I recently went to see the 20th Anniversary
release of The Matrix, restored in 4K. The Matrix is my favourite film of all
time but I hadn’t watched it for a few years, the rewatch reignited my love for
franchise and so over the last few weeks I’ve been rewatching the trilogy and a
lot of the supporting material (The Animatrix and Enter The Matrix).
Due to its release timing (years before I started
MoviePush), I don’t think I’ve ever written anything about The Matrix on my
blog and therefore thought I do a bit of a Matrix Trilogy retrospective.
Firstly, I’ve written about each film and then looked at the
whole series as an overarching trilogy.
THE MATRIX
A perfect film and my favourite film of all time.
It’s a masterclass in story-telling and structure, whilst at
the same time delivering some of the most inventive special effects and action
ever seen on the big screen. The concepts and executions for explaining
everything to the audience is just incredible, and is the perfect example of
the “show don’t tell” technique. You don’t need me to tell you that or how big
of an influence this film had on the movie industry. I loved this movie the
second I watched it, and it was the first movie I was truly obsessed with.
It is a stone-cold classic, and is it any surprise the
sequels were never going to live up to it…
THE MATRIX RELOADED
If you don’t like Reloaded, I get it, it’s an editing
nightmare and it has a completely different
flow / structure to the first film. It relies heavily on the audience having
seen / played the supporting material from The Animatrix and Enter the Matrix
videogame to really even begin to understand what’s going on. If you only watch
the film, it’s hard to keep up - it jumps from scene to scene with glimpses of
characters you barely know / recognise, and the final act is edited in such a
way it’s really hard to follow (and that’s before we even get to the
Architect).
But one thing you can’t accuse it of is being unambitious,
it is The Matrix turned up to 11. The action sequences are out of this world
incredible; “The Burly Brawl” and “The Highway Chase” have rarely been surpassed
since its release. The philosophical concepts presented throughout and the
revelations of what the Matrix actually is and the purpose of the One are all
mind-blowing. But, a lot of this is presented in overly indulgent and
lengthy conversations or sequences (plus all the supporting material in Enter
the Matrix and The Animatrix), so unless you truly love this stuff I can see
why a lot of the audiences checked out upon its release.
However, as a huge fan of the franchise I for one have
always really enjoyed Reloaded, I love digging deeper into all the
conversations, concepts, theories, etc and what it all means, and as a film /
VFX lover I would just rewatch the action sequences over and over again. Hell,
I’ve probably even watched the Architect scene just as much trying to analyse
every phrase. Remember this was a time before Youtube and explainer videos, so
it really was up to me to work this all out.
Now I will confess my love for Reloaded probably impacts my
less than warm feelings toward Revolutions, as I feel because Reloaded was
presented as a Part 1 a lot of what it was setting up / introducing I always
thought would be paid off in Revolutions, when they weren’t I was more
disappointed with Revolutions (than retrospectively Reloaded).
THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
I think structurally Revolutions is a better film than
Reloaded, it’s edited together more cohesively and tells it’s story in a more
traditional manner. However, it’s still my least favourite of the 2 sequels,
the thought-provoking philosophy and inventive action is much more reserved and
constrained (there’s only one bullet-time shot for example). Also, we barely
spend any time in The Matrix, this is the best aspect of the franchise so to
minimise it is a shame.
Also, the core cast (Neo, Trinity, Morpheus and even Smith)
have very little screentime or anything to do for most of the movie, a writers
choice I’ve never quite understood. This hurts the movie most in the Battle for
Zion, (at the time of the release) this was the most expensive sequence ever
created, yet it features none of the characters we actually care about, so it’s
literally 20-30 minutes of spectacle with no emotional investment from the
audience.
When I first saw Revolutions, I was extremely disappointed,
and remember both my friend and I turning to each other in the cinema as the
credits rolled in disbelief “Really? That’s how they’re going to end it?” It
wasn’t just the fact that this super cool franchise had ended with an overly
cheesey bit of dialogue from Sati and the Oracle followed by a rainbow(?), but
that was the final instalment of the Matrix Trilogy, we were never going to get
to see these characters again (and some of them were completely wasted in the
movie) and so much of the promise of the first two movies hadn’t been paid off.
It took me years to get over…
Now, some 19 years later I do have some more appreciation
(or acceptance) of the final instalment, I really like the first and final
acts, but the 2nd act is still weak (for the above mentioned
reasons) and it’s a shame. I wonder if the movies weren’t shot back to back and
there was a few year gap, maybe the third instalment would have been slightly
different.
Anyway it is what it is, but having rewatched it recently,
it doesn’t end as conclusively as I think people remember, it’s very much left
up to interpretation whether or not Neo is dead, and the Oracle even says she
expects to see him again sometime.
Based on where we are with movie sequels being released
decades after the original, I’d be really excited to see a fourth Matrix movie,
in a similar vein to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we could introduce a new
cast, but still keep the original characters involved. I’d love to see how this
new version of The Matrix has evolved and if the “peace” between humans and the
machines has actually lasted, and what happened to Neo? Will he return?
DOES THE MATRIX TRILOGY HOLD UP?
The Wachoski’s have always said they envisioned The Matrix
as a trilogy, and although after a rewatch there are definitely elements that
are setting up or allude to a bigger story, the final phone booth scene in the
first film breaks this for me a little.
As a self-contained movie The Matrix is perfect, it has a
clear beginning /middle / end, and the final scene works perfectly for
concluding the story, but… I think it creates some big problems for the
sequels, in terms of the overarching narrative and audience expectations. The
movie ends with what appears to be an “all knowing, all powerful” Neo telling
the machines he’s going to essentially free everyone and show them a world with
no rules or boundaries.
The sequels in no way deliver on this promise, if you cut
from the final scene of The Matrix to the opening of Reloaded – Neo has changed
from all knowing to being lost and confused, he is essentially just waiting for
the Oracle to tell him what to do.
I remember when Reloaded was released and people were
commenting online, that maybe the final scene of The Matrix, was actually a
clever time jump to the very end of trilogy and everything in Reloaded was
actually happening in between Neo waking up and kissing Trinity (the scene
prior to the phone booth) and him becoming fully enlightened – but no this
never happens.
He also never shows people this new world without rules and
boundaries, I remember imagining what that world would look like during the gap
between the sequels, and it never materialises. Yes his fighting skills
improve, he can fly and stop bullets, but he never manipulates the world or
transforms it in any meaningful way. Even by the end of the Trilogy this
promise hasn’t been fulfilled – we have peace, and humans are free to leave the
Matrix if they wish, but the set-up and physical rules of The Matrix are
essentially the same.
I honestly believe if you remove that final phone booth
scene from The Matrix, the trilogy actually stacks up a lot better as an actual
trilogy with a clear narrative. Obviously, I wouldn’t want that as it would
have detrimental impact on a perfect film, but you do kind of have to ignore it
for the starting point of the sequels to make sense.
So that’s it, my retrospective of The Matrix trilogy, a
series that starts perfect and then has some diminishing returns, but the
sequels are in no way as bad as people remember and I very much hope this series gets a sequel soon to reinvigorate it.
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