Don Davis

Don Davis has scored everything from the Wachowskis' first adventure into film, a dark and sexy neo-noir film called Bound, to A Goofy Movie, which…is slightly less dark and sexy.

Of course, what Davis is most known for is The Matrix. He went all out with full orchestration, leaving us with a haunting tension against the outbursts of the rock soundtrack, and capturing the emotions behind waking up in the pod or the crazy hotel fight.

Then there's the official soundtrack where you can get clubbed to death, blown to bits in a minefield, and, most importantly, woken up (so maybe don't listen to it before bed if you're hoping to avoid lucid dreams of dystopic alternate realities).

Together, the score and soundtrack combine for three distinct moods felt throughout the film. First, we have the all-out rock-and-roll up-beat, up-tempo, get-your-blood-pumpin' goodness that makes for a stellar action movie. Most of this is found in the soundtrack with songs like Propellerheads' "Spybreak" playing in the epic lobby shoot out.

Then there's the dreamy trance music that shows us the way into the Matrix. Where the harder hitting tunes escalate toward the film's end, the electronic tunes come near the beginning, like Massive Attack's "Dissolved Girl" which plays as Neo wakes up at his computer, the first time we meet him.

Finally, there's something we might call eerie machine music. This is found more in the underscoring than the soundtrack. We hear a lot of high notes from strings that almost become grating sounds, like metal grinding against metal. You can hear this in parts of the main theme and to a more heightened degree in the interrogation scene when Neo is unable to speak. This sound evokes an inhuman sense of dread.

These three motifs combine to sonically guide us through The Matrix to its conclusion where we end with an aptly named band, Rage Against the Machine, with the equally apt "Wake Up," which gives us enough punk to remind us that our heroes are, at their core, rebels that are fighting the system.