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Blade Runner and Mad Max are back, so why not The Matrix? The Hollywood Reporter says sources have confirmed that Warner Bros is starting work on a reboot of The Matrix, and it even has a star in mind: Michael B. Jordan, who recently broke out as the star of Creed. Zak Penn (Alphas, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Incredible Hulk) is currently writing a treatment.
The Matrix was not expected to be a blockbuster when Warners released it in March 1999. At the time, writer/director siblings the Wachowskis were best known for an indie film noir called Bound about lesbian lovers plotting the ultimate crime. But the innovative camera effects (bullet time!) and futuristic originality of The Matrix blew audiences away, rocketing it to the fourth-highest box office on Earth that year. Who could forget badass Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, offering the blue and red pills, or Carrie Ann Moss as Trinity, using nmap when she wasn't doing gun ballet. And then there was Keanu Reeves as Neo, downloading data over his brain port and intoning gravely, "I know kung-fu."
Though the sequels never lived up to the promise of the first film, the franchise was a game changer, influencing science fiction to this day. Everything from Inception to Mr. Robot owes something to the style and themes that the Wachowskis popularized. Plus, bullet time has forever left its mark on action scenes, both technologically and stylistically. Any time you see a fight scene that moves between fast and slow motion, viewed in 360 degrees, you are looking at a special effect that the Wachowskis invented.
Don't think you can. Know you can.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:20PM (2 children)
Mad Max: Fury Road is a 4th installment in the series and the upcoming Blade Runner film is a sequel to the original (hell it's even got Harrison Ford in it playing an aged Deckard.) This is the second time I've seen an article where the writer somehow doesn't know the difference between the words Sequel and Reboot!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @11:04PM
Mad Max: Fury Road
More like Furiosa Road ft. Mad Max.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @02:57PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:22PM
Like any entertainment franchise, it's a matter of what you do with. Make captivating stories and use visuals to tell that story well, the franchise lives and grows. Do it poorly, and you bury it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:38PM (9 children)
Matrix wasn't particularly original, not saying it wasn't good - it was quite enjoyable, as it was a mishmash of various sci-fi and fantasy books, movies and role-playing games from Johnny Mnemonic (which had Keanu in it, story by Gibson), Snow Crash (Stephenson) and the pen and paper RPG Shadowrun (from FASA). It's hard to say which it drew influence from but Shadowrun was around before Gibson wrote Mnemonic and Stephenson wrote Snow Crash, that is not to say they where influenced by it but it's a very similar theme and system for virtual computing. The main difference is that Shadowrun is a form of sci-fi/fantasy/alternate-timeline setting where magic has returned to our world and with it comes the elves and dragons and such. In some regard you could probably even say that the original TRON was an influence, that came out in '82 and Shadowrun didn't make the market until '89 or so - which are still a few years ahead of the others.
I prefer to think of it as if the movie didn't have sequels. They where both so shit and more or less describes all the things that are wrong with Hollyweird. The question is what is in a reboot - are they going to retell the story of the movie again, which seems kinda pointless - certainly so if Keanu is going to star in it again or are they going to tell more and better stories about Neo before he becomes matrix-jesus?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:43PM
I forgot about Gibsons other work such as Neuromancer which came around the same time as TRON. Anyway -- back to the point: Matrix, not original at all. But still good.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:02PM (4 children)
None of it is entirely original, I mean... the Matrix borrows from Shadowrun, Shadowrun borrows from D&D, D&D borrows from Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings borrows from The Worm Ouroboros... it's standing on the shoulders of giants all the way down. Well it's more like pyramids of giants I guess. Point is, Hero's Journey stories and so forth, all the way back to Gilgamesh and further back still than anyone remembers. This does not, alone, mean they're any less valuable.
It's a little early for a remake though. It's not really THAT old. What could they add or do different that would make it worth it? What new angle, what new facet could they bring out of the story? Technology and society have advanced, but not so much that we'd tell a substantially different story, I think (besides perhaps fixing some trivial technical mistakes). "Expanding" the story did not really go well last time, as the sequels showed.
They might as well just re-release the original Matrix for another theater run in Super Ultimate HD or something. It'd probably do okay and cost a lot less.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:16PM
None of it is entirely original,
Well, it was pretty original for a movie.
What could they add or do different that would make it worth it?
They could dump that stupid idea of using people's bodies as batteries and replace it with using people's brains as one gigantic distributed, biological computer. Then they could go all rosicrucian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @12:05PM (2 children)
"What if... guys guys.. what if, get this, what if Neo... is a woman"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @04:03PM (1 child)
Carrie-Ann Moss's character was already way more competent than Neo.
Other than this magical 'destiny' he had for unexplained reasons, she could have done everything he did and more.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Friday March 17 2017, @04:25PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:50PM
The question is what is in a reboot - are they going to retell the story of the movie again, which seems kinda pointless
I think the trick would be to totally re-imagine it, and produce something that was completely different in style and mood. I'm not holding my breath.
You really can't follow something like The Matrix that had such a major trendsetting effect on filmmaking. Unless you were heavily into imported anime and martial art movies, you hadn't seen anything like The Matrix when it came out. By the time the sequels arrived, however, bullet time, extreme computer-assisted martial arts wirework. muted colours etc. had almost become a cliche (the sequels had their own problems, but a major one was that they had to try and top The Matrix). Blade Runner is in the same category (and, ho hum, they're wheeling that out again, aren't they...)
Plus, the plot of The Matrix was kinda hokey (ditto Blade Runner) - we just didn't notice because our jaws were hitting the floor over the visuals. Oh, and The Matrix didn't give you time to think because it was so beautifully paced and choreographed. The first reel must be one of the slickest bits of celluloid in existence.
I think Hollywood has another problem: for several years now they have had the technology to make virtually anything that the creator can imagine appear on screen in photo-realistic detail - especially if you're dealing with fantasy creatures, aliens, robots or blink-or-you'll-miss-it human action scenes where "uncanny valley" can be subverted. That's making it hard to impress people with sheer spectacle (which, up to a point, was what The Matrix did - and certainly what the sequels tried to do). That might be part of the reason for the rise of TV dramas - which can now afford passable special effects and couple those with vastly more time to develop interesting plots and characters.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:58PM
And an obvious source of inspiration here is Phillip K. Dick who has written many novels that involve the theme of reality as an illusion over something else. That in turn is probably based on the philosophy and/or mental illness of solipsism which is about the futility of determining if anything outside of the self is real (the syndrome is where reality appears unreal to the sufferer). This again is first apparent in ancient Greece.
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Friday March 17 2017, @03:01PM
Came to say the same. The Matrix was awesome and fun but just about the only thing original in it was the bullet-time camera style. It was basically Total Recall meets Tron/Terminator.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday March 16 2017, @08:42PM (6 children)
The original Matrix was (in my opinion) a brilliant piece of sci-fi. It was an interesting story in an interesting world, that was custom designed to take advantage of the medium of film. It used several scifi and cyberpunk tropes without feeling derivative.
Then they had to go and make two sequels that were more visual effect-fests. They introduced a few new ideas, but also had to explain a heck of a lot of stuff that was better left vague, and those answers opened a whole lot more questions than they resolved. (Example - if your only effective weapon against the machines is an EMP, why do you not have any back at the base, and why do you only have one on each ship? Why do you have hi-tech gun platforms at all given you can't hope to defeat the machines' numbers by force of arms, but having 3-4 EMP's would make it really hard for them? Why would handloaded mortar rounds be effective against fast-moving flying robots? etc.)
IMO the original creators of the movie couldn't follow it up in-world without making it a collection of special effects strung together with nonsense a la Jerry Bruckheimer. Why would we expect anything else this time?
And, yeah, I guess the sequels made money, so maybe I'm in the minority in "not looking forward to this." But I don't have to like it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:04PM (2 children)
What more needs to be said other than: "remakes are typically bad money grabs, and this is a bad idea that should be ignored"?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @10:18PM (1 child)
It will get money which is what it is all about. But for us the viewer the 2/3rd films were not good.
Instead of continuing on with the neat premise they had promised in the first one they decided to make Neo some sort of 'god figure'. The battery thing did not make sense. The 'war' did not make sense. Logically the movie did not make sense. But it made sense if it was just layers in the matrix. Instead they mistakenly thought the cool effects were why the movie did so well. So they did more of that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:03AM
Maybe the raging success of the first movie lead them down paths that compromised their visions for the 2nd/3rd.
From what I'd read the original plot for the 2nd movie was dramatically different from what ended up getting produced, and might in fact have been due to either psychological issues, or consequences of success in the following year.
Now that they have both transitioned and moved to other mediums for their work, I am curious how they will react to the story of a Matrix reboot unrelated to themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:10PM
My stupid explanation is that EMP will destroy another EMP type device.... I know I know... but it would make sense why they can't be hoarded. And the ships are mobile and can be moved far apart.
Anyway there are more inconsistencies throughout the other two movies, to a point where I don't want to watch them at all. I liked the original, it was enough movie for me.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:12PM
There are far too few ways to expand that universe and make an original story, because you have humans holed up underground fighting the machines in virtual reality, and that's about it.
The special effects were cool and the action looked good, but the whole humans-as-batteries and esacpe-VR-only-through-a-phone really bothered me. And stone-face Keanu...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday March 16 2017, @10:40PM
I don't believe I saw the third one, but I saw the second one in theaters and got extreme action fatigue -- seriously, the whole movie was one long action scene and became exhausting to take in.
I find that surprising given that everybody I knew who saw the preview trailer for it were raving and pretty convinced it was going to be awesome, which it was. After it came out everybody was wearing Martix-themed costumes the following Halloween.
But I'm not going to see the reboot. Reboots are not only stupid, but intellectually lazy and now so politically-correct they'll be totally without any meaningful gut-checks. The sooner the Sodomites in Hollywood fall, the better. They're taking their Social Justice diversity shit straight to the grave, and good riddance.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Soylentbob on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:10PM (1 child)
Oblig. xkcd [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:20PM
So, non-obligatory:
https://www.xkcd.com/1022/ [xkcd.com]
"So it has come to this!" Matrix reboot, and a Soyentil with the handle of "Soylentbob" posting oblig. xkcd. Brace for impacting Apocalypse in ten, nine, eight, . . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:14PM (3 children)
Hollywood wants to trivialize (and therefore dismiss) the fact that The Matrix is real and this world is a computer simulation.
Hollywood is just a tool to control the masses, to brainwash them into believing the unreal (comics) and forgetting that they are being manipulated to be herded like animals in this prison. The other-dimension beings control a few people and use them to grab real power. They need human energy and use humans as food.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:33PM (1 child)
So basically, Hollywood is like the Ori from Stargate SG-1.
Hallowed are the Ori... Hollywood... it all makes sense!
(Score: 2) by ticho on Thursday March 16 2017, @10:51PM
...and now you made me sad they cancelled the third SG movie. Thanks!
(Score: 2) by Zyx Abacab on Friday March 17 2017, @06:10AM
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:27PM (1 child)
Looking forward to a Matrix with modern special effects, it just wasn't believable with the fake-looking ones they had to use in the original.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @09:35PM
</sarcasm> I can only hope..... Getting a root canal might be more entertaining than 90% of the movies released in the last oh 5 years or so.
(Score: 2, Informative) by varsix on Thursday March 16 2017, @10:06PM (5 children)
Another Hollywood remake/sequel. It's funny how the peeps in Hollywood complain about not making enough money, and that people pirate too much. If they want us to support them with our dollars, however, perhaps they should consider making some movies that aren't complete and total drivel. Maybe they have forgotten how to be original and come up with new ideas. Wonder why? Surely their brains don't have input slots for dollars to use as fuel for new movie ideas, so it can't be lack of money that's causing them to create crap and try to market it to a disinterested public.
Call me an old fogey (who isn't really even old), but I seem to remember a lot more creativity from movies and television of earlier generations. What happened?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday March 16 2017, @10:50PM (4 children)
Yeah, this exactly. People are bitching about the cost of movie tickets, but considering how fun you can make movie trips, the ticket prices are still well worth-it, if only the movies themselves were.
We used to enjoy getting a big group of us and getting high, sneaking in pints of vodka and pouring them into our large overpriced sodas, seeing the late-night showing, and really getting into the plots and action. Doubly so when we had access to the drive-in movies. Triply so when we knew the people who worked in the theater and we had our own intimate private showing at 2 a.m. ripping bong loads inside the theater after it closed for the night.
But that was back in the day when Hollywood made movies we all enjoyed watching. Now they're not even worth the bandwidth and effort to pirate. You couldn't pay me to watch them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @11:37PM (3 children)
You are looking at it through survivor bias.
MOST movies in a given year are terrible.
The same year Full Metal Jacket and The Princess Bride came out, both decent movies. But "Leonard part 6" also came out that same year.
Usually in 1 year only a small tiny handful of movies are worth anything. I have to admit last year was a big stinker. Pretty much only Xmen and deadpool were I think worth seeing. I actually kind of enjoyed Suicide Squad but I had 0 expectations on it. I think they wasted what they had.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday March 16 2017, @11:43PM (2 children)
The Princess Bride, decent?
Guffaw, the folks who think Princess Bride is worth watching are the same folks who think Vonnegut and Persig are worth reading.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @11:52PM
(((opinion-fueled)))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:13AM
You know you made my point right?
Most movies are not good. Princess bride is amusing 90 min movie. Nothing more. It was good for what it was thats it. But 99% of the other movies meh...
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @11:39PM
"You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
(Score: 1) by jman on Friday March 17 2017, @01:13PM
Am pretty sure Sam Peckinpah would have used 360 if in his time the technology to produce it was affordable.
His use of slow-motion video combined with real-time sound was brilliant, and certainly an influence on the Wachowski brothers.
Even though I'm pretty much a skiffy guy, just thinking about this makes me want to watch the Wild Bunch again...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @06:45PM
Reloaded/Revolutions was released in 2003 and Matrix Online went from 2005-2009. That's only eight years ago. Fourteen years to Revolutions and Seventeen to the original.
No, it does not need a relaunch, reboot, or even sequel.
Coming next year: The remake of La La Land!