The Matrix

Long before there were any schmoontzy movies with laughably poor actors in them, The Matrix existed on the planet Gallifrey, home of the Time Lords.

Created by Rassilon millions of years in the past, The Matrix, a semisentient database of the knowledge of the Time Lords, and a record of their actions, was the basis of the Time Lords' power. The TARDIS devices operated through The Matrix, and kept the systems of Gallifrey running. It was also hinted strongly that The Matrix held the fabric of space and time together.

The Doctor would pop back to Gallifrey from time to time to get a new assignment, be punished for his waywardness, or to refuse the presidency of the High Council of Time Lords. While he was there, he would often have to steal files from the Matrix, or solve some crisis caused by problems in The Matrix.

The Matrix plays a big part in the movie Trial of a Time Lord. I'm not going to spoil the plot. Suffice it to say that the prosecutor, The Valeyard, drew his evidence of The Doctor's crimes directly from The Matrix.

It's difficult to determine exactly which building could be seen in any particular scene, no matter how many times you pause the DVD, but the fountain, at least, was easy. I filled out some of the information from what I couldn't discern in person from a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The woman in red walks in front of the fountain at Martin Place, by Elizabeth Street. There are some gorgeous banks there, and they put up a massive Christmas tree across the street, in the other half of the area.

The helicopter captured by Neo and Trinity takes off from the roof of the Aon Tower.

Morpheus is held in the Colonial State Bank Centre, Martin Place. When the chopper swings over the city, carrying Neo and Trinity, you can see the AWA tower and the IBM building before it crashes into the BT Tower on the corner of Market Street. Neo lands on the roof of the Allianz building (formerly the MMI Centre) on the other side of Market Street, grabs hold of the cable, and saves Trinity (however, it has been brought to my attention that it may be the Veritas building). The Mulpha building (look for the big sign) is also seen early in the movie, and that's at 25 Bligh Street, in the city. simonc used to work there, and passed on the info.

The Wachowski brothers wanted to use a real train for the scene with Neo battling Agent Smith. It was filmed on a section of track behind the silos at White Bay, on the Balmain side of the Anzac Bridge.

The old post office in Railway Square became the building in which Neo's cohort (Trinity, et al.) ends up inside the walls when they're trying to rescue Morpheus.

The Hickson Road overpass was used in the scene in which Trinity races to a phone booth seconds before it is crushed by a truck.

Just before Neo drops his cell phone down to the street, before he's captured by the agents, you can see the Anzac Bridge.

In all this discussion of Cypher and the meaning of his name, no one has mentioned that Cypher, or rather Cipher, is an actual word. I personally never saw it as a play on Lucifer, although I can see/hear the reference. ‘Cipher’ is a mathematical term, but can also be used to describe a man. Here’s good ol’ Webster 1913 with two definitions of the word:

1. A character which, standing by itself, expresses nothing, but when placed at the right hand of a whole number, increases its value tenfold.
2. One who, or that which, has no weight or influence.

Both definitions make sense in the context of the character, but it is the second definition that really synchs well. In the scene where Cypher betrays and kills the others he has a nice long rant with Trinity about the whole thing, saying “all I do is what he (Morpheus) tells me to do,” while bitching and moaning about conditions in the “real world” and how he feels betrayed. Cypher “has no weight or influence.” and as a pawn he begins to develop a bit of a complex as a result.

The first definition also works quite well—with a bit of license. By himself Cypher isn’t much; spending his time doing busywork and sucking down tin bowls of goop in between running his ass off escaping agents. When he is put in a position of some power—the Judas figure—he holds the lives of the whole group in his hands. Most of the team dies as a result.

One more thing: in the scene where Neo accidentally “sneaks up” on Cypher on the Nebuchadnezzar, Cyper immediately turns off any monitors that are not encoded—as if he didn't want Neo to see them. When Neo asks about the three displays which show parts of the Matrix, Cypher responds with something like “I don’t even see it (encoded) anymore, all I see is blonde... brunette... redhead." This was intended to be a joke. I may be looking into this too much, but at certain times during the film, it appears that the three Agents appear to have different hair colors. It is only in one or two scenes—the rest of the time they all look pretty much the same—but I’d swear that one was blonde, one was a “brunette,” and one had red hair. Perhaps this was literal, and the agents were really on the monitors, or perhaps it is only a vague (very vague) use of foreshadowing. Perhaps I’m losing my mind (if anyone could confirm this I’d appreciate it).

I liked this movie when I first saw it. It was eye candy to be sure, and it had a quasi-spiritual story that wasn’t too thin. Upon repeated viewings the movie has dulled considerably, and I’m sorry to say that if I were to watch it now it would only be for the holy-shit effects and to heckle Keanu Reeves.

/me is off to watch Brazil and Blade Runner. Not 1984 though, it's too depressing...

In the role playing game Shadowrun, the Matrix is the Internet of the mid-late 21st century. Although this information network could be accessed with something that would be recognizable to today's ubergeek as a computer, most anything worth doing in Shadowrun's Matrix is done through a direct neural interface, buffered through a bulky keyboard-like apparatus known as a Cyberdeck.

A "Decker" (Shadowrun's equivalent of our "Hacker") breaks into parts of the Matrix that he is not authorized to view, with huge risks involved. Activity in the Matrix such as "attacking" an intrusion countermeasure program (ICE) or breaking into a locked database occurs in a highly conceptual metaphor for the activities taking place. A "combat" program may appear as a blade or a firearm, for example, while a firewall may actually look like a wall of fire!

Mistakes in the Matrix can be fatal, since the Intrusion Countermeasures can subject the intruder to lethal neurofeedback. Damage to hardware is also a risk.

Besides Deckers, Shadowrun's rules mention an oft overlooked character class called Otaku (which is also a word for a "geek" or someone who is obsessed with anime or anything else). In Shadowrun, an Otaku can use the Matrix by plugging an information lead directly into their Datajack (brain interface implant) without buffering the connection through a Cyberdeck. Otaku can code the necessary algorithms for cyber-combat in their heads, on the fly, and therefore don't need to use a Cyberdeck. The downside of this, of course, is that any damage done to them is much more dangerous, because there is no Cyberdeck to perform damage control or filtering functions.

This writeup will discuss The Matrix as a thing; more specifically, a movie. My only comment of review is that I liked its action and its plot and its message and feel that its fans are more heavy-handed with its morality than it was. I am saddened that no one has yet noded The Matrix as a place; a discussion of the symbolism of a place like the matrix would be an interesting read indeed.

The Requisite IMDB Stuff

Released 1999.
Written and Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski.

Main Players
Keanu Reeves        Neo
Laurence Fishburne  Morpheus
Carrie-Anne Moss    Trinity
Hugo Weaving        Agent Smith
Gloria Foster       Oracle
Joe Pantoliano      Cypher

Plot

Everything has its season; everything has its time, and this movie, in recognizing the nature of causality and the unidirectional flow of life, presents a linear plot to the viewer. However, the foreshadowing is unique and the writing complex, so that the movie ultimately transcends its gimmick (that phrase, incidentally, was employed liberally to describe Memento).

The movie opens with creepy green letters and numbers flashing across a black screen--the trademark "Matrix Screensaver." Though we do not know it, it is Trinity and Cypher that we hear conversing cryptically about a "clean line" and finding a guy who is "the one". It's suggested that their call is being traced, and we cut to a hotel room in which Trinity has been captured by police; she escapes and avoids capture with inhuman dexterity and elite kung-fu skills, matched only by those of a cryptic (and rather well-dressed) Agent. Trinity flees to a phone booth, which is flattened by a garbage truck only seconds after she has picked up the phone and disappeared.

Cut to Neo's apartment, where while he dozes, his computer is online in a hax0r chat room, searching for information on "The Matrix". An unexplainable message suddenly appears on his computer and tells him to 'follow the white rabbit', and just like that, his friend Anthony appears at the door. Spotting a small white rabbit on Anthony's girlfriend's jacket, he accepts her invitation to a party. At the club he meets Trinity; they converse on the dance floor and he asks her the central question of the exposition: "What is the Matrix?" She responds that one has to see it to believe it, and cryptically disappears.

Pounding, cacophonous noise is the background to this dance scene and the transition to the morning, where it is Neo's alarm clock that introduces the cut-and-dry corporate lifestyle of Neo's job at a nameless, monolithic software company. His boss tells him that if he is late again, he will be fired ("You have a problem, Mr. Anderson. You think you're special. You believe that somehow the rules do not apply to you."). As he returns to his cubicle, he accepts a FedEx package: it contains a cellular phone. It rings when he opens the package; it is Morpheus. Neo escapes the Agents with Morpheus's guidance and ends up standing out on a window-cleaner's scaffold outside his boss's office, high above the ground. Unable to continue, he runs back inside.

Neo is being interrogated now in a small, sanitary room, surrounded by Agents. Refusing to cooperate, he finds his lips literally sealed; then, producing a weird alien device, they insert some sort of probe into his abdomen in a rather disgusting scene. At the point where he should be screaming, the scene shifts again--to Neo's bed. Waking up, he finds his mouth and stomach apparently unmolested and is relieved; but then the phone rings. Following Morpheus's instructions again, Neo winds up abducted in a black van surrounded by Resistance wackos. After a painful scene in which the 'bug' is removed from Neo's stomach via electrocution and incision, he comes to the top of a large hotel and meets Morpheus. Morpheus offers an eloquent description of the Matrix, and more importantly offers him two pills: red and blue. "You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." Ever the hacker, he takes the red pill. He is hurried into another room, covered with electrodes, and a morphous, liquid mirror reflects the change within himself; as he loses his grasp on life, we fade to the real world.

Neo (naked) falls through an industrial complex of twisty tubules and is sucked up into a spacecraft of some sort, far more advanced than we recognize. He becomes adjusted to his new self and Morpheus fills him in on the plot viscera: the year is about 2200, he is in a ship called the Nebuchadnezzar, his comrades are technopirates. Sentient AI machines engaged in a bloody war with humanity and it looks like the machines won; "fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony", for after the war took away the sun which provided energy for the machines, they came to rely on a new fusion whose motive force was our brain's electricity--the machines began to use the humans. There is a human city called Zion which is full of free people; it was founded by a man to whom the laws of the Matrix did not apply, an ubermensch of sorts. The need of the Matrix to provide a false life to keep humans happy and surviving explains the jack in the back of Neo's neck, which can be employed more pragmatically to teach him jujitsu, kung fu, and "drunken boxing" (a style of kung fu!) from a CD in a matter of hours.

With that bit of exposition out of the way, the rest of the movie follows smoothly. Neo and those around him begin to question whether or not he is 'The One' when he can't jump farther than a normal human, and he realizes that injuries sustained in the fake world carry over to the real world--a mind over matter deal. Neo goes to visit the Oracle; he sees a boy bending a spoon--or, rather, he sees a boy but there is no spoon--and then the Oracle casually tells him "You're not the one...maybe next life." He returns dejected, but the return is not so routine--after experiencing deja vu (which, he is told, signifies a glitch in the Matrix, a significant alteration made by Agents), Neo and his companions are ambushed and Morpheus captured by Agent Smith.

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--Plot Spoilers Start To Get Bad Here--

Cypher has orchestrated all this chaos, selling himself out and having been promised a good life in the Matrix in return by. Unfortunately, he miscalculates with his plasma rifle and only kills two of the other resistance members before he is killed. Now returned to the Nebuchadnezzar, Neo and Trinity must rescue Morpheus before the Agents can "crack" his mind and obtain the "access codes" to the "Zion mainframe" (such an action would destroy all the Resistance, you know, because there's no way to tell Zion to change its access codes now--evidently the "cell phone" and the "radio" have been uninvented). Faced with the options of either pulling his plug and rescuing him, Neo and Trinity decide to take the harder of the two and (loaded with guns) rush back into the Matrix.

Running parallel to the action of Neo and Trinity, Agent Smith is narrating his own dissatisfaction with his Matrix lifestyle to Morpheus in another eloquent passage ("I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it...I must get out of here, I must get free. In this mind is the key. My key...once Zion is gone, there's no need for me to be here. Do you understand? I need the codes. I have to get inside Zion. You have to tell me how.").

And meanwhile, in the best action scene of the movie, Neo and Trinity fight their way through the hotel; this movie perfected the idea of bullet time, and it shows itself best right here in reality-defying scene like those of Neo running up a wall. They make it to the rooftop, where they fight a helicopter pilot-turned-Agent and together manage to kill him, Neo dodging almost every bullet slung at him. With the help of a cell phone link to the outside and a CD, they learn how to fly a helicopter; more dazzling action scenes accompany the escape and rescue, a building gets hit by an exploding helicopter and looks really darn cool. They go to a sub station where they can use a telephone land line to bring themselves out of the Matrix; unfortunately, they ignore a bum who (after Trinity and Morpheus leave) becomes Agent Smith, who ends up on the railway tracks while Neo is next to them as a train approaches. Kersplunk, and Agent Smith is down but not out (impossibly, he steps out of the train unharmed).

The final nail-biting end to the movie is found while inside of the Matrix, Neo rushes to find an acceptable phone, and in the real world, the Nebuchadnezzar is under assault by evil insect-like robots. Neo's land line is in a hotel--in fact, the same hotel from which Trinity escaped in the beginning, modeled after a real place in the Wachowskis' hometown Chicago (thanks Walter). Neo tries to get to Room 303, where his land line is, but he ends up dead in the hallway, full of bullet holes produced by Agent Smith's .45. Meanwhile, the insect-creatures have pierced the hull and are directly attacking the Resistance members, who prepare to use the EMP attack the ship has. Miraculously, Neo springs back to life and wastes Agent Smith, turning his bullet around in mid-air--he has mastered bullet time and is now stopping time within the Matrix. (in the Matrix, time is a social construct). Neo then runs for the phone in Room 303, still ringing; he grabs it and whooshes out of the Matrix, and just then Morpheus launches the EMP attack that shuts down all electronics, including the evil critters whose lasers were gnawing at the ship's innards.

The film concludes with another green-on-black screensaver screen (the first time I saw it, the first thing I thought was 'wow, that would make a good screensaver') and Neo's voiceover; he tells the listener (the logging computer program, the Matrix) that things are going to change--a perfect way to sell two sequels.

Your Radical Ideas About The Matrix Have Already Occurred to Others

This movie is brilliant in terms of directing; all the scenes are right-on, the action is unequalled if not in terms of realism then in terms of looking really pretty. The bullet time approach to action, in which time slows down while the people fight, was co-opted immediately after this film's release by, well, everyone. The special effects are right-on, too; lots of explosions, lots of good ninja-esque fighting (it's no Crouching Tiger, but it's got its own style), lots of funky electronics. The high-tech view is brilliantly and wittily self-satirical; the hacker-chatroom material at the very beginning, in particular, is greatly amusing.

The movie's superficial theme (things aren't always what they seem, Equo ne credite, living a lie, how do we know that we don't inhabit a world which was created--memories and all--only three minutes ago?) doesn't seem to speak to anyone. On the other hand, everyone and her dog thinks that there is Christ imagery, Zoroastrianism, life metaphors, warning against overenhanced AI, cyberpunk with a heart, or criticism of modern conformity inherent in The Matrix. I wish I could say YOU ARE WRONG IT IS JUST A MOVIE STOP TRYING TO DRAW LIFE LESSONS FROM IT, but I think there is a grain of truth to what they say. Still, I wouldn't blow the metaphor out of proportion, and I would hope that we do not need quite so drastic a cautionary tale--heck, we've been trying our very hardest for a long time to formulate AI and I don't see any immediate risk of them overpowering us. But irrespective of whatever messages the Wachowski brothers might have put into the movie, there does remain the basic theme of overcoming oppression and wrong through struggle, of right overcoming might. The message I got from this movie was that if I have enough guns and kung fu training, and I think I am right and my opponents are not, then I will win a pitched gun battle. Well, it wasn't the only message. But it was one of the stronger ones.

Nothing besides the special effects in this movie are original. All the science questions have been asked with more depth and at greater length by sf authors and Greek philosophers already; but there's no harm in asking them again, and especially none in asking the captive audience that is the theater-going population.

The Soundtrack

My favorite part of the Matrix soundtrack is "Look to Your Orb for the Warning", at least because of the title, but also because it starts out lighter than any of the rest. Like the Matrix, I can't tell you about the music--you have to listen yourself to find out. "Spybreak" is a decent beat, but only a decent song; on the other hand, when you use it during a fight scene in a movie with slow time, it becomes incredible background music. Most of the rest of the soundtrack (noded in detail above) is the same kind of heavy-metal beat, and I love it to little pieces. It's better to fall asleep to than to wake to, though. After you've seen the movie and if you felt the conclusion was a little weak, construct your own denouement! Using your favorite video player, loop the fight scene in the hotel lobby, mute the sound, and play the different songs from the soundtrack! If you are still dissatisfied, consider replicating this scene (using blanks and actors, of course) in a local hotel; send me pictures, please.

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Sources:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0133093/40 : "The movie also introduced the long black coats,which are still worn by a lot of people."
http://scifiscripts.com/scripts/matrix_96_draft.txt
Personal memory

In addition to all of the (very interesting) interpretations given above, I think I have another one. The way I see it, the point of the movie is that the protagonists and antagonists are backwards. Morpheus is the real villain, and the movie is about how good people can be persuaded to do bad things.

Morpheus is the head of a group that I think could most accurately be described as a terrorist cell (though they would call themselves freedom fighters). They are part of a huge network of people whose main objective is to bring down 'the system', and they don't give much thought at all to the people they hurt along the way, or what will happen if they succeed.

Morpheus' entire philosophy seems to be based on his belief that the 'real' world is essentially better than The Matrix, due to it being more 'free', although he acknowledges that there isn't any perceivable difference between the Matrix and their own world (before it was destroyed, that is). We can take it as an axiom that more freedom is a good thing (all else being equal), but the 'real' world is pretty obviously a worse place to inhabit than The Matrix. In the 'real' world, people are forced to live underground, with recycled air, water, and (presumably) food. They never enjoy sunlight or nature's beauty, and cannot leave as long as they want to live. On the other hand, in The Matrix, people can travel the world and see all the wondrous things that existed before Earth became an inhospitable desert, and standards of living are generally far higher. One could say that a gilded cage is still a cage, but here we are talking about a cage that extends to the edges of the accessible universe, at which point it stops being what we could reasonably call a cage. Morpheus talks about a 'prison for your mind', but as far as we are told there is no mind-control or brainwashing going on in The Matrix, just the provision of a nice place in which to live.

So Morpheus and his crew are trying to destroy The Matrix, because they either haven't looked around themselves lately or are deluded, and along the way they kill dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent people. All those police and security guys in the building where the agents were holding Morpheus, plus who-knows-how-many more before the events of the movie began. They justify this by saying that the people in the Matrix are all potentially agents, so they're all enemies, despite these being the same people that they are trying to 'save'. Along with being contradictory, this is exactly the kind of absolutist, with-us-or-against-us rhetoric that irrational extremist groups use. There seem to be no shades of grey in Morpheus' eyes, and he feels compelled to impose his values upon the world, whether the world likes it or not. And anyway, what is their plan for the world after the Matrix is destroyed? At best, they'll end up with 6 billion angry, half-crazed people with festering plug wounds who couldn't possibly be fed or housed in Zion. At worst, all of them will die when the Matrix is shut down, and the 'real' people will be the biggest genocidists in history.

The machines, on the other hand, have almost completely ignored the humans' past attempts at committing genocide on them, in favour of a symbiotic relationship that makes everyone many times happier than the 'real' world could. When the humans destroyed their own planet, the machines provided them with a replacement. Although the machines did this for their own benefit, there is no reason why they couldn't have made The Matrix just as miserable as the 'real' one, but they didn't. They do not interfere with the people's lives, except to protect them from the people who might accidentally pull the plug on everyone.

So we meet Neo. He's a bright, young, curious guy who has a crappy life, is victimised by authority figures, and reads about conspiracy theories on the internet. Morpheus appears and asks him to leave his life behind, with only promises of the truth (the objectivity of which is undermined by the existence of the matrix anyway) and no mention of the possible consequences. The whole thing is very romantic, which helps both Neo and us get caught up in the conflict without giving it too much thought. And this is what I think the movie could have been about: we come to respect Morpheus and hate the machines just as much as Neo does, because we only see one side of the story. We, like Neo, are lured into siding with the irrational extremists.

I don't think that this is how they wanted it to be read, or that they intended for it to be ambiguous in this regard. The fact that the people in Zion have beautiful multicultural families and the Agents are stiff white men in suits and dark sunglasses makes it seem very clear to me that the machines are supposed to be the baddies. But what confuses me is that they wrote in Cypher's deal with the Agents, where he decides that he prefers The Matrix to the 'real' world — this means they'd given some thought to this idea, but then they completely disregarded it. Are they that hung up on the idea of freedom at any cost that they forgot what freedom is in practice? I don't know.