Easter Eggs You Never Noticed In The Matrix

Nostalgia for the 1990s is inescapably prevalent in pop culture. Relaunches, reboots, and remakes of that era's movies and television evinces this (e.g. the Point Break remake, The X-Files relaunch). So we decided to follow this trend by scouring one of our favorite science fiction films of the 1990s, The Matrix, to see what easter eggs it contains. The Wachoskis, who directed the movie, make it obvious that they're paying homage to the classic story of Alice in Wonderland. Yet there are some additional, smaller references that may escape some viewers...

In addition to his day job, Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) sells counterfeit programs under his alias Neo. This is a subtle nod to the film Strange Days (1995). The movie is a cyberpunk thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) and written by James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, The Terminator). In Strange Days, the main character, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) similarly peddles black market memory discs to customers.

In the climactic chase scene, Neo runs through an apartment in which The Prisoner is playing on a television. The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan, was a short-lived, yet culturally significant British series from the late 1960s in which a secret agent find himself imprisoned in a surreal village. Does this theme seem familiar, Matrix fans?

Drunken boxing is one of the martial arts styles that Tank uploads into Neo's brain during the movie's training scenes. Perhaps not coincidentally, the film's fight choreographer, Woo-Ping Yuen, directed Drunken Master (1978) starring Jackie Chan.

The premise of the eponymous Matrix computer is quite similar to a device first introduced in the Doctor Who serial Deadly Assassin in the late 1970s (with Tom Baker playing the Doctor). Much like the movie, the Matrix in the "Who-niverse" is a computer that creates a virtual reality. If a user dies in this virtual reality, then he or she will also expire in the real world.

Sci-fi movie fans will no doubt notice stylistic similarities between The Matrix (1999) and Dark City (1998). This is not totally a coincidence. Both films used some of the same sets in Australia. In fact, the rooftop that Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) uses to escape the agent at the film's beginning was also used in Dark City.

The Nebuchadnezzar is Morpheus's ship that transports his crew around post-apocalyptic Earth and allows them to enter the Matrix. The ship shares a name with King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. The Book of Daniel 2:1-49 recounts that the king became obsessed with interpreting a troubling dream. This is similar to the plight of the humans living in the Matrix. The inscription on the Nebuchadnezzar also states that is is a Mark III, No. 11 ship. The book of Mark 3:11 reads, "Whenever the impure spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, 'You are the Son of God.'"