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….

- Kevin Harley

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 action pumped 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.