To celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Matrix, Dolby, AMC, and Warner Brothers are bringing the movie back to the big screen. It appears that they are taking the work that was done for the upgraded 4K Dolby Vision/Atmos disc and exhibiting it in Dolby Cinemas for a limited run. Last week, I attended a press screening of The Matrix at Dolby Cinema with two of my teenagers; one had not seen the film before, and he was positively jumping out of his seat at the end. I have the 4K disc, and I have a fairly advanced home theater with Dolby Vision and Atmos, but there is something to be said for watching this movie on a really large, really bright screen, in a dark venue with strangers, and dozens of speakers surrounding you and overhead.
The audio sees the biggest improvement from pre-Atmos mixes; the bass gets extra punch, the foley effects are even more directional, and, at key moments, the score completely fills the room in a way that the original mix did not. However, while The Matrix is strong Dolby Atmos reference material, it is not the best film to show off Dolby Vision. The additional contrast is both visible and welcome, but this is not a film where an extended color palette is used (for that, try Thor: Ragnarok). However, the engineers who remastered The Matrix for Dolby Vision deserve credit for doing no harm: key dark, grainy scenes (such as the opening, where cops holding flashlights approach Trinity) retain the film grain they started with.
With a new installment in The Matrix now planned to start production next year, it’s worth going out to the theater to see the original again. In my professional opinion, “whoa.”
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