Released in 1999, The Matrix was a huge hit for Warner Bros. It set a trend for long leather jackets, dark glasses, moody expressions and of course, bullet-time cinema. I was working in a multiplex when the film came out and I remember people walking out of the screen and trying to avoid bullets in slow motion and damaging their backs in the process.
It is considered by many as a flawless masterpiece. But it was mentioned in the ace Channel 4 sitcom, Teachers (yes this show ended eight years ago… but better late than never) that astonishingly there are 138 mistakes in the Matrix. In the world of movie bloopers, that is a huge number. So I sat down and made it my life’s mission to see if this was correct so you don’t have to.
Watching the film in slow motion (a task that should only be undertaken by those with a strong constitution) I cross referenced every blooper with those that been listed by eagle-eyed fans on other websites. I found that some were indeed mistakes but most were not and had a logical explanation. Also, some bloopers had been edited out by the filmmakers when the film made the jump to DVD, most notably a super-blooper where you see one of the Wachowski’s hands when Neo is opening the FedEx parcel in his office, so that could no longer be classed as a mistake.
However, it turns out Teachers was correct, there are 138 mistakes in The Matrix. So prepare to wish you took the blue pill and have the film ruined forever as I take you through a frame by frame breakdown of the most complete list of every mistake/blooper and plot hole in The Matrix.
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12 Comments
Cool article, bro. Maybs now you can finally focus on getting a girlfriend/living life! Peace out.
The Matrix provides all that I need.
hi
great article but no mention of bono?
I got the ring sting
Intense. Good work.
Dude, I haven’t read past the first one and you’re already wrong! The time on that doesn’t matter because it could be referring to the time in the real world in which case we don’t know what time it is there or even what time zone they are in!
There, I’m just as big a dork as you!
While some of these are gaffs, some are gaffs by the author.
As for the time code this, The time thing someone else mentioned so I will not say that.
The garbage truck.. Smith is riding in a Garbage truck because a human in the Matrix was a garbage man passing by and saw Trinity; they really did not have much of an idea where Trinity was going. But as explained in the movie (are you SURE you watched it)they say that the Agents can hop into those who see the person they are looking for. Basically they got lucky, but unlucky in the fact that it was a garbage truck driver. As for the green monitor, watch any number of the behind the scenes of the Matrix, or just watch it again, and you will notice a green tone to the matrix, this was done intentionally with the monitor as well (Im guessing on that but it makes more sense than your explanation). The ‘wobbly’ corporate office building where NEO is trying to escape? Guess what? In some modern high rise buildings they use aluminum for decoration, when you do this, you get wobbly bits on high rise buildings… why? Because they do not expect people to be climbing all over them but they need something lightweight to keep the elements off parts of the building, I know because have done something you apparently have never done, work at a large office building. As for number 106 it appears one of the things that Tank was doing in the matrix was hacking into the matrix maintenance program to ensure the maintenance bot did not just kill NEO (in case you forgot the bit about all the little sharp objects it was going to puncture him with in the scene before it just disconnects him and leaves) You should really determine if it is really a mistake in the movie or a just a mistake on your part.
Thanks for you comment. My point about the garbage truck is that they have the ability to enter the matrix as they wish. So they see that trinity is going to use that phone box and instead of taking over the driver of the truck and then shooting at her as Agent Smith did at the end of the film in the subway, he gives her ample opertunity to run to the phone booth and exit.
The truck is slow so why even bother trying to drive it into the booth if she’s already making the call, it’s a dumb idea. And if you know she might be heading to a phone somewhere, make a determination and cover your bases. Don’t tell me the garbage truck driver was the only one who saw her, it just looked cool on film to have the truck drive through a wall. And how come it was suddenly indestructible?
And before you say it, yes it’s a film but the point of this article was to point out and debate the mistakes and by the very nature, they are going to be nitpicky.
And no, I’ve never climbed out on a ledge of a high rise building but I doubt Keanu has either as im 99.9% sure that he was safely standing on a set at ground level. I’m also sure the wobbly post was not a feature that was deliberately added by the set designer to add authenticity,it was a wobbly set.
Nice article, and I can’t imagine the time it took to sit and watch that in slow motion. A lot of this I just saw as nitpicking, and the questions about “well, why didn’t they do” this or that, that’s called story telling. The person who wrote the screenplay did that so that there would be more than just a 15 minute movie. Almost any movie can be nitpicked the way you did this one, and they all have the “why didn’t they just” question, but in every scenario of “why didn’t they just”, if they had “just”, then the movie would have been over. And as someone already said, are you sure you really WATCHED the movie? Cause some of this stuff is explained, again as has already been pointed out.
Yes all movies can be nitpicked and The Matrix is no diffrent. These are mistakes and bloopers that more than one person has noticed so let’s debate them.
‘mussels’?
Girl, please.
wasn’t it shot in Perth?