Buy it... on the 2008 limited album if you desire a most balanced and palatable presentation of Don Davis' often difficult, postmodern score, the 1999 and 2024 albums too short and the 2021 complete version only for true franchise enthusiasts.

Avoid it... if you demand the greater role of thematic tonality that develops in the two sequel scores by Davis, both featuring a more interesting blend of challenging dissonance and quasi-religious drama.

The Matrix: (Don Davis) Very rarely does a truly visionary concept come out of Hollywood, especially in the science fiction and fantasy genres that include thousands of entries over many decades. The existential issues raised by Andy and Larry Wachowski in 1999's The Matrix proposed the idea that everything man knows in terms of "reality" is a computer simulation controlled by machines in a real world of the future, a world in which humans' bodies are harvested for energy while their brains are fed the illusion of a world contemporary to viewing audiences. Those who have escaped the machines and their endless levels of competing programming hide deep under the surface of the planet, plugging into the virtual world when necessary to cause trouble and save people who didn't know they needed salvation. The primary target for both humans and machines is the character of Neo (Keanu Reeves), who is the Jesus Christ figure of this disjointed world and the one who can both save humanity and bring balance to the machine world. The film's March release revealed relatively low initial expectations from Warner Brothers, though an explosive return at the box office eventually opened the door for two successful sequels, both released (awkwardly) in 2003. The production elements of The Matrix are stunning, especially in the art direction and Wachowskis' unique techniques of shooting and editing fight sequences, the latter revolutionary at the time. The dimensions of time and space are distorted in the film's pivotal moments, yielding a marvelous spectacle of sight to coincide with the story's already unconventional propositions. The Wachowskis realized immediately that the film would require an unusual combination of music, especially when pertaining to the score. While the trilogy adopted more of a romantic sense of fantasy in its sequels, The Matrix presented an odd blend of horror and coolness in between its frantic chase sequences. The real-world veterans played by Carrie-Ann Moss and Laurence Fishburne exuded professional and cool personas that necessitated an equally ass-kicking personality in the music.

For the coolness of the soundtrack, the Wachowskis relied on hard rock songs that defined the film for many. This is especially evident as Neo adopts the same persona in the last flying sequence of the film. With those hip, mainstream elements of The Matrix addressed by Marilyn Manson and others, the Wachowskis turned to their collaborator for the quirky Bound, Don Davis, to provide the unusual sounds necessary for the darker concepts. The directors specifically requested music that was different, and whether you label it postmodern or avant-garde, Don Davis' result certainly succeeds. It was a project that Davis referred to as a dream assignment, for it allowed him, as he stated, to rely more heavily on the "postmodern works that are being done now on the concert stage." Davis has always enjoyed writing original concert pieces in his career, because it allows for a level of freedom and exploration that films don't often permit. He commented that The Matrix, despite being a good candidate for a different sound, would not have worked with a score heavily laden with synthesizers, and he justified this by claiming that electronic scores had become something of the norm by the late 1990's. Instead, when Davis arrived at a particular scene in the film, he tackled it by writing music in exactly the opposite mould of what initial reactions might dictate. Perhaps this is most evident in the cue "The Power Plant," in which Davis arrives at the score's most monumental crescendo of harmonic resonance for full ensemble and (ironically Mormon) choir, albeit briefly, for the moment when the lead character discovers the horrors of the real world for the first time. Another example exists in the cue "Welcome to the Real World," which is treated to a melancholy boy soprano solo despite the fact that that same man, Neo, is now surrounded by a group of real and genuinely caring people for the first time. Davis' work for the film is better recognized, however, for its harsh dissonance and startling brass tones in atonal bursts of energy that are indeed quite harrowing to hear. Even when the score isn't as truly unlistenable as the terrifying mangle of sound in "Unable to Speak," Davis inserts unease into every cue.

As a horror experience, The Matrix is one of the more engaging on album, though this statement remains interesting in that such material really doesn't define the music as heard in the film. For this score, there is significant difference between the two. While Davis has claimed that he looked back at no orchestral film score as his guide for The Matrix, there are actually distinct similarities between this work and that which resulted from the Alien sequels by James Horner and Elliot Goldenthal. Fans of the latter composer, specifically, will note that Davis' handling of layers of instrumentation in order to produce disharmony, highly organized despite being unpleasant, is remarkably reminiscent to Goldenthal's avant-garde tendencies. The unusually large and diverse role for the brass section is mostly responsible for this style in The Matrix, along with ominous rumbling of the piano and other percussion. Some of these instruments are electronically manipulated to give them a foreign sound. There are no simple themes in The Matrix despite the franchise's movement towards the romantic in the sequels. The superhero element for Neo does shine through in "Anything is Possible," with the major-key statement on brass over choir in the cue providing an obvious hint of both his powers and his savior status. (This proves to be a theme in and of itself in the sequels.) Late in that cue, at 4:50 (as well as late in "Ontological Shock"), audiences hear the opening bars of the love theme for Neo and Trinity that would later flourish and resolve by "Trinity Definitely" in The Matrix Revolutions. The finale cue ends with a raucous crescendo that could easily fit in Alien 3, Heat, or Sphere. The two most distinct ideas in The Matrix are also staples of the series. First, the pulsating, pitch-defying brass polychord effect that wavers between trumpets on top and horns below is an extremely distinctive identity for the entire franchise. It's instantly recognizable and proves quite useful in the ease with which it can be integrated into nearly any cue. Davis' method of presenting the polychord motif at the very start of the film, with rolling piano and tingling metallic percussion, smartly carried over to the sequels.

Secondly, the evil machines in The Matrix are given a rhythmic effect of a deliberate, accelerating movement, both tapped out lightly on the cymbals several times (a definite Horner influence) or blasted by brass in the aforementioned moment of choral tonality in "The Power Plant." The sense of the inevitable in this motif cannot be missed. Also omnipresent are metallic sound effects through all of these ideas, sometimes making you wonder if one of your major household appliances is malfunctioning. Altogether, The Matrix is extremely original, but it's not easy listening on album. The score has earned a significant amount of respect in subsequent decades, mirroring the cult-to-classic status of the film and supported by a very dedicated fanbase of listeners. The songs play such a prominent role in the film that there is often confusion for mainstream viewers about where the boundary between the songs and score exists. Perhaps the most obvious blurring of lines comes with the use of Rob Dougan's undoubtedly cool, rhythmically ascending "Clubbed to Death" piece for the scene when Neo is reintroduced to the matrix (and the lady in the red dress). So distinct was the adaptation of that piece into The Matrix that Dougan would himself expand the idea for The Matrix Reloaded. It's not surprising that most of the hype generated by the music of The Matrix came from the non-Davis material, which consists of songs that people often associate with the film when protesting and extending their belief that it inspires school shootings in the United States. The most interesting debate about music usage for the film ironically involved the use of "The Eyes of Truth" by Enigma, with a gothic new age style of heavy percussion and massive chorus that very obviously stirred anticipation in the film's trailers. The lack of an Enigma-like sound in the actual score was understandable when you look at the project from Davis' postmodern viewpoint, but it's interesting to observe that his two sequel scores slowly moved towards exactly that kind of sound. It's unlikely that this choice was made based on so much positive hype from the usage, but those listeners unsatisfied with the lack of that kind of sound to the first score eventually heard something more to their liking.