One of the biggest cinematic blunders of all time firmly rests on the Wachowski brothers’ shoulders. After creating one of the best and most innovative sci-fi pictures of all time, 1999’s mind bending The Matrix, they followed up with two overblown disappointments, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both released in 2003.
For all practical purposes, those two sequels soiled forever a beloved brand and missed the opportunity to build or improve upon the original. And all likely because of hubris.
The Matrix’s performance was a big surprise. Release the same year that another sci-fi movie was supposed to dominate, Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, the first of the three prequels to another beloved sci-fi saga damaged by inferior sequels, all everyone talked about was how cool The Matrix was.
Largely because of that success, both in terms of how much money it made (and its sequels could potentially make) and of the fan base it had assembled, the Wachowskis got a pile of cash and the go ahead from the studio to complete the trilogy they had envisioned when they set out to make The Matrix.
Unfortunately, the two sequels turned out to be inferior chapters of the whole story that were longer and felt like overblown rehashes of all that we had been given the first time around.
Recently I decided to give the trilogy another try, since I positively worship the original. I can now safely say that, apart from any issues there might be with holes in the screenplays, if the Wachowskis had been more editorial, the sequels wouldn’t have failed so miserably.
The worst parts of both are the endless fighting sequences. Take the so called “burly brawl” of Reloaded. Is it really necessary to have it go on and on and on like that? What starts out as a “Shit Neo! Get out of there!!” moment, soon turns into “Enough already!!” At the end, Neo simply flies away. Why couldn’t he do that 3 minutes earlier?
Next to the endless fights, there are the useless ones, like when Neo needs to see the Oracle and meets Seraph, who, in order to ensure that he is indeed Neo, attacks him. After that endless (but blissfully shorter) fight, Seraph tells Neo that “the only way to really know someone is to fight them.” I can’t imagine a single person in the audience actually thinking that’s a good line in the script and it certainly doesn’t justify the fight. Cut it off!!
Let’s then take a look at the useless sequence in chief: the Zion dance. What exactly does that add to the story other than campiness? It’s a totally laughable sequence of a bunch of half naked people dancing that was likely meant to sassy it up and ends up feeling completely out of place, ridiculous, and trivial.
Couple all the useless stuff with the lack of editing and you have a big problem. For instance, in Revolutions, when the machines reach the outskirts of Zion, an interminable sequence begins without any intercuts of what is happening to Neo and Trinity. Only when the battle is pretty much over and the machines are about to storm the city are we transported miles away to what our hero is up to. Now his voyage to machine city begins and with it another battle, while the audience is left wondering about Zion’s fate.
I’m not a filmmaker or an editor, but I’ve seen countless action scenes and this is not how you build them. If they had simply intercut the two sequences, the big battle in Zion and the struggle of Neo and Trinity to reach the source, the end result would have worked a lot better. Just think of how masterful was the intercutting of three story lines in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Frodo and Sam meeting Gollum; Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli following the Uruk-hais; and Merry and Pippin meeting Treebeard. Countless more characters and scenes are all advanced together to give the audience a well rounded sense of time and action.
And it’s not like the Wachowskis don’t know how to set up a chase scene. Their highway chase in Reloaded is as thrilling as they come even though it’s long and overblown. But they constructed it well, has a plausible purpose, and as a result it works.
It’s sad that directors often feel like they can’t go wrong and fail to recognize when and where things are taking a bad turn. I’m assuming that someone did point out how over the top the movies were becoming, but the Wachowskis (or the studio) must have thought the more the better, and just kept going.
Too bad. Sure, the sequels made more money than the original, but don’t even come close in terms of cinematic longevity.
The Matrix: 9
The Matrix Reloaded: 5
The Matrix Revolutions: 4
No comments:
Post a Comment