfire Aeon Flux, Kate Beckinsale vamp fantasy Underworld and X-Men echoed Neo, Trinity and Morpheus’ style. Latterly, fashion writers at Glamour noted the look’s return on catwalks in 2018. As Barrett told the website, “I never had a hard number on when in the future it [The Matrix] was set, but I wanted it to feel like it was in a world of bigger possibility, and now we are in that world.”
DISCS. LOTS OF DISCS
Incredible as it is to think now that we’re into the UHD and 4K/8K streaming era, the home-ent release of The Matrix helped initiate a surge of sales for the then-fledgling DVD market. It was the first movie to shift a million copies on DVD, surely helped by innovative special features and Easter eggs such as ‘Follow the White Rabbit’, a pop-up guide to the action scenes.
ENTER THE BRAINBUSTER
While many action movies just preceding The Matrix seemed limited to asking if Nic Cage could pull off a muscle vest and mullet, the Wachowskis challenged you to ask deep existential questions about steak and spoons. Reminding us that mind/ muscle could co-exist, the sisters gave Reeves a reading list to prove it: the titles included French thinker Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra And Simulation (Neo hid his discs in a hollowed copy) and Wired founding executive editor
Kevin Kelly’s Out Of Control: The New Biology Of Machines, Social Systems, And The Economic World.
Although cinema has not been deluged with similar examples since, a few stand out. Arguably, the leap from Tim Burton’s Batman to a more philosophical Dark Knight in Christopher Nolan’s films was aided by Neo’s leap of faith. Inception was not really ‘The Matrix on acid’, as some critics suggested, but Nolan recognised parallels. The Matrix, he argued, “was an incredibly palpable mainstream phenomenon that made people think, ‘Hey, what if this isn’t real?’ Yes, that’s a massively complex philosophical concept in some sense. But in another sense, it’s really simple.”
Meanwhile, Inception co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt unpacked similarities with the film he made with director Rian Johnson, Looper. “It’s the basic human question – about identity and fate, what you would say to your future self if you could have that conversation – dramatised in a really fun way using the genre of science-fiction.”
COMPLICATED MESSIAHS
Myths of the ‘chosen one’ echo throughout cinema, but Neo ran with the idea and augured a millennium stuffed to the hilt with chosen ones. Young adult fiction overflows with them; some commentators have discerned a visual echo of Neo being plucked into the air in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, when Katniss is being hoisted to safety. When Game Of Thrones’ Bran the Broken turned out to be a thinly disguised chosen one, his monkish demeanour echoed The Matrix’s rebel crew.
INTERPRETATION NATION
In establishing hotlines to online debates about the malleability of meaning, the Wachowskis intuited how the internet might (dys) function early. The Matrix has lately been embraced by both the far right and the trans community, crystallising dividing lines between opposing ways of thinking. Alt-right dolts in the so-called ‘manosphere’ have co-opted ‘red pilling’ as a metaphor to suggest men’s supposed oppression by social justice warriors. But the character of Switch was – supposedly – originally envisioned as gender fluid; she was to be played by a man in the real world and a woman in the Matrix. Given the Wachowskis’ own transitions and anti-conformist sensibilities, it seems blazingly obvious which end of the interpretative spectrum they occupy.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
True, The Matrix did not invent ancillary tie-ins. But 2003’s animated anthology piece, The Animatrix, and videogame Enter The Matrix (featuring Jada PinkettSmith, who played Niobe) helped fire up the market for such. A comic-book tie-in was also launched, including contributions from The Sandman/ American Gods writer Neil Gaiman.
CYBERPUNK AND DYSTOPIAN VIEWS
While Reeves’ own attempt in Johnny Mnemonic showed how easy it can be to make cyberpunk cinema look cheesy, the Wachowskis found ways to successfully merge fantasy character arcs and grand ideas to CG-fried action in the services of cyberpunk and dystopian visions. The misfires of multiple attempted copycats proved by counter-example how right the sisters got it. While Christian Bale knife-fu outing Equilibrium failed to pull off a similar mix of dystopian views, black-clad heroes and lethal moves, it took Batman Begins to steer him back on track. Elsewhere, Ultraviolet and Aeon
Flux seemed locked on a trajectory to DVD bargain bins. Minority Report made sharper work of merging a desaturated palette reminiscent of Matrix DoP Bill Pope’s mucus-y (“Inspired by the phosphorus green of old PCs,” said the Wachowskis) images with a dystopian world. Latterly, the mix of cyberpunk, anime, chosen one clichés, and Mahershala Ali’s shades in Alita: Battle Angel occupied the same pool of comicsinfluenced material as The Matrix.
REALITY BYTES
At a time when the nature of truth is in contention, the Wachowskis’ vision seems alarmingly on-point. Reality seems tinted by its shadow, with ‘fake news’ banking headlines. And Elon Musk opened up a rabbit hole of debate when he claimed, “There’s a billionto-one chance we’re living in base reality.” Musk may have been touting an argument as old as philosophy (see Plato’s cave), but The Matrix undeniably helped encourage these kinds of arguments. The Wachowskis cooked up a dense dystopian worldview: it’s not their fault we’re practically living in it, but you can’t help but admire their foresight.
THE MATRIX IS RE-RELEASED IN 4K IN CINEMAS ON 12 JULY.