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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 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.