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The Matrix: revisited
It's been ten years since the original 'Matrix' film wowed cinema audiences. Tom Huddleston re-watches the three films and asks, were they really all that?
By now, the mythology is ingrained. Hot young filmmaking duo, fresh from minor lesbian crime caper, make a wild pitch to production overlord Joel Silver: an ultramodern cyberpunk epic, packed with thrills, action, the usual. The movie is made under the radar and, to everyone’s surprise, hits big. Back-to-back sequels are announced, the newly minted internet fanboy community, still testing the limits of its own power and influence, begins to salivate. Tie-ins follow swiftly: books, animated shorts, computer games. The world holds its breath.Then the sequels are released, and said world scratches its head. ‘Reloaded’ and ‘Revolutions’ don’t really make sense, and everyone feels cheated. The brothers slink off with tails between legs, lying low until, on the tenth anniversary of their first success, they’re once again ready to storm the barricades of Hollywood with comeback feature ‘Speed Racer’.
There are those happy to make a case for ‘The Matrix’ and its sequels as modern genre masterpieces, as Baudrillardian puzzlebox conundra, as groundbreaking technological marvels. A younger friend once referred to the first movie as ‘our Blade Runner’, having the same impact on the culture, thought and graphic design of his generation as Ridley Scott’s had on mine. This was a work that questioned humanity the same way Deckard’s replicants did, which opened up the future like Dick’s ideas had.
This is, patently, nonsense. To even begin to compare ‘The Matrix’ to ‘Blade Runner’ is ludicrous: one is a dazzling, beautiful, psychologically rigorous investigation of the psyche, human or otherwise; the other is a mildly diverting, wildly overreaching slice of post- (and sub-) William Gibson cyberpunk, and one upon which crackpot sports pundit David Icke now bases much of his serpent-based chaos theory.
It’s hard to say how seriously even its makers took the first movie during production. They obviously had a handle on the glaringly obvious postmodernist aspects of the narrative (Is there a spoon? Am I me? Dude, where’s my car? etc), but the dangerously pretentious stuff didn’t kick in until later on. So there’s a case to be made for the first movie as a solid piece of up-tempo action trash, lacking character and swimming in dated ’80s fashion clichés and tedious industrial rock, but reasonably enjoyable nonetheless.
It’s also arguable that the two sequels combined might have made one half-decent two-hour film, but by this point the Wachowskis were on a self-indulgent roll, and nothing but the biggest and most convoluted would suffice (almost exactly the same problems as plagued the recent back-to-back ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ sequels).
The flaws in narrative and character which plagued the first film returned with a vengeance, coupled with a monstrous new streak of overweening pretension and sprawling, galactic egoism that ensured the half-decent little sci-fi movie trapped inside this unwieldy frame never had a chance to surface.
The first, ‘Reloaded’, has its moments: the much heralded freeway chase packs a shattering punch, but it doesn’t move the story forward and goes on forever. The new ‘characters’ are saddled with ridiculously portentous names that randomly reference everything from Greek mythology to Japanese cinema (Persephone, Mifune, the Merovingian), always a handy shorthand to make stupid people think you’re clever. And then of course there’s the infamous ‘Architect’ sequence, in which everything is explained thus:
'While this solution worked, it was fundamentally flawed, creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly, that, if left unchecked, might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those who refused the program, while a minority, would constitute an escalating probability of disaster.'
It’s like paying to listen to someone read aloud from a VCR manual, only not as instructive.
‘Revolutions’ is just a horrible mess. The film’s flaws are crystallised in its big action sequence, the robot attack on the last human city and the popular crusty rave site of Zion (sigh), a sequence in which a million amazing special effects join forces to threaten a group of characters we don’t even know the names of. Any lingering vestige of human interest goes down in a hail of bullets and swirling metallic squid-legs, and millions upon millions of CGI dollars go up in smoke.
It seems unlikely that a major ‘Matrix’ reappraisal is on the cards. The fatal flaws in the latter films have stifled any goodwill induced by the first, and not the other way around: the once common (though increasingly pitiful) wail of ‘but the first one was great…’ is heard less and less as the years go by. TV repeats and DVD bargain sales keep the movies alive, but for how much longer? Perhaps it’s time to chalk the whole thing up to mass marketing hysteria and just let it die. Brick up the rabbit hole. Game over.
User comments on this story
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- B166ER said...
- Just because you didn't get it, doesn't mean its bullshit. The three Matrix movies go deeper than you, or i, for that matter, can ever hope to comprehend. I can't start explaining things right now for the (obvious) lack of time and patience on my part. What i WILL say is this - do you KNOW what science fiction IS? What it MEANS? Matrix (and more importantly, its two sequels) brought to science fiction a level of philosophy AND visualism never imagined before. Comparing Matrix and Blade Runner would be comparing Rolls Royce to Lamborghini. I agree,both are cars, but you get the picture. Posted on May 30 2008 08:40
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- george said...
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The Matrix was only ever designed as one movie,
It was only after it went through the roof at the box office that 2 sequels were announced (to cash in - remember Joel Silver was the producer). I sat in the picture theater watching Reloaded and was disgusted at the result. As for the car chase that takes forever - it's about as exciting as watching a video game on your phone. Want car excitement watch The French Connection or the second Bourne movie! As for Revolution I wasn't going to be suckered into watching that one!! Posted on May 13 2008 19:22 - Report as inappropriate
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- hip said...
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Impressively short-sighted, and in its blasting of the Wachowskis' egos, is impressively egocentric and hence hypocritical.
It's great fun to slap some well-worded put-downs onto pop culture (and the Matrix franchise became admitedly too big for its pop culture britches -- whose fault is that?). But to look beyond its achievments is to do exactly what was done with Blade Runner.
I'm sorry, was the author the one critic who praised Blade Runner when it came out? It's fun to jump on the trend of slamming people jumping on a trend, but let's show a little foresight, and not predict that one person's personal opinion is going to rule popular or critical opinion in the years to come.
I'll say that for myself and many others, the original was not just a masterpiece, but a paradigm shift in film, and the sequels were doomed to be nothing but fantastically fun sequels. I love all three, and am happy to allow for others not to... but to condemn the lot as drivel today and tomorrow is admitting that you have no idea what the spoon is. Posted on May 13 2008 07:04 - Report as inappropriate
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- Julia Says said...
- I find the comparison to Blade Runner very fruitful, personally. It gives pause for thought on how the denotation of the phrase 'the sci fi movie of our generation' has changed... consider, if Blade Runner had been made now, and if it had been a success first time round, the studios would doubtless have thrown money at two stupid overblown expensive sequels in which the "plot" would have evolved into something like 'Deckard IS a replicant... NO HE'S NOT! Ha ha! Wait... YES HE IS! HAHAHA! In fact... EVERYONE is a replicant! Actually, all of this was a dream! The unicorn is actually the only real character in the series!" Posted on May 13 2008 04:29
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- flub said...
- Honestly. Who are you to define what is and is not the "Blade Runner" for a generation? The compare and contrast of film making and story telling is not the point. The point is the influence. Perhaps a better analogy might be the "Matrix" is the "Star Wars" for a new generation. But really, get the fuck off your high horse. Posted on May 13 2008 04:09
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- jom said...
- Generally, you're just getting a little carried away here I'd say. Heavy criticism of the sequels is understandable but the quality of the sequels in no way lessens the brilliance of the first which was undoubtably one of the best action-sci-fis ever! And also the bit about Blade runner being "psychologically rigorous" is complete nonsense - the novel it was based on "Do androids dream of electric sleep" might be, but there's really almost no attention paid to the depth of the psychological side in the film at all. Rant if you like but I think for you to call these movies self-indulgent is somewhat hypocritical. Posted on May 10 2008 19:56
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- Dave W said...
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Spot on! Great to read an opinion so close to my own after years of thinking everyone believed in the Emperor's new clothes of the Matrix.
Far from being ground breaking , I'm afraid if you devote any thought to that film at all, it rapidly reveals itself as a pretentious load of sub standard sci-fi tosh for people who don't know what proper science fiction is.
It said it all for me when inside our virtual Matrix world where anything should be possible the best the unimaginative film makers can come up with is some slow motion bullet pornography looking like a wet dream of the NRA. Sam Peckinpah did the violence much better in film and it's laughably behind authors like Gibson or Sterling in the cyberpunk ideas stakes, So, not big, not clever, not original, just very, very stale, lane and sad.... (but with some excellent marketing somewhere)
Never wanted to see the sequels and from this review it sounds to me like it melted down in its own meaninglessness, pretty quickly, so I obviously made the right decision. Posted on May 10 2008 12:30 - Report as inappropriate
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- Mark Dighe said...
- I agree with you Kurosau, this is the conventional rant from someone trying to twist what was loved probably because they never really got into it when it came out and most likely resented everyone else for loving it! The second two movies, granted, where awful and i agree with most of the bashing this guy gave them, however the first movie was a masterpiece. I have got Blade Runner and its a culture defining movie, but i wasnt born when it came out, its like comparing every romantic movie with Gone with the wind, pointless and born of different eras. The Matrix was a film the defined a generation of 15-20 yrs olds at the end of the 90's. To try and discredit it is simply obscene. Why cant critics get on with reviewing the rare good films on modern cinema without feeling they have to attack the great ones of old! Posted on May 09 2008 03:29
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- Kurosau said...
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Boy howdy, I love it when people get a chance to vent about how much they hated what was popular back in the day. We get that you didn't like it, but please don't try to disguise personal opinion as any sort of serious criticism.
And yeah, 2008-1999 does not equal ten years, and won't until next March. Posted on May 08 2008 13:32 - Report as inappropriate
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- Chris Johnston said...
- Ummmm, some remedial math, Tom: 2008 - 1999 ≠ 10. Posted on May 07 2008 06:48
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