Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Matrix
1999 · Lana Wachowski · The Matrix on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the green tint whenever they are in the city. (light)
Bill Pope gives the simulation a sickly green cast and shoots the hovercraft in cold blue. The switch arrives with the black screens between worlds, before anybody explains what the two places are.
Payoff: You can tell which world you are in at a glance, and the film taught you that without a word. In the reading: cinema of the brain. The reading calls the simulation a cinema of the brain, and the green tells you you are inside it.
Watch how much of each fighter stays in frame. (staging)
Yuen Woo-ping choreographed the fights and the camera holds the combatants full length, so you can see feet, distance and who moved first. Pope shoots wide, which compresses the space between bodies.
Payoff: You can follow the geometry of every exchange, which almost no Hollywood action film of the time allowed.
Listen for the bass smear when time slows down. (sound)
Dane Davis's team stretched ambient noise into a low warped drag for the decelerated shots. Don Davis's orchestra runs alongside industrial rock on the needle-drops, and the two registers stay out of each other's way.
Payoff: The sound tells your body that the rules just bent, a beat before your eye works out how.
Notice how flat Reeves plays Anderson early on. (performance)
Reeves keeps Neo affectless through the first two acts, a man living two lives and fully present in neither. Weaving drops Smith's voice and clips the cadence into something not quite human.
Payoff: The flatness is a starting position. Everything Reeves does later is measured against how little he gives you here.
Look at what Neo hides his disks inside. (setting)
A hollowed copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation holds his contraband. The apartment, the cubicles and the streets are dressed as an unnamed American city and were built in Sydney.
Payoff: The film names its own argument as a prop in the first ten minutes and then gets on with the plot.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Green means you are inside the simulation and blue means you are under it. Watch what Neo learns to read.