Quote: "Ah, who cares? As far as I am concerned the Matrix was a brilliant movie. The next two are as dead to me as the new Star Wars films (or that stupid Battlestar Galactica rehash with Face blokey as a bird). "
Couldn't agree more. Nor could Will Shetterly:
the Matrix Reloaded lessons
"I loved the first Matrix movie. Games with reality, cool sunglasses, Hong Kong action sequences, and Carrie Ann Moss. What's not to love?
Well, Keanu's Mr. Anderson is an Everyman, not a character with a personality or a life. He doesn't abandon friends or family in return for commiting to the Matrix. All he has to do is be willing to take drugs to hang out with cool people. That metaphor's fine by me, if you don't examine it too closely. An Everyman makes an acceptable point of view character for the first movie. For some stories, an Everyman is all you need.
And the explanation about humans being batteries is astonishingly stupid. Computers run the world, but they can't come up with nuclear, solar, wind, water, or bad old fossil fuel power? You could've explained that away in the sequel, if you'd wanted. But I don't ask for a perfect story; if something does 95% of what I want, I'm prob'ly there. The Matrix at least hit my 97%.
Besides, I loved Bound, the Wachowski Bros.' first film. I expected a lot from people who had pleased me twice.
First warning. Since nothing dramatic happens for over half the movie, you can safely stick with me until I slap up a spoiler warning. If you'd rather bail now, hasta luego!
So, what did I learn?
1. If your story isn't about dreams, don't start with a dream.
Matrix Reloaded opens with a shot of Trinity on a motorcycle at night. That seemed right. Then the action becomes really, really slow. That seemed wrong. As the action slows, more and more computer effects suggest that we are seeing something happen inside a computer. And that seemed very wrong. It made me ask who the point of view character was.
Which was when I got the answer: Neo. Dreaming. Starting a story with a dream is usually a mistake. Here's why:
1. If you start with a dream, the audience will doubt anything that happens later, since it might be another dream. An opening dream sequence makes them more critical when you want to make them more trusting.
2. If you start with a dream, the audience will spend the rest of the story waiting to see how the dream is important. If it was there because it seemed cool and not because it was necessary, you wasted their time. The audience wants its time filled, not wasted.
3. If you start with a dream, the audience knows that they don't need to worry about anyone in the dream until that character enters a situation like the dream.
Let me belabor this. The movie has just begun. In an attempt to make us worry about Trinity, one of the most important characters in the story, we've just been assured that she's perfectly safe until we see her on a motorcycle at night. If Trinity was frequently on a motorcycle at night, we might worry about her often. But there's only one scene of Trinity on a motorcycle at night. At the end of the movie.
Now, you may ask whether this movie is in some way about the idea that life is a dream, and therefore opening with a dream is appropriate. If the writers had made something of the relationship between dreams and the Matrix, or if Neo's future actions were affected by his dream, that might be true.
But this dream never affects anything Neo does. At the end, he is shown that Trinity is about to die, and his subsequenct actions follow from that revelation, not from the dream. If you cut everything from the movie that refers to the dream, the story would make as much sense. It might make more.
2. Make your main character sweat.
The audience isn't stupid. We know that characters like Batman and Neo can't be killed, or there won't be sequels. But we want to see them struggle and suffer so that we forget that. Making the audience forget what they know is the storyteller's job.
Neo is so powerful that he never sweats or gets his clothes torn or even has his sunglasses knocked off. By the apparent rules of the Matrix, having your ultra-cool jacked-in self visibly disrupted means that your code is being damaged, and if your code is damaged badly enough—like by being shot through the heart or tossed off a building—you'll die. Because Neo never seems to suffer, we're never worried about him in the Matrix.
3. Let your main character think.
Neo goes where he's told to go. He never has to be clever. At the only moment where it looks like he may fail, a villain helps him.
4. If your story has different levels of reality, threaten your characters in all of them.
The Matrix has a great sequence when a traitor begins killing our jacked-in heroes. We don't know exactly what a person can survive in the Matrix, but we know that in the outside world, death is death.
In Matrix Reloaded , we're told several times that Zion is threatened by squiddies sent by the machines. But we hardly see that. There's no strong threat in the ostensible real world until the final moments of the movie.
5. If one character can't be harmed, make us worry about another.
In most of Neo's fights, he fights alone. Since he's Superman in a world without green kryptonite, we never worry that he might lose. His solo fights are spectacle, not drama.
The logical person for us to worry about is Trinity. Neo's dream tells us she's safe until we see her on a motorcycle at night.
A new pilot of the ship is introduced. We meet his family and see him interact with Morpheus. He's played by the charming Harold Perrineau; we want to care about him. But he's never in danger.
There's a kid who hero-worships Neo. He's tiresome in the way one-note kids are in bad scripts. It would've been equally satisfying to see him die or see him grow over the course of this movie. But he doesn't show up again, making us afraid he'll appear in the next movie, every bit as annoying as he was in this one.
Several characters are computer programs that don't work for the machines. We don't know how to worry about a program; if it's killed in the Matrix, does it die? Or has it been backed up? Can it, like Freeagent Smith, copy itself, so if we see it die, we should expect to see it come back duplicated?
The only person left to care about is Morpheus. But we don't, because:
6. When you reintroduce characters in a sequel, remind us who they are.
All the established characters are taken for granted. They don't grow or change. We learn a little about Morpheus's past, but we don't see him being smart, brave, angry, or hurt. He makes speeches that sound like speeches we heard in The Matrix . When he's finally in danger, we wouldn't mind seeing him die, because the writers no longer seem to have a function for him.
7. Let the audience see the most significant events in the main character's life.
The Matrix Reloaded begins about six months after The Matrix ended. That means that when we see Zion for the first time, Neo has already seen it. There's no wonder or surprise for him, and that diminishes the wonder and surprise for us. Neo's familiarity with Zion is not the only reason that the city is boring, but it's the main one.
The sex scene with Neo and Trinity is oddly flat. Part of that is because it's not dramatically significant beyond showing us that they like sex. It's not the first time for them, and there's no suggestion that they're afraid it might be the last.
8. Be true to the logic of your invented reality.
At the beginning of the movie, Smith, now a free agent who no longer works for the machines, leaves a package for Neo. That package has to be passed through a small window in a door guarded by humans. In the Matrix, where everything is data, accepting a package should mean that they have allowed data to pass through their firewall, which could be very, very dangerous. But Smith's package is only a message. If it was somehow scanned for viruses, I missed it. In this movie, it seems like the relationship between reality and computer code depends on what the writers want to do next.
At two other points, Neo flies like Superman and grabs people so quickly that the change of direction should kill them. But sometimes physics matter in the Matrix, and sometimes they don't. Perhaps part of Neo's power is that he can change the rules of the Matrix for everyone around him. If so, why does this story take so long?
9. Be inventive with the appearance of your world.
Zion looks like any city in a scifi movie made in the last twenty years. The Zionistas' clothes look like clothes you could buy from the Deva catalog.
10. Be inventive with the cultures of your world.
Zion is filled with people of all races dressed in funky raver clothes. That seems cool until you notice that when it comes to romance, based on the story's main examples, blacks stay with blacks and whites stay with whites. Don't ask why Earth's last free humans are preserving racial purity.
In the first movie, the leader was Morpheus, a black guy. In this movie, we meet the head of Zion's military, another black guy. That seems cool if you don't think about Colin Powell. This black guy answers to a politico who is a white guy. So, at the beginning of the movie, it looks like in this funky rebel city, the important people are men, and the most important one is white.
Then we meet the council of elders, which has a female speaker. That seems cool if you don't think about Margaret Thatcher. The casting and costuming say that these are a Ragtag Bunch o' Rebels (TM). The dialogue says that this is a stock George Lucas jackboot scene: the government gives its orders to the military.
11. Let the plot change the characters.
The plot, such as it is, begins a quarter into the movie, after the visit to Zion:
Neo gets a message to go see the Oracle. He goes to the meeting place and fights Collin Chou as a test. Collin Chou takes Neo to see the Oracle. For an Oracle, she's remarkably precise: Neo must go to the Merovingian and rescue the Keymaker to get to the Architect to fix everything.
You might worry that finding this Merovingian would be a challenge, but luckily, the Oracle tells Neo where to go (and I envy her for that ability). Neo fights Freeagent Smith in a scene with cool F/X. Then Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus meet the Merovingian and his wife in a sequence that's more stupid than repugnant. Our heroes free the Keymaker. Trinity and Morpheus fight albino twins and drive fast, and we would worry about Trinity if it was night and there was a motorcycle. We don't worry about Morpheus, because he's been astonishingly boring. When Morpheus nearly dies, Neo flies like Superman and saves him, which is cool, but only because Neo looks cool flying like Superman. Alas, Morpheus goes on to make more speeches.
Now something happens that affects the characters and the story, so: spoiler warning.
The Keymaker opens a door for Neo and is killed. That's sad, but also nice, because the Keymaker is the only character who dies before talking too much. Neo meets the Architect, who talks too much in a room filled with TV screens. He tells us that there have been six previous Matrices, each better than the one before. The job of the One is not to be a savior. The One is part of the programming for shutting down a Matrix when it becomes unstable. The Ones before Neo were happy to do their job, according to the Architect.
Then the Architect shows Neo that Trinity is in danger. If Neo goes through the second of two doors, he can try to save her, but he will fail—that's the sort of thing villains are obliged to say. I think their union has it as a standard clause.
Neo decides to save Trinity, which surprises the Architect, though I have no idea why. I had hoped that Neo would do something clever, like see through some trick that the Architect was playing. When villains give heroes two choices, heroes should come up with a third. Instead, Neo flies like Superman through door #2 and saves Trinity.
Meanwhile, the boring squidlike machines that are threatening the generic scifi city are getting close. What, you'd forgotten about the squiddies? Don't worry, I think the writers did, too.
In the very last couple of minutes, a character changes: Neo gets a new power. In the ostensible real world, he can shut down squiddies, rather like Storm in the X-Men. Then he falls into a coma. The end.
Over the course of the first movie, Neo learned things about his reality that he had not suspected, found that he was capable of things he had not known, learned that he had a destiny, and fell in love. In the last quarter of this movie, Neo does the first two, learns that there's a question about his destiny, and, well, doesn't change a tiny bit as a person. That would have made a fine start for a movie. It's a poor end.
12. Commit to the nature of the middle part of a trilogy.
This one's a little wifty; bear with me. A true trilogy consists of three complete stories that tell a larger story. Ursula LeGuin's first three Earthsea books are a trilogy. The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy; it's one story in three books. The Matrix movies are a duology; The Matrix is a distinct unit. The next two movies are halves of a continued story.
The Wachowski brothers could have commited themselves to making a "trilogy" in either of the contemporary senses of the word:
They could have made a story that essentially stood alone, perhaps exploring the nature of Zion and what it meant for people to be divided over the question of whether Neo is "the One" and what being "the One" means to everyone, including Neo. This story is hinted at in the beginning of Matrix Reloaded.
Or they could have picked up Neo's story immediately after the previous movie and continued it. The Matrix is extremely faithful to the first part of the model described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces , a model known as "the Hero's Journey." It's roughly a three-part pattern. First the heroes discover that they are destined to be heroes, then they discover their possibilities as heroes, and finally they confront their destiny and whatever consequences come with it.
Instead of taking either tack, the Wachowski Brothers give us something that feels like they had a decent idea for a sequel, then decided to pad it into two movies."
That pretty much sums it up, AND THEN SOME. He didn't even mention some of the other things that confuse me/bother me.
Team EOD :: Programmer/Storyboard Assistant
