“Unfortunately, nobody may be told what the Matrix is,” Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus famously teased back in 1999. “You’ve to see it for yourself.”
He wasn’t just talking to Thomas ‘Neo’ Anderson, either, because his words helped the theater-going public buy into the considerable hype. Every thing about “The Matrix” was so stylishly packaged – the impossibly cool outfits, the slow-motion kung fu, those iconic green letters and numbers – that the subject of sentient machines using the human race as batteries became certainly one of the most popular conversations on the planet.
The rock- and dance-infused soundtrack also captured a moment, Keanu Reeves continued his run of picking unexpectedly iconic roles (see also “Speed”, “Bill & Ted” and “John Wick”), and a certain Nokia cellphone became a must have fashion accessory. And in a 12 months that was purported to be dominated by the “The Phantom Menace” bringing “Star Wars” back to the multiplexes, it was this movie from enigmatic creators the Wachowskis – whose only previous directing credit was low-budget crime thriller “Certain” – that left the larger imprint on popular culture, becoming probably the greatest sci-fi movies of all time (opens in recent tab).
When “The Matrix”‘s own sequels arrived in 2003, nevertheless, the shoe was firmly on the opposite foot. Like “The Phantom Menace” 4 years earlier, “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions” struggled to live as much as expectations. While “Reloaded” took a formidable $742 million worldwide on the box office – an incredible figure for an R-rated movie – when “Revolutions” arrived six months later, the returns had dropped off to a relatively disappointing $427 million. Now not the most popular ticket on the town, “The Matrix” was perceived as a franchise that had gone off the rails. Audiences unplugged in droves and by the tip of the 12 months “The Matrix” felt like yesterday’s news. But were the sequels really that bad?
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From a dramatic viewpoint, “The Matrix” arguably never needed a sequel. Actually, when Neo told the machines, “I didn’t come here to let you know how that is going to finish. I got here here to let you know how it’ll begin,” the Wachowskis could have left us with the type of ambiguous ending that gets debated by fans ceaselessly. But studio Warner Bros were never going to show their backs on the (then) highest grossing movie of their history, so that they gave the author/directors an enormous budget to shoot two sequels back-to-back, as well significant creative freedom.
Whether any of us knew exactly what we wanted – or expected – from a Matrix follow-up is debatable, but top of the list would have been more balletic “bullet time” motion. We got that in abundance in “Reloaded”, on a rather more epic scale that reflected the increased money on the filmmakers’ disposal. We also got to see Neo fighting multiple Agent Smiths within the so-called “Burly Brawl” and a freeway chase so ambitious that the production built their very own mile-and-a-half long section of road to film it. When it comes to spectacle and technical accomplishment, we couldn’t have asked for more.
But in a world where bullet-time effects had grow to be so ubiquitous that they were utilized in ads for hotels, every part that had once felt fresh and recent had grow to be overfamiliar. Where the unique film had been applauded for bringing features of anime (most notably from “Ghost within the Shell”) and Asian martial arts cinema to the Hollywood mainstream, “Reloaded” mostly borrowed from, well, “The Matrix”.
At the identical time, it made some very strange storytelling decisions. It turned out that the last human city, Zion, was home to a particularly hedonistic club night, while Neo – the confused everyman protagonist of the unique film – was now a completely blown superhero. Perhaps most divisively, the Philosophy 101 that had at all times been a part of the “Matrix” equation was pushed up higher in the combination, as questions of religion, free will and destiny became all-consuming. Ergo, when the story concordantly culminated in a gathering with the Architect who spoke in riddles vis-à-vis Neo’s situation, all of it felt slightly anticlimactic.
It actually wasn’t the type of “I’m your father” cliffhanger that leaves viewers clamoring to search out out what happens next, though the reduced audience that got here back for “Revolutions” did at the least get to see something different – for higher and worse.
With more time spent in the true world, much of “Revolutions” played out like a tribute to James Cameron’s best hits, because the post-apocalyptic “real” world fused elements of “The Terminator”‘s briefly glimpsed future war with souped up versions of the facility loaders from “Aliens”. As derivative because the machines vs humans scrap was, it did at the least feel like spectacular recent ground for the franchise.
Unfortunately, the trilogy never worked out to do with Agent Smith after his death-by-Neo in the primary film. Every nuance of a genuinely iconic villain was excised as a vindictive rogue program became obsessive about taking up the whole Matrix. He even got to own a human host, who blinded Neo in a brutal hovercraft fight.
Indeed, if there was one thing “The Matrix Revolutions” excelled at it was making its heroes suffer. Where modern blockbusters are reluctant to kill off their leads in case they may be needed to meet future contractual obligations, this trilogy closer was all about drudgery and sacrifice. With each Neo and Trinity bumped off within the name of the cause, “Revolutions” was a good distance from the more optimistic, almost aspirational tone of the unique movie. And yet, as Neo faced off against legions of Smith within the trilogy’s climactic showdown, it became clear that in “The Matrix”, there is no problem that cannot be solved with an enormous kung fu fight in gravity-defying slow motion.
Twenty years on it’s tempting to treat “Reloaded” and “Revolutions” as failures. That might be unfair, seeing as they’d the near-impossible task of following up a movie that redefined a genre. Compared with other blockbusters of the era each movies get up pretty much, and on a technical level they were real gamechangers, laying the groundwork for the superhero motion that may come to dominate Hollywood – there are many occasions when the Wachowskis’ gift for innovation stretches beyond the capabilities of the tech of the time.
Nonetheless the 2 movies are undeniably pretentious and ripe for parody, a proven fact that even Lana Wachowski (writing and directing without sister Lilly) appeared to acknowledge within the more meta moments of 2021 comeback “The Matrix Resurrections”. If the first goal of a sequel is to boost what got here before, the jury’s out on whether “Reloaded” and “Resurrections” succeeded. But despite – and maybe due to – their many flaws, they continue to be movies, and rare examples of filmmakers being given colossal budgets to craft epic blockbusters on their very own terms. That is definitely not something you possibly can say of each modern popcorn movie.
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