The green code came from a sushi cookbook
The falling green symbols of the MATRIX CODE are one of the most copied images in film. The production designer who created them, Simon Whiteley, has said he made them from characters scanned out of his wife's Japanese cookbooks — so the digital rain is partly made of sushi recipes, mixed with numbers and letters and flipped in a mirror.
The film came out in 1999 and was written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski. It won four Oscars, including one for its visual effects.
Bullet time
The film's most famous shot shows NEO leaning back to dodge a BULLET while the camera seems to swing round him in slow motion. To make it, the film-makers set up a ring of around 120 still cameras around the actor and fired them one after another in a split second, each taking a single picture from a slightly different angle. Computers filled in the gaps between the pictures, and the effect became known as bullet time.
It was copied in countless films, adverts and video games in the years that followed.
Months of kung fu
The actors trained for months with the martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping before filming began, learning KUNG FU, wirework and fight moves so they could do much of their own fighting. Keanu Reeves had recently had neck surgery and trained anyway. In the film, knowledge is uploaded straight into the brain, and Neo wakes after a training session saying he knows kung fu.
MORPHEUS, played by Laurence Fishburne, leads the crew who free Neo, and TRINITY, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, is its best fighter. AGENT SMITH, a program hunting them, became one of the best-remembered villains of the decade.
Red pill, blue pill and an old idea
Morpheus offers Neo a choice: take the BLUE PILL and go back to believing his ordinary life, or the RED PILL and learn the truth. The phrase has entered everyday language. The idea behind it is very old. The Greek philosopher Plato described prisoners chained in a cave who see only shadows on a wall and think that is all of reality, and the French philosopher Descartes wondered how we could ever be sure our senses were not being fooled. Our philosophers page covers both.
Some modern thinkers have seriously argued that we could be living in a computer SIMULATION ourselves, an idea the film made famous.
Zion, the Oracle and the rest of the grid
ZION is the last human city, hidden deep underground, and the ORACLE is a program who seems to see the future and bakes cookies in an ordinary kitchen. The ARCHITECT designed the Matrix. CYPHER betrays the crew, and TANK and DOZER are its operators, born outside the Matrix.
The rest of the grid holds a SENTINEL, one of the squid-like machines that hunt the ships, the CONSTRUCT, the loading program where training happens, and a GLITCH — the déjà vu that shows the machines have changed something. To UNPLUG is to wake up.