A member of the legendary class of ’99, I saw The Matrix twice in theaters last year for 25th anniversary screenings. This was after a 2021 re-release ahead of The Matrix Resurrections, the series’ corporate-mandated retrofit, which was actually my first opportunity to see it in a theater.
Seeing The Matrix at the giant IMAX on Webb Chapel was very much like seeing it for the first time. The soundscape, a weak point in home viewing, is rich and layered in a theater’s surround sound, bringing out details I’d never heard before almost immediately, but what I really notice is the lighting. Famously, inside the Matrix, everything has a sickly green tint, but it’s also just slightly blown out. In photography, “exposure” refers to the amount of light that a piece of film is exposed to – “overexposed” means too much light hit the sensor, “underexposed” means too little, and “blown out” specifically means so much light hit the film that details in the brightest parts of the image aren’t recoverable. Scenes set in the Matrix are deliberately and very slightly blown out, the whites just barely stretching into those characteristic burnmarks that stand out if you know what you’re looking for. It’s obviously an artistic choice, but it registers in your brain as a mistake, this constant reminder that something about the world onscreen is phony.
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Reel Entropy 