The Matrix Rewatched
I took some time this week to rewatch the old Matrix movies (including everyone's favorite Christmas movie, The Matrix Revolutions), along with the newly-released one.
(Which was going to be the one movie I made it out to theaters for, but turns out that's still a no. It's kind of interesting that one of the last films I saw in theaters before I stopped going forever was also The Matrix, the 20th anniversary theatrical re-release of the original in 2019.)
I really don't understand the level of hate the Matrix sequels got, they're decried as if they're beyond-the-pale bad and series-ruining. Don't get me wrong, it's obvious that they're not as groundbreaking (can't break the same ground twice, after all) and aren't as good in a lot of ways. And it's obvious that most of the extreme cultural and cinematographic impact of The Matrix comes from the first movie. But the sequels are still good sci-fi action movies by Hollywood blockbuster standards, IMO. And a lot of the flaws in the sequel movies are things about the world-building that were in the first movie, it's just that the origin-story nature of that made some of those inconsistencies easier to elide over. I enjoyed them both the first time around, and I enjoyed them even more on the rewatch.
One of the big problems with the sequel Matrix films was how the two movies were divided up, ending the second movie on a to-be-continued cliffhanger with a cut to "The Matrix will return", where the last scene called back to some things mentioned much earlier in the movie. Easy for that to be a combination "wait who the hell was that?" and "now I have to wait another six months for the ending?!" Both of those, while still flaws, are a much-diminished problem on rewatch. (Interesting to think about how that could have been done differently, would it have worked better if slimmed down from 4.5 to 3.5 hours somehow and combined into a single movie? Not sure.)
As for the most recent movie, I thought it was a lot of fun. It trades in a lot of the previous sequels' somewhat heavy-handed religious allegory for more meta-commentary, and it had all the elements you'd expect in a Matrix film. (Though it was kind of a shame Fishburne and Weaving didn't return, it's a setting where appearance and identity can be very flexible, so the new versions of those roles worked out fine.) I'd expect that people who want more of The Matrix will enjoy the film, though I'm not sure how it will go over for people who really loathed the previous sequels. This entry was originally posted on Dreamwith.
comments are there.
(Which was going to be the one movie I made it out to theaters for, but turns out that's still a no. It's kind of interesting that one of the last films I saw in theaters before I stopped going forever was also The Matrix, the 20th anniversary theatrical re-release of the original in 2019.)
I really don't understand the level of hate the Matrix sequels got, they're decried as if they're beyond-the-pale bad and series-ruining. Don't get me wrong, it's obvious that they're not as groundbreaking (can't break the same ground twice, after all) and aren't as good in a lot of ways. And it's obvious that most of the extreme cultural and cinematographic impact of The Matrix comes from the first movie. But the sequels are still good sci-fi action movies by Hollywood blockbuster standards, IMO. And a lot of the flaws in the sequel movies are things about the world-building that were in the first movie, it's just that the origin-story nature of that made some of those inconsistencies easier to elide over. I enjoyed them both the first time around, and I enjoyed them even more on the rewatch.
One of the big problems with the sequel Matrix films was how the two movies were divided up, ending the second movie on a to-be-continued cliffhanger with a cut to "The Matrix will return", where the last scene called back to some things mentioned much earlier in the movie. Easy for that to be a combination "wait who the hell was that?" and "now I have to wait another six months for the ending?!" Both of those, while still flaws, are a much-diminished problem on rewatch. (Interesting to think about how that could have been done differently, would it have worked better if slimmed down from 4.5 to 3.5 hours somehow and combined into a single movie? Not sure.)
As for the most recent movie, I thought it was a lot of fun. It trades in a lot of the previous sequels' somewhat heavy-handed religious allegory for more meta-commentary, and it had all the elements you'd expect in a Matrix film. (Though it was kind of a shame Fishburne and Weaving didn't return, it's a setting where appearance and identity can be very flexible, so the new versions of those roles worked out fine.) I'd expect that people who want more of The Matrix will enjoy the film, though I'm not sure how it will go over for people who really loathed the previous sequels. This entry was originally posted on Dreamwith.
comments are there.