The Matrix (Matrix): what age is it for? 17, alone or with a parent

The codes, for parents

A programmer discovers that the world he lives in is a simulation, that his real body floats in a tank, and that a handful of humans are fighting in the real world to get out.

The lexicon

• The MatrixThe computer simulation the whole of humanity lives in without knowing, set in the late 1990s. Everything you see at the start of the film is false.
• The red pill and the blue pillThe choice offered to Neo: to know and never be able to go back, or to forget. The phrase has spread far beyond the film, sometimes hijacked by political groups whose meaning has nothing to do with the original.
• The agentsSecurity programs in suits and dark glasses, able to take over anyone's body inside the simulation. You do not beat them, you escape them, which is what makes the ending remarkable.
• ZionThe last real human city, dug near the Earth's core. It only appears from the second film onwards but is named in the first.
• The OneThe person who, according to a prophecy, will be able to change the rules of the simulation. The film plays with the idea and the third one turns it completely around.
• Jacking in, the phone boxYou enter and leave the simulation through a landline. That is why characters run towards ringing telephones, which makes no sense to a child born with a mobile.
• The falling green charactersThe code of the Matrix as the operators see it. Those green columns became the most copied image of 1990s cinema.
• Bullet timeThe effect where time stops while the camera circles the character. Invented here, it has been copied everywhere, down to adverts and video games.

How the world works

The film explains its rules in one long scene halfway through, and everything after follows from them: knowing the rules lets you bend the simulation, but the real body still dies. The fights are choreographed like Hong Kong cinema, with wires and four months of actor training: this is not brawling, it is dance. The first film stands alone. The two sequels, and then the fourth film, open questions many viewers find less successful.

The references

• The idea of a world that is only an appearance goes back a long way: Plato's cave, Descartes' doubt, and a Jean Baudrillard book you can see in the film.
• The Wachowski sisters have since said the film was also about transition and about living in a body that is not your own; that reading is now widely accepted.
• The black coat, the glasses, the slow motion and the green tint were copied for twenty years, to the point that many children know the images without having seen the film.
• The word matrix itself has entered everyday speech to say that a situation is rigged.

Why they love it

• The idea that the world you are shown is not the real one speaks loudly in adolescence, and this is the first work many people meet on that theme.
• The action scenes invented a grammar found everywhere since, and they still hold up twenty-five years on.
• It is a film that makes you want to argue on the way out, which is rare for an action film.

Three questions to ask

• Cypher chooses to go back into the simulation knowing it is false: do you understand his choice?
• If you were offered the two pills, which would you honestly take?
• What proves that what you are seeing right now is real?