Unlocking The Matrix

Monday, May. 12, 2003 By RICHARD CORLISS

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That cinematic dawn revealed a grave new world where nothing was as it seemed. What we knew as reality in the late 20th century, the movie suggested, was a fiction imposed on human beings by intellectually superior machines. In fact, it was the late 22nd century, when humans, who provided bioelectric power to the machines, spent their entire existence in pods; they were nourished by the liquefied remains of their fellows and by the Matrix, a virtual-reality computer program of their lives. A few rebels had escaped the Matrix with the aim of destroying it and liberating humanity. Now if Morpheus and his insurgents from the underworld city of Zion could only find a savior, the One of an oracular prophecy. Perhaps this One is a young man called Thomas Anderson. Code name: Neo.

The money earned by The Matrix was nice, especially for a movie whose audience was limited by an R rating. The film's success on video was gratifying. But the cultural impact was near phenomenal. Cybernerds, proliferating like the film's men-in-black computer Agents, studied the Wachowskis' host of referents--to the Bible and Buddha, to novelist William Gibson (Neuromancer) and comic-book artist Jack Kirby (Captain America), to cybernetics and higher mathematics, to Hong Kong action films and Japanese anime--and filled more than 1,000 websites with gnarly exegeses. Half a dozen books have investigated the film's subtleties and invented still more. The Matrix stoked the adrenaline of millions of moviegoers and the intellects of many active, lonely minds.

The Matrix also caught the wrathful attention of moral watchdogs when the fatal shootings at Columbine High School occurred a few weeks after the movie's opening, and it appeared that the two perpetrating teens had seen the film--as had 15 million people who didn't kill anyone.

Anyway, the movie was a hit. And a hit, in the lower math of Hollywood, demands a sequel, whether or not the story has been completed. The brothers, though, had a vaster vision--one not easily contained in a single film. They had conceived The Matrix as a gigantic comic book, then stripped it down to movie form. "In the first version of the script," producer Joel Silver recalls, "you actually saw Zion. But they didn't have the time or the money to do that. If the first film hadn't been successful, nobody would have seen the rest of the story. But the boys had it in their heads. So when the studio said, 'Let's make a sequel,' they had already planned a lot of it."

The brothers' production scheme was as audacious as their narrative vision: two films shot as one, and more than two years in the making of the real (sound stage) and virtual (computer-generated) elements. They also planned a DVD package called Animatrix--nine short computer films by top Japanese and American anime directors, elaborating on the trilogy's themes and subplots (it hits stores next month)--and a nifty video game, Enter the Matrix (see box page 74).