San Francisco Frontiers - 'The Matrix is everywhere': cinema bets on immersion

This new immersive experience is designed to be a red pill moment that will get film fans off their couches at a time when the movie industry is desperate to bring back audiences.

Cosm, which has venues in Los Angeles and Dallas, is launching its dome-style screen and 3D sets in June with a "shared reality" version of "The Matrix," the cult 1999 film starring Keanu Reeves as a man who suddenly learns his world is a fiction.

"We believe the future will be more immersive and more experiential," said Cosm president Jeb Terry at a recent preview screening.

"It's trying to create an additive, a new experience, ideally non-cannibalistic, so that the industry can continue to thrive across all formats."

Cinema audiences were already dwindling when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, shuttering theaters at a time when streaming was exploding.

With ever bigger and better TVs available for the home, the challenge for theater owners is to offer something that movie buffs cannot get in their living room.

Prestige projects like Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning" or Christopher Nolan's Oscar-winning "Oppenheimer" increasingly opt for the huge screens and superior film quality of IMAX.

But Cosm and other projects like it want to go one step further, collaborating with designers who have worked with Cirque du Soleil to create an environment in which the viewer feels like they are inside the film.

For filmmakers, it's all about how you place the cameras and where you capture the sound, said Jay Rinsky, founder of Little Cinema, a creative studio specializing in immersive experiences.

"We create sets like the Parisian opera, let the movie be the singer, follow the tone, highlight the emotions... through light, through production design, through 3D environments," he said.

The approach, he said, felt particularly well suited to "The Matrix," which he called "a masterpiece of cinema, but done as a rectangle."

For the uninitiated: Reeves's Neo is a computer hacker who starts poking around in a life that doesn't quite seem to fit.

A mysterious Laurence Fishburne offers him a blue pill that will leave him where he is, or a red pill that will show him he is a slave whose body is being farmed by AI machines while his conscious lives in a computer simulation.

There follows much gunfire, lots of martial arts and some mysticism, along with a romance between Neo and Trinity, played by the leather-clad Carrie-Anne Moss.

"The Matrix" in shared reality kicks off with a choice of cocktails -- blue or red, of course -- which are consumed as the audience sits surrounded by high-definition screens.

Shifting perspectives place the viewer inside Neo's office cubicle, or seemingly in peril.

"They're sometimes inside the character's head," said Rinsky. "The world changes as you look up and down for trucks coming at you."

The result impressed those who were at the preview screening.

"It just did feel like an experience," influencer Vince Rossi told AFP. "It felt like you're at a theme park for a movie almost."

F.Edwards--SFF