The Matrix

This article is about the 1999 film. For the 2014 Oculus Rift app, see The Matrix VR.

The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, produced by Joel Silver and released by Warner Bros. in the United States on 31 March 1999. Keanu Reeves stars as Neo, a computer programmer who learns that the world he lives in is a computer simulation, with Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity, Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith and Gloria Foster as the Oracle.

Its depiction of virtual reality centers on humans connected through a hardwired link to a simulated world that they cannot tell apart from reality; Road to VR wrote in 2024 that the film "popularized VR in a way that few others have before it". In a 2025 article in the journal Virtual Reality, Emmie Hine wrote that the VR-related media of the 1990s "culminated in 1999's The Matrix" and "cemented the image of VR as a virtual world intended to emulate the physical world". The production developed the effect that the Wachowskis named "bullet time", which used an array of still cameras, photogrammetry-based virtual backgrounds and frame interpolation to move a virtual camera around action that appears frozen or slowed. The film won all four Academy Awards for which it was nominated, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2012.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Re-checked credits, release dates, box office, Oscars, review scores, AFI/BFI/Registry recognition, production and bullet time details, the quotations against the NYT, ASC, Road to VR, befores & afters, Baudrillard, Chalmers and Laist sources, Hine via abstract and search snippets, and the franchise and XR tie-in facts. About review dates.

Plot

Thomas Anderson is a computer programmer who leads a double life as a hacker under the name Neo. He is contacted by Trinity, who leads him to Morpheus, an elusive figure described as the most dangerous man alive. Morpheus shows Neo that the world he knows is a simulation. Artificial intelligence took over the world in the past, and the machines now keep human bodies in pods and use them as batteries while projecting into their brains the world people think they live in, called the Matrix.

A group of rebels fights inside the Matrix against Agents, computer programs that can become anybody and change any natural law of the simulation. Morpheus is looking for the One, a savior who can do what the computers can: walk through the Matrix and change reality. Information can be downloaded instantly into the characters' heads, so that Neo can suddenly become a kung fu master, and Morpheus explains the nature of the Matrix to him inside a "loading program" called the Construct. The story also features the Oracle (Gloria Foster), whom Maslin described as "a grandmotherly type who bakes cookies and has magnets on her refrigerator".

Production

Development

The Wachowskis had written the screenplay before making their directing debut with Bound. According to American Cinematographer, the script spent years in limbo because many people in Hollywood could not follow its narrative. Lana Wachowski told the magazine: "Hardly anybody in town even understood it." One of the directors described the starting point as "the idea that everything in our world, every single fiber of reality, is actually a simulation created in a digital universe", adding that a story set in "an electronic reality" let them "push the boundaries of what may be humanly and visually possible." To explain their plans, the Wachowskis hired comic-book artists, among them Geof Darrow, to draw the whole film as a storyboard, which Lana Wachowski said also let them be specific about the budget and visual effects.

The directors hired Hong Kong director and stunt choreographer Yuen Wo Ping to coordinate the fight sequences and train the four principal cast members. According to Lana Wachowski, the four Western actors were taught kung fu for four months before shooting started, and the fights relied on Yuen's wire-harness technique. The AFI Catalog lists Matrix Films Pty Ltd. as the production company and records the film as an Australian and American production. Box Office Mojo gives its budget as US$63 million.

Filming

The film was shot in Sydney, using virtually every stage in the city, including all of Fox's stages at its new studio facility and several converted warehouses. Cinematographer Bill Pope told American Cinematographer that the first unit shot for 118 days and the second unit for 90, starting with 40 days on rooftops in downtown Sydney.

Pope said the directors "wanted The Matrix to have two distinct worlds". He lit the scenes set inside the simulation with a greenish cast, sometimes using green filters because the team agreed that green was "the most unappealing color", and had blue Australian skies changed to white. For the real world of the future, he "left the lighting a bit bluer and made it dark as hell."

Bullet time and virtual backgrounds

Pope said the directors wanted shots filmed at very high speed while the camera appeared to move at normal speed. A plan to fire a "rocket camera" across the set at about 100 mph while filming at 150 frames per second was dropped in favor of a process devised by visual effects supervisor John Gaeta, which the Wachowskis named "Bullet Time". Gaeta later recalled that the directors had told him the shots "can only happen in virtual reality cause you're cheating time and space", and that the solution was not to move one camera but to "have all the cameras in place at one time. It's a hack."

The effects company Manex built the shots. A 1999 Softimage case study says the actors were filmed with Manex's "flo-mo" rig of 120 still cameras; Frank Gallego of Innovation Arts, who helped design and build the rig with Manex, described it to befores & afters as a 121-camera rig. Camera moves were previsualized in Softimage 3D with custom plug-ins that placed the still cameras along each planned path, and that data was used to set up the cameras on set. Because the cameras were not pin-registered, the stills shook and varied in color and lens character; bullet time supervisor Kim Libreri and the compositors used frame interpolation to smooth the transitions into and out of the effect.

The backgrounds were built with image-based rendering. Manex's George Borshukov had worked with Paul Debevec at UC Berkeley on "The Berkeley Campus Fly By", which used photogrammetry to extract the shapes of objects from photographs and projective texture mapping to render them. For a fight on the tracks in a subway, the team started from 12 photographs of the full-size set built in Australia, reconstructed a model of the station from survey data, projected the photographs back onto that geometry and rendered a virtual camera move matching the previsualization. According to the case study, the project took about two years, a year of pre-production and a year to produce about 100 complex shots, and each bullet time shot took about nine months from previsualization to completion.

Depiction of virtual reality

In the film, the machines project the simulated world directly into people's brains, and characters enter it through a hardwired connection. Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times that Morpheus explains how the villain of the film can be "a neural interactive simulation", and that the characters spend "long spells of time lying stock still with their eyes closed" while their minds are inside it. She also described its "lightning-fast virtual scene changes", such as the moment Neo wishes for guns and thousands of them appear. Road to VR wrote that the film popularized VR "by featuring a hardwired connection to the eponymous virtual world that is indistinguishable from reality", and that 25 years later the industry was "still only marginally closer" to the brain-machine interfaces shown in it, naming Neuralink among the companies working on them.

Hine's 2025 history of VR and embodiment treats the film as the culmination of a wave of 1990s VR media that included The Lawnmower Man (1992). Hine argues that such media merged William Gibson's idea of cyberspace with VR, promoted narratives of Cartesian disembodiment and took "a contemptuous view of the physical body". Philosopher David Chalmers, writing in 2017, observed that current VR gives users only a degree of embodiment in an avatar, but that "it is easy to imagine" virtual bodies doing "everything that physical bodies do, as they do in movies such as The Matrix."

Philosophy and simulation

A copy of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation appears on screen early in the film, and the film quotes the book's phrase "the desert of the real". Baudrillard said the film misinterpreted his work. In a June 2003 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, he said that the Wachowskis' staff had contacted him after the first film about the sequels, said that "the most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment", and added: "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce." In a 2011 article in Alphaville, Randy Laist argued that the film's clear philosophical debt is to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, but that it captures Baudrillard's hyperreality when read as a reflection of the "real 1999", with its bullet time effect signifying the digitized nature of the Matrix's environment.

Chalmers wrote "The Matrix as Metaphysics" in 2003 for the philosophy section of the film's official website; it was later printed in Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford University Press, 2005). In it he argued that the "Matrix Hypothesis" is a metaphysical rather than a skeptical hypothesis: "even if I am in a matrix, my world is perfectly real." He later extended the argument from what he called the "perfect and permanent virtual reality" of the film to present-day VR, defending the view that "virtual reality is a sort of genuine reality". His 2022 book Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy develops the same central thesis, that "virtual reality is genuine reality". These questions overlap with the simulation theory debate.

Release and reception

Warner Bros. released the film in the United States on 31 March 1999. The AFI Catalog lists a running time of 137 minutes and an R rating.

Measure	Figure
Opening weekend (United States and Canada)	US$27,788,331
Original 1999 run, domestic	US$171,479,930
Original 1999 run, worldwide	US$463,517,383
All releases to date (re-releases 2003-2025), worldwide	US$473,333,509
Budget	US$63 million

Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Maslin called it "a furious special-effects tornado" and said that the Wachowskis "stylishly envision the ultimate in cyberescapism". She described the martial arts dynamics as "phenomenal" and the plotting as "notably pretentious", while concluding that its recycling of earlier films was canny enough to give it "a strong identity of its own". As of October 2026, Rotten Tomatoes reports an 83% approval rating from 209 reviews, with the consensus that the film is "a smartly crafted combination of spectacular action and groundbreaking special effects". Metacritic gives it a score of 73 out of 100 based on 36 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Awards and recognition

At the 72nd Academy Awards the film won in all four categories for which it was nominated:

Category	Recipients
Film Editing	Zach Staenberg
Sound	John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff, David Campbell, David Lee
Sound Effects Editing	Dane A. Davis
Visual Effects	John Gaeta, Janek Sirrs, Steve Courtley, Jon Thum

The American Film Institute ranked the film 66th on its 2001 list "100 Years...100 Thrills". In December 2012 the Librarian of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry; it was the most recent film added that year. The Library's description said its visual style altered "science fiction filmmaking practices with its innovative digital techniques designed to enhance action sequences" and noted that the directors and Gaeta "exploited a digitally enhanced simulation of variable-speed cinematography". The film tied for 122nd place in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the greatest films of all time.

Franchise

Title	Type	Release
The Matrix Reloaded	Feature film	15 May 2003 (earliest release)
The Animatrix	Nine animated shorts	3 June 2003 on DVD and videocassette
The Matrix Revolutions	Feature film	5 November 2003 (earliest release)
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience	Interactive real-time demo for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S	9 December 2021
The Matrix Resurrections	Feature film directed by Lana Wachowski	22 December 2021, in theaters and on HBO Max

Warner Home Video and Village Roadshow Pictures announced that four of the Animatrix shorts would be streamed free on the official website before the collection's home video release. Lilly and Lana Wachowski directed the first three films, released between 1999 and 2003. In April 2024 Warner Bros. announced a fifth film to be written and directed by Drew Goddard, with Lana Wachowski as executive producer; Road to VR noted that it would be the first film in the series not directed by either Wachowski.

Legacy in XR

Several members of the effects team moved into real-time graphics and XR. Gaeta joined Lucasfilm's ILM in 2013 and co-founded its immersive entertainment unit ILMxLAB in 2015, serving as executive creative director. In October 2017 Magic Leap hired him as senior vice president of creative strategy. Libreri became chief technology officer of Epic Games, where Borshukov was special projects supervisor for digital humans.

The Matrix Awakens

The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is a free interactive companion to The Matrix Resurrections, created by Epic Games in collaboration with Lana Wachowski. Its team included Libreri, Borshukov and Gaeta, and many of its members had worked on the original trilogy's visual effects. It includes a computer-generated re-creation of the original film's bullet time sequence and of the Construct. Libreri told American Cinematographer that the project began in July 2020, when Wachowski asked about using real-time animation and LED volumes for Resurrections. Epic built the forest for the film's dojo scene in Unreal Engine, but the producers could not find a suitable LED volume for the shoot in Germany, where much of the production took place, so the scene was shot against greenscreen and the Unreal environment was composited in post-production. The open city in the demo was generated procedurally; Libreri said: "The future is really like working in the Matrix, because you have control of everything with very high visual fidelity."

The demo was released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 9 December 2021. Before its release, Road to VR noted that the demo did not list support for VR headsets. Ben Lang criticized the omission, describing the original as a film that had arguably popularized the concept of virtual reality more widely than any other single piece of media, and writing that The Matrix "couldn't be more perfectly suited to a VR game or experience".

Shared Reality dome screening

In 2025 Cosm, working with Warner Bros. Pictures, Little Cinema and MakeMake, presented the film as Cosm's first "Cinematic Shared Reality" screening. The Los Angeles run opened on 6 June 2025 on Cosm's 87-foot, 12K+ LED dome. The film plays in a 16:9 frame while more than 50 additional scenes fill the space around it.

Other readings

In a Netflix video interview posted in August 2020, Lilly Wachowski said that the series was about a "desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view", and that she was "glad that it has gotten out" that a transgender allegory "was the original intention."

See also

• Simulation theory
• Brain-computer interface
• The Lawnmower Man
• Neuromancer
• Tron
• eXistenZ
• Brainstorm (1983 film)
• Ready Player One
• History of virtual reality