The Matrix is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a Dolby Cinema release showing at select theaters nationwide.

The groundbreaking film solidified Keanu Reeves’s place in the Hollywood pantheon of icons and made action stars of Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Ann Moss. The bullet-time and 360 degree shots were immediately apart of the sci-fi lexicon.

The Virtues Of Dolby Cinema

Prior to an advance screening, Chris Kukshtel, Director of Product Marketing for Dolby Cinema, pointed out the the virtues of the new remastering. 

“Dolby Cinema is designed so you can see a perfect view of the screen, everything is black so that technically it supports the technology. Dolby Vision is our dual laser projection technology which gives you extreme contrast and what that means is that the blacks are truly blacks. So you’ll see the cape of Neo or the jacket of Neo really pop out.

Dolby Atmos is our immersive audio system we’ve got speakers everywhere, on the ceiling, this presents sounds all around the room. I was doing a soundcheck earlier and just bullets flying everywhere are pretty incredible. And when they’re punching each other, it’s pretty impactful, it feels like you’re getting punched yourself.”

A Conversation With Chris Kukshtel

After the screening, we asked Kukshtel a couple more questions. 

Is there any scene or any sequence in particular that thrills you looking at it through the new remastering?

“I think a lot of the dark scenes are where Dolby Vision really shines, pun intended. You can really see a lot more detail in their black jackets, in their facial expressions, inside their ship. There was one scene where they were inside the ship and they had all the monitors in front of them, right? There was color off the monitors and these kind of these muted grays behind it so the colors really popped out but those muted grays because of the contrast ratio of Dolby Vision you can actually really see all the detail.” 

Can you describe how the Dolby remaster process begins?

“It works in different ways. It depends on what assets are available to us. In this case, it was film and they actually scanned it into digital. What we do or what we work with Warner on is they actually take that and do a color grade that takes advantage of all of the things that Dolby Vision can do.

In Dolby Atmos, if we have all the different streams of sound that have been preserved we can take those use that and remix the film in Dolby Atmos to give it that full, immersive, 3-D audio space.”

The Matrix is showing at 135 Dolby Cinema locations from August 30 to September 5. More information can be found here.