Who Still Loves The Matrix Trilogy?

I appreciate the original. Hardly anything overly satisfying in the sequels.

The story ended in the original. Anderson discovers his true role in life and is reborn as the savior Neo.
The rest is epilogue.

Give it a few more years, amadeus. A lot more few more years.

I really enjoy the first one as well, and watch it frequently on DVD. I saw "Reloaded" once, in the theater, and "Revolutions" once, on DVD. I doubt I'll ever watch either again.

Because there's only so many times one can say "I'm still a Matrix fan goddammit" before one gets tired of defending it, I'll say this....

I think, in a more general sense, i see LOTR, the Star Wars prequels, and the Matrix trilogy as the three defining movie epics of our time, each exploring different sides of mythology and humanity and the reasons we do the things we do in the name of certain ideals, and all three exploring them from different angles.

All three have imperfections on their own terms, but all three trilogies as a whole represent something truly powerful, and truly important in this day and age.

They may have extended the universe, but the story's climax occured in the original. Matrix 2&3 may be cool fun for fans, but from a narrative point of view they're superflous. Ultimately that's what turned off so many casual fans.

I think Reloaded is the best film in the trilogy. As opposed to earlier posters, I'd call the first film a mere preamble, with a generic "savior/chosen one" plot. The second film subverts that rather intelligently and takes a much more choice-based look at the future. The third film focuses a bit too much on ancillary action and characters to sustain the massive push of the second film, but I still appreciate quite a bit of it.

I love the trilogy, as much as I do LOTR and the OT, and more than the PT (which at least saved the best movie for last). The Matrix sequels require some effort on the part of the viewers where the first does not. I am happy to give that effort.

It's a very rewarding trilogy.

Bob's right. Additionally, 2&3 are founded on a premise that struck me as a gyp. The Matrix ends with Neo as an omnipotent superman, his power predicated on his knowledge and exploitation of the fact that "there is no spoon." 2 & 3 find the guy in Spoon City all over again. The Matrix, while no Dark City, is a good adventure movie. The Matrix trilogy is a bloated, colossal failure.

It'd be great if it had any emotional resonance whatsoever.

The emotional resonance is mostly replaced by a philosophical one (which explains why most of the emotional scenes, Rama-Kandra and Neo's conversation in the train station aside, stumble). Granted, that's harder to implement to make a film work for most people....but that was, indeed, the aim.

Dark City is developing a reputation as being a far more concise version of the events of The Matrix Trilogy. Unintentional, of course (both scripts were being developed around the same time...great minds think alike and all that), but it's true.

They're both good movies in my book.

The Matrix ends with Neo essentially a god. The sequels have him actually fighting again, when the whole point of the original's climax is his realization that he doesn't have to - he's moved beyond.

Dark City takes the same premise as The Matrix - Things Are Not What They Seem - and goes fascinating, disturbing places with it. The production is daring and dangerously beautiful, and the movie raises questions about the nature of self sufficiently interesting to challenge even the most accomplished frappuchino jockey. It's The Matrix for smart people.

The first one was good, but the second two were bloated and pretentious.

I always say that walking out of the theater from the first Matrix, I was the one asking questions about philosophy and the movie and all that. The second and third actually ask the questions too overtly.

Having just watched Dark City again last weekend, I have to say that it seems slightly uneven at times. Especially compared to the first Matrix movie. Still, I love Rufus Sewell so it's all good ... but not as well executed as the original Matrix film.

What cemented my hatred for the Matrix sequels is the simple-minded way they dismiss Neo's powers from the original as, "Hmm...upgrades." That's just an outright slap in the face.

You do realize he was talking about the agents, not himself, with that line, yes?

If anything, the original is a prologue. The real story is in the sequels. It's just not the story most people expected.

I think it's pretty obvious that I still love the trilogy.

There's some good ideas in 2 & 3, but the delivery of those ideas through poorly written dialogue, coupled with a lack of emotional connection, do make the sequels come across as a bore.

Like some other posters, I too felt shortchanged on the promise of the original's climax. Neo had learned to read and manipulate the program of the Matrix, including agents. To have him moving through the Matrix, governed by the sames rules except for those shown at the end of 1 (flight, stronger fighter etc.) just felt unimaginative. Following the logic of the first, Neo should have been able to rearrange any construct of the Matrix at will.

My enjoyment of the first, however, has also been hampered by the notion that Neo and company must have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people in their mission to save Morpheus. All those people in the building didn't know they were in the Matrix. I suppose they were considered collateral damage by Neo and company. If the makers wanted to explore philosophy, the resultant guilt would have been an interesting starting point.

Yikes.

Reads more like self-conscious comic book dialogue, striving for profundity but unable to escape falling into cliche. It reads like something written by a fourteen year old who thinks he's smarter than all his friends because he skimmed through some Nietzsche.

I wouldn't even call it good dialogue, let alone iconic.

Loved this trilogy from the moment I saw Trinity run along the wall and kick the cops' asses.

It's interesting, looking back on the trilogy. By no means are these movies flawless. But I have seen worse. I also think that Reloaded is the best movie of the three. That's all - I have spent way too much time on the Internet talking about these films.

EDIT: Oops, needed to correct some grammar.

I couldn't say it any better myself.

You couldn't say anything better than "I've seen worse"?

Helix! You said you weren't going to post in this thread. You colossal liar. Fine.

I think, If there is going to any sort of perspective gained towards the sequels it is still going to take some time. Give it five years or so. Watch something else.

I do have to rail against this though:

This would be true if they didn't give Rufus Sewell super powers. As they did, the thematic bits only serve as a context for another good verses evil climactic battle. It's also edited far too quickly.

Personally, I think the first two movies are nearlyperfect. Revolutions, to me, builds to a nice climax but fizzles out in the final 10 minutes, dropping a pretty big damn ball. It's very frustrating to watch (in fact, I really don't like watching it past the "Why, Mr. Anderson?" speech), but there's stuff to appreciate and enjoy nonetheless. What gets me about the ending is how it totally ignores Morpheus' character arc--the last time we see him is just another face in a crowd of celebrating cave people. There's not resolution there, when his arc begs for some kind of closure. Having the final scene focus totally on characters that had a combined screen time of about 20 minutes in the entire series was another misstep. The ending of Revolutions has the right idea, but they went about it the wrong way. Consider this:

I wrote that down not too long after I saw Revolutions in theatres, and I was trying to figure out why the ending was bugging me so much. Showing the truce helps clarify the rather muddled plot point as to what exactly Neo did to save Zion and bring peace (there are a LOT of people who got confused by this), and giving the "I believe we will" line to Morpheus wraps his character up. His crisis of faith is resolved, his soul at peace. He leaves the Matrix for the first time, and the final zoom out ends the series on the same note it began, while keeping the epic feel the trilogy (particularly the second and third) worked so hard to achieve. The final shot used in Revolutions--the sunrise over the cityscape--is pretty and works, I guess, but it's a pretty static and boring way to end a series as visually exciting as the Matrix. I don't puport to know more than the Wachowskis, or say my ending is "better" (though I think it is), but I figured I'd throw my opinion into the mix.

Yeah, I can't tell you how disappointed I was. They stuffed the film with too many ideas and thought they should over-explain (belabor?) their points.

Also, I felt the fight scenes seemed strangely pointless and lacked the punch of the first film. I look at the fight scenes in the first one and they seem to flow and have specific purposes. Instead in the second one you get the terrible Burrly (or what ever the hell it's called) brawl, Neo's fight against the keymaster's (not Rick Moranis's) minion to prove he is who he is, and the not as exciting as it should be freeway chase. Now I love action - even dumb and implausible action. But if your movie is a high-minded (one might say intellectually snobby, really) the action should flow from the story. And they criminally underused Monica Belluci.

I'm not anymore. But I just felt that bit of silliness needed some pointing out.

You said you weren't going to post in this thread too, remember?

Don't you pull that 'you did it first crap' with me, sonny. I know you secretly like Revolutions.

Agreed. In fact, I thought they were all really boring. Then again, I got tired of bullet-time real quickly, but none of them were anywhere near the coolness of the dojo fight.

I prefer the almost Dadaist absurdity of MechaSmithZilla.

Okay, the first film is great, no arguments there.

But I think the sequels begin to decline from there, and after the highway chase (itself ruined at the money moment by a comical moment that isn't very comical), there is little to recommend watching. The problem for me is where the first film combined the philosophical with the visual fairly well (there is still some atrocious dialogue/exposition in there), the sequels just take time to stop, waste money and spout some ideology. They also say "I believe..." a HELL of a lot.

As for Revolutions.... well, a big part of the problem is that much of the film is driven by characters only recently introduced, who are poorly written and carry little to no investment (the Kid?). The other problem is that the action sequences lack flair or excitement. People make a big deal about the Zion invasion. Its fairly impressive on one level and i'm sure it was very expensive, but its hardly a great action sequence. Same goes for the Neo-Smith superbrawl, or whatever it was called. It has a couple of interesting shots, but is bloated and lacks ingenuity. And Smith, wow, how to derail a great villain. I love him in the first and second films, but the dialogue you quote above is literally terrible. Why doesn't Neo, the saviour of mankind, recognise the ONLY person in the real world who would call him Mr Anderson? Put this with Smith's dialogue when he's standing over Neo in the crater (so on the nose, it hurts) and I consider the character all but ruined. The topper: how long does it take you-know-who to die? "Oh wait, I can't die yet, I have some more great stuff to say. Ok, i'm done. Byeee."

One other point - why are there so many New Zealanders in Zion? Apart from the fact that the sequels were largely shot there, is there something about the NZ way of life that promotes enlightenment?

Loved the first but couldn't get past the sloppy writing and less-inventive fight choreography of the sequels.

Sloppy writing - to me it was clear at the end of Matrix that Neo now understands that it ain't air he's breathing. He looks at the agents' bullets with a some smallish bit of intellectual curiousity and then dismisses them. In II and III he has to fight agents and other programs again? No. Also (and this is probably more of a personal thing) the first one made plain (at least to me) that humans in the real world were relatively helpless against the machines. The EMP was their only defense in the real world, no giant military base with hundreds of machine-gun-wielding walkers.

I maybe could've gone for a story that focused, for example, on the fact that Neo, though relatively "omnipotent," was still just one guy, so now the tables turn and he has to help Morph and the others "level up" to free more minds.

And what happened to the fight scenes? I enjoyed the BB and truck-top fights in II but even those were out of their league compared to the short-but-brutal Morpheus vs Smith tangle and Neo's subway fight with Smith in the first flick.

i loved the first movie because it was an action movie with brains. a bit like robocop, where the (very interesting) ideas add texture but don't mess with the mechanics of a well-told genre movie.
the sequels, i think, lose sight of this & failed to entertain the general audience by concentrating to much on the "deepness" of the philosophical questions. & strangely those questions seem less important/universal once it became too specificly tied-in with the movie(s).

I can't stand any of them. I flipped out over the first when I saw it on release. But the sequels wiped away the gloss on my eyes and I saw how horrible the brothers really were as filmmakers. It totally tainted the first one for me.

I've tried re-watching the first one on several occassions and can't make it past the agents chasing Trinity scene.

My complaints are two-fold:

First, the action sequences after the first film lost their sense of urgency. All conflicts in the first film arose from the characters' basic motivations. Smith beat the crap out of Morpheus because Morpheus was trying to destroy the Matrix. Neo went to rescue him because Morpheus was his mentor and friend. Very cool...it both creates exciting actions and advances the plot in one fell swoop.

Fast forward to Reloaded: Any action scene involving the quest to rescue the Keymaker feels tacked on. It felt, to me, no different than a fetch quest in a videogame. I have, completely honestly, never seen a bigger MacGuffin included in a film. This same critique can be applied to several other action sequences in both films. The Burly Brawl, while not a MacGuffin, is just absolute empty calories...it served NO purpose, but it did look fairly cool (and convinced me that we're not yet ready for CG stuntmen).

However, I did feel like the final fight between Smith and Neo was at least visceral and had a real sense of urgency...so, I can't complain about ALL the action scenes.


Second, so many of the characters were merely representations of a philosophical viewpoint. That is some laughable, sophomore-year level writing. No, I get it...The Merovingian believes in cause-and-effect predestination. Unfortunately, that's all there is to him. That's not good writing. That's actually sacrificing good writing at the expense of adding a viewpoint to the film. By sacrificing good writing, the character and his viewpoint come off as ham-handed and unnecessary (not to mention needlessly verbose, which seems to be a common crutch among the Wachowski's philosophy characters) Really, that's all the last two films are to me: two-dimensional characters created solely to espouse a philosophy, and characters that once seemed three-dimensional stumbling into the philosophy characters. Dull.

Furthermore, if anyone can explain to me the plot-based necessity of either the Trainman or Merovingian's desire for the Eyes of the Oracle, I will buy them a cookie.

I remember an interview with the Wachowskis after the first film, and they plainly said that they originally conceived it as a trilogy but changed their mind once they got greenlit, which is even more reason to believe the first film offers ample closure.

There really isn't a MATRIX "trilogy." It's just one good movie that was followed by a couple of sub-par sequels.

I'm starting to see STAR WARS the same way, except that the first sequel there (EMPIRE) managed to surpass the original. And after that we ended up with four sub-par sequels.

As for the whole "STAR WARS was a pre-conceived trilogy" argument -- Lucas might have had some sequel (and prequel) ideas from the get-go, but they weren't very well thought out. Maybe the MATRIX guys also had some sequel ideas from the beginning, but, again, they weren't very well thought out.

The same can be said of many other franchises. I mean, I guess people will be talking about the SPIDER-MAN TRILOGY after SM3 comes out, but it's just another case of a movie being successful, followed by the filmmakers scrambling to continue the story (to be fair, I think SPIDER-MAN 2 is a fun movie, better in many ways than the original).

I'm not the biggest LORD OF THE RINGS fan around, but I do like that it's a real trilogy, with three movies written and shot at the same time.

I echo some of your other issues with ep 3, Sackley, but this is the one that bothered me most.

I could give a crap about 90% of the characters in Revolutions - Neo and Trinity are barely there the second part of the film. They are main characters and they are essentially written out. If I'm to care about the Invasion of Zion, Neo had to be there - he's who we invested in for the previous films.

I'd say 'at least Morpheus was around' execpt he completely falls apart and spends most of the third movie sulking.

All those foks dying and - impressive looking though it was - I really didn't care like I should of.

Of course, I could be dead inside.

Love the first movie though. Great flick - as for Neo's powers, the dude CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD. He's a god - don't focus on the flying, focus on the stopping bullets in mid air and coming back from the dead.

The second movie always felt like it undermined it, but in far too casual a way - as if because Neo see Smith has 'upgraded' now he's in danger.

But you know what -- this is a 'I like Matrix' thread and we have derailed it -- sorry if I pissed on your parade. I certainly don't begrudge those of you who loved it your enjoyment.

PS --
The biggest difference to me was on the first film, there were doubts in WB about the viability of making any real money -- they knew it was a good idea, but didn';t think it would make alot of cash. As such Joel Silver rode the Wachowskis and made sure things were concise, not over the top and coehesive. (as wel las cost-effective, no doubt).

Matrix was a surprise smash hit - the Brothers got free hand to do what they wanted - the last two moves were (IMO) a big fat mess...

The trilogy is a textbook example of he law of diminishing returns. The first film is still a classic. The second is pretty good (great in parts, but disappointing because it lacks the first film's clarity of purpose.) The third is mostly a bloated mess.

I just wish the bros could have ironed out all the flaws in the script stage, which would have really sharpened the focus of what's going on narratively and set up some self imposed boundries. The trilogy has a great plot, the films just doesn't explore it a meaningful way. The sequels are too busy trying to repackage the first film and up the ante as if that would make for the most satisfying set of films.

I definitely don't love these films as a trilogy, but RELOADED stands out from the pack as a stylish, satisfying action flick. I thought that REVOLUTIONS was a waste of celluloid.

I'd say BACK TO THE FUTURE is a better trilogy than THE MATRIX.

Interesting. I haven't seen Dark City in years. Perhaps it's time to queue it up for a reevaluation. 'Til then, here's a quote from Ebert's Great Movies writeup:

"Dark City" by Alex Proyas resembles its great silent predecessor "Metropolis" in asking what it is that makes us human, and why it cannot be changed by decree. Both films are about false worlds created to fabricate ideal societies, and in both the machinery of the rulers is destroyed by the hearts of the ruled. Both are parables in which a dangerous weapon attacks the order of things: a free human who can see what really is, and question it. "Dark City" contains a threat more terrible than any of the horrors in "Metropolis," because the rulers of the city can control the memories of its citizens; if we are the sum of all that has happened to us, then what are we when nothing has happened to us?

I loved the first, but was disappointed with the sequels. That said – I am warming to them. I think all three movies aim higher than most action flicks, and because of this I’m more inclined to forgiveness. And there’s a lot of forgiving to be done. More than I’ll be able to manage before I’m shovelled into the ground I suspect.

On the other hand I think I’m growing less fond of Dark City by the day. To me it seems like an extended Twilight Zone episode, and neither Sewell nor Sutherland (especially) are convincing - which is saying something when were talking comparisons with a movie featuring Keanu Reeves, who isn't noted for his hypnotic performances.

I'm not sure the comparison is a good one, anyway. DC is concerned with the nature of humanity and how it exceeds the sum total of memories. The Matrix is more concerned with the nature or reality, free will vs predestination etc.

For sure.

Well, Back to the Future does have a much stronger third act, but it has a pretty dismal second part (it gets better in the alternate 1985, and really picks up when they go back to 1955, but the stuff in 2015 is way too goofy). If there's 10 minutes I'd like to re-write for Revolutions, there's a good 40 minutes I'd like to re-do for Back to the Future Part II.

I disagree, I think Part II is the best part. The stuff, sure it's goofy, but it's a comedy more than anything, so it fits, and it's also pretty funny and a good homage to people's actual future premonitions (i.e. world's fair types) and how goofy they really are.

I think if the series has a weak link, it's Part III, but I don't think even that's weak enough to seriously damage it, not in the way RELOADED does.

Can someone tell me whether the Wachowskis did lose creative control for M Rev? Was it heavily edited by the studio? I suspect it was (the Merovignan weirdness leaves me suspicious), but I've never got to the bottom of it.

If this is the case, I think we need to think about other questions such as - where did they want it to go?