Expected on the screens Wednesday December 22, Matrix Resurrections is signed only by Lana Wachowski, her sister Lilly having remained on her reservations, for the first time since their collaboration inaugurated in 1996 (Bound). Was there a fourth Matrix ? This new part of the science fiction saga, still with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, but without Laurence Fishburne, revives the fundamentals of the franchise which marks a date in science fiction cinema.
At 57, Keanu Reeves is back in one of the roles that have most marked his career, before John wick : the hacker Thomas Anderson, who became Neo, savior of humanity, after having torn the veil of appearances between the “matrix”, in which men think they are evolving, and reality, where they are “cultivated”, reduced to the fetal state by machines. Neo was left for dead at the end of the third installment Revolutions, released 18 years ago, but in Matrix, whose narrative with drawers, subject to an infinite number of interpretations, has always delighted its fans, anything is possible.
First “cyberpunk” film, this fringe of science fiction inaugurated in 1984 by William Gibson in Neuromancer, puts the computer world, cybernetics and augmented realities at the center of its subjects. If there are many references in Matrix, with notably Alice in Wonderland, or the “simulacra” of the author Philip K. Dick (Blade runner), the film concocted in 1999 by the Wachowski sisters (who were still brothers) is also at the origin of new images.
On the roof of a skyscraper, Neo dodges a burst of bullets in a staggering slow motion, where the camera, rotating around the scene, seems to have frozen time. Unheard of at the time. Mixture of tracking shot and freeze frame, this special effect that has become iconic is “a moving camera in a stopped world“, summarizes Dominique Vidal, of the special effects company Buf, who worked on three of the four parts of the saga. The” bullet time “, which influenced two decades of action cinema, has French origins, notes Before the Wachowskis, the French director Michel Gondry, a genius visual handyman, had used it in artisan mode, for … a clip of the Stones (Like a Rolling Stone“).
The creators of Matrix came up with the idea of applying it to fight scenes and professionalizing the process that at the time required a profusion of technical means to capture the same scene, at the same time, from dozens of points of view. different.
A shower of fluorescent green computer code letters that fall from the sky and end up drawing a parallel universe, the matrix … This visual idea has also remained in the annals. “Basically it was a menu of ramen (Japanese noodles) mixed with inverted numbers“, explains Dominique Vidal about these typographies of which armies of fans have tried to decipher the meaning.”We’ve done a lot of research on how to show people “done” in computer code“, he says about this last effect, taken again in Resurrections.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wtdA7hRs6o
Because the Wachowskis are perfectionists. On some special effects, their teams have submitted up to 20 different proposals “to have as a swatch of effects“.”We have plans that have arrived at version 150!“, have fun Dominique vidalL. Result: from an aesthetic point of view Matrix marked a break, tipping the cinema into the era of the “green screen” and omnipresent digital effects, underlines Lloyd Chéry, founder of the podcast C’est plus de la SF.
For many fans, Matrix, which features a group of rebels who fight artificial intelligences that have imprisoned humans in the Matrix, a virtual reality universe simulating the outside world, is the saga that best anticipated the start of the 21st century. “Matrix said a lot about what was to come, reality catching up with sci-fi with the arrival of 3D, augmented and virtual reality“, underlines Lloyd Chéry. Until the news of recent weeks, with the rise of the metaverse (contraction of meta and universe), which the giant Facebook announced that it was going to make its new business project, recalling to some the universe of the Matrix.
In advance, Matrix was also syncretism, mixing many different references, martial arts to Hong Kong cinema through religious myths and cyberpunk, as pop culture does today, notes Lloyd Chéry. Neo, a sort of Christ figure in a long black coat, experienced in kung fu and computer hacking, alone sums up these influences.
And last year, Lilly Wachowski, who like her sister changed her gender after the first film, explained that she saw the work as a “trans” metaphor ahead of its time, at a time when questions of gender fluidity were much more confidential.