"It was an underground sensation that became the 'Star Wars' of the new millennium," wrote Gina McIntyre in the Hollywood Reporter, "a thinking man's action film born aloft by the cultural zeitgeist: a time of paranoia, rife with fear that machines might inadvertently bring about the end of modern civilization as the clock ticked down to 2000." McIntyre was not describing some art film from Central Europe; rather she was announcing the arrival of The Matrix, a movie written and directed by virtual unknowns: the Wachowski brothers. Larry and Andy Wachowski became the hottest property in Hollywood with this 1999 release.

The Matrix posits a bleakly dystopic future in which machines have enslaved human beings, breeding and growing them in pods and harvesting their inner bioelectricity as an energy source. These human dynamos are in turn plugged into the Matrix, a virtual-reality eye-candy intended to keep humans quiescent. Only a...