Characters who dodge bullets defying gravity and time, computer code falling from the sky ... Here's how The
Matrix
, whose fourth episode comes out on Wednesday, has taken science fiction to a new dimension.
To discover
The peasant humor of Bodins does not make Paris laugh
This new episode, signed by Lana Wachowski alone, marks the return between reality and the matrix of the cybernetic rebel in dark glasses Neo (Keanu Reeves), not hesitating to reinterpret images from previous films, including the first, released in 1999 and cult for many.
Read alsoKeanu Reeves facing the pills of nostalgia in the first trailer for
Matrix Resurrections
This is the image that brought cinema to the third millennium: on the roof of a skyscraper, Neo dodges a burst of bullets in a staggering slow motion, where the camera, rotating around the stage, seems have frozen time.
Unheard of at the time.
Mixture of traveling 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, he 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 different points of view.
Code columns
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.
"At the base, it was a menu of ramen (Japanese noodles, editor's note) mixed with inverted numbers"
, explains Dominique Vidal about these typographies of which armies of fans have tried to decipher the meaning.
"There's been a tremendous amount of research done on how to show people 'made' in computer code
," he says of the latter effect, again picked up in
Resurrections
. Because the Wachowskis are perfectionists. On certain special effects, his teams have submitted up to 20 different proposals
“to have like a color chart of effects”
.
"We have plans that have arrived at version 150!"
, he laughs.
As a result, from an aesthetic point of view
Matrix
marked a break, tipping the cinema into the era of
“green screen”
and omnipresent digital effects, underlines Lloyd Chéry, founder of the podcast
C'est plus de la SF
.
Matrix and Metaverse
For many fans, the film which features a group of rebels who fight artificial intelligences who have imprisoned humans in the Matrix, a virtual reality universe simulating the outside world, is the saga that best anticipated the beginning of the 21st century. . "Matrix
said a lot of things about what was going to happen, reality catching up with science fiction 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 has announced that it was going to make its new business project, reminding some of the universe of the Matrix.
In advance,
Matrix
was also syncretized, mixing many different references, from martial arts to Hong Kong cinema through religious myths and cyberpunk, as pop culture does today, remarks 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 has changed her gender since 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.
