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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: 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.