I took the advice to check the 'spleen, and what I found there is extremely interesting. I’m amazed hardly anyone here is talking about it: anyone even slightly interested in colour timing should download this immediately. The difference between the home video releases and the 35mm version of The Matrix is STAGGERING.
I dunno, I saw it and shrugged. To me it looks like something very photochemically bad happened with those prints–or at least a reel or two of them–and they ended up with an extreme orange tint. Either that or something equally bad happened during scanning, but I tend to think that’s less likely. Maybe with some color-correction, we can get some idea what the film originally looked like, but man, as it stands right now, that is so unbelievably orange I would have remembered if it looked like that, and it didn’t. Color specifics are hard to remember, but unrealistic blanket hues are not. Everyone remembers how Do the Right Thing was gold-tinted, and this is way more out of whack than that.
I don’t know enough about print chemistry to say how this could have happened, but I’m guessing some cut-rate duplication facility or a tragic accident at the Tang factory.