In early 1999,
strange posters appeared throughout the United States, advertising
an enigmatic movie created by a little-known writer-director team
with only one movie to its credit. The mystery extended to the film’s
unusual name, The Matrix. When The Matrix finally
appeared, over Easter weekend of 1999,
the anticipation created by this campaign paid off. The film earned
$460 million worldwide,
and became one of the most iconic and imitated films in recent memory.
Along with a number of other special-effects innovations, The
Matrix introduced “bullet-time” photography, in which the action
slows down or freezes as the camera seems to circle 360 degrees
around the characters. This effect in particular was so stunning
that it was spoofed or emulated in The Simpsons, Shrek, Scary Movie, Charlie’s
Angels, and at the Super Bowl. Cowriters and codirectors
Larry and Andy Wachowski—a.k.a. the Wachowski brothers—became famous
overnight.
The Wachowskis are notoriously private. They rarely grant interviews
to the media, and their contract with Warner Brothers for The
Matrix Reloaded and The MatrixRevolutions actually
stipulates that they are required not to do so. The essentials of
their biographies, though, are well-known. The brothers were born
in the 1960s and raised
in Chicago. In the 1980s,
the two of them dropped out of college, Larry from Bard and Andy
from Emerson, and became high-end carpenters and house painters
before landing jobs writing for Marvel Comics. In the early 1990s,
they sold a script to Warner Brothers studios, which would emerge,
dramatically altered, as the 1995 movie Assassins,
starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas. The film was a
flop, and the Wachowski brothers vowed never to cede artistic control
again.
Rebounding from their disappointment, the brothers wrote
and directed Bound (1996),
a noir-thriller with lesbian heroines that starred Jennifer Tilly,
Gina Gershon, and Joe Pantoliano, who plays Cypher in The
Matrix. Even as the Wachowskis were making Bound,
they were already planning The Matrix. After fourteen drafts,
they showed the script to Warner Brothers—in the form of a comic
book—and ultimately received a budget of nearly $70 million
to make the film.
To prepare for filming, the Wachowski brothers required
their actors to undergo as much as fourteen months of martial arts
training, along with a course of required readings. The intense
preparation paid off, and The Matrix was so popular
that the Wachowskis quickly received permission to create the next
two installments of the trilogy, with a much bigger budget. The
films were skillfully rendered cross-genre spectacles with ground-breaking
special effects and Keanu Reeves in a starring role, Warner Brothers
gave them all wide releases. Critics praised The Matrix,
but support waned with each of the next two films, a surprising
phenomenon given that the trilogy maintained its internal story
logic more rigorously than most other film series in recent memory.
Nonetheless, audiences worldwide flocked to all three films, which
together grossed over $1.5 billion. The
Matrix Reloaded set box-office records for its opening days
of release.
The Matrix films abound with references
to pop culture, philosophy, religion, classic literature, myths,
and other films. In making the Matrix trilogy,
the Wachowski brothers drew on imagery and ideas from Greek mythology,
Gnosticism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Nihilism, Taoism, comic books, the
works of René Descartes, Homer’s Odyssey, Jean
Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, Kevin Kelly’s Out
of Control, and Dylan Evans’s Introducing Evolutionary
Psychology. Actors from all over the world contributed their
efforts to the films, and the cast is meant to represent a wide cross-section
of humanity. In this mishmash of ideas, cultures, religions, and
nationalities, cultural theorists of every stripe, religious scholars
of all religions, and sci-fi fans all over the world have seen their
own pet ideas reflected. The Wachowski brothers insist that the
trilogy is not meant to reflect one consistent set of symbols or any
single religious or philosophical system. Instead, they claim, the films
draw upon an eclectic array of sources in order to forge a new, universal
mythology.
While the Matrix films have also been
remarkably influential in their own right, they have spawned several
collections of philosophical essays, semester-long college courses,
and endless debates and discussions. The “bullet-time” special effect
pioneered by visual effects supervisor John Gaeta was instantly
mimicked in television advertisements for cars and other products
and has been spoofed in parodic films, both animated and live action.
The Matrix films inspired an onslaught of commercial
products, including video games, clothing, and comic books. The
Matrix DVD became the first release to outsell its VHS
copies and was instrumental in fueling the development of a burgeoning
DVD industry. The Wachowskis were attuned to the cross-market potential
of their films, and between The Matrix Reloaded and The
Matrix Revolutions they created a series of animated shorts
called The Animatrix, some of which give important
background information for the films, and a video game called Enter
the Matrix.
With its countless references, cross-references, riddles,
and enigmas, the trilogy seems to raise more questions than it answers,
creating a sense of frustration that the filmmakers gleefully acknowledge.
The Wachowskis have said that one of their primary goals was to
make an action movie that would make people think, and because the
movie is based on the idea that knowledge frees us, we are left
to figure much of it out for ourselves. The directors are careful
not to produce clear-cut answers to the problems they raise. Sometimes
understanding the Matrix films is less about knowing exactly
what’s going on and more about knowing what questions you’re supposed
to ask. As Trinity tells Neo when she first meets him, “It’s the
questions that drive us.”
