Friday 27 August 2021

The Matrix Resurrections at CinemaCon



Out of left-field, The Matrix broadsided George Lucas' Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in the summer of 1999.

Artfully blending the film noir of Dark City with Alice in Wonderland and Marxist cultural criticism, the Wachowskis breathed new life into late nineties Hollywood action cinema with the release of The Matrix and popularised bullet time in an era where lightsaber duels were tech demos.

It would become the first killer app for the emergent Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) format and necessitated a firmware update for some DVD players (mine included). This was a time before wi-fi-enabled devices and over-the-air (OTA) updates were ubiquitous. Now I can't imagine taking my PlayStation 5 (PS5) into John Lewis for a software update.

The Matrix, like the original Star Wars, was self-contained. However, sequels soon followed with deminishing returns. As much as I enjoyed The Matrix Reloaded, I never bothered seeing The Matrix Revolutions in 2003! Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy had overshadowed all (including the Star Wars prequels).

Fast forward 18 years to 2021.

At CinemaCon on Tuesday, Warner Bros. announced The Matrix 4 is now officially titled The Matrix Resurrections and premiered a trailer, which is yet to be officially released. Lana Wachowski (her sister Lilly Wachowski, who co-directed the original trilogy, is taking an extended break from the entertainment industry) is at the helm with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising the roles of Neo and Trinity respectively.

The Matrix Resurrections is in cinemas and on HBO Max on 22nd December. Hopefully, I can entice Nick Smith away from the holiday season festivities to review it for your reading pleasure.

Are you looking forward to The Matrix Resurrections? Let me know in the comments below.

4 comments:

  1. The matrix and it’s sequels came out at the cinema when I was a grown up and through to 22.

    I remember getting the matrix imported on region 1 dvd from Amazon.com as well as blade runner. Cost me a fortune in shipping and in taxes and vat.

    We saw the matrix opening night. The cinema was full and we had to sit in that front section of seats in front of the screen that nobody ever sits in. That’s not where you want to sit for the matrix.

    When that first green line of code scrolled left to right, I nearly gave myself whiplash.

    It was like nothing we’d seen before and the lobby scene became the new defacto surround system demo for friends and family (taking over from terminator 2 : Judgement day. The T-800 cracking a human skull underfoot made for impressive bone crunchingly satisfying bass through the subwoofer).

    The sequels weren’t as good, but in the days where the internet was just turning mainstream, there were many theories as to what it all might mean. Is it a matrix within a matrix?

    It wasn’t.

    I rewatched all three films not so long ago and the the sequels weren’t as bad as they were. Time is a healer.

    The original still stands out and will never be topped. I’ll definitely give the new one a watch but can’t say I’ll be rushing to the cinema to watch it day one.

    Ghostbusters afterlife on the other hand…..

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    1. I remember importing DVDs, too! Especially during an era when R1 releases tended to be superior and many titles weren't available. I even bought a secondary multi-region DVD player! Let's hope The Matrix reboot is worthy of the iconic original.

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  2. I remember it as if it had been only 22 years ago! .. wait ..
    Anyway, at that time, the internet was still in it's baby stage and we still relied on trailer downloads and movie preview shows and, of course, watching the trailers in the movie theatre. This one was very highly anticipated by the cineast-nerd community at the time. Word had gotten out about the cutting edge tech to be used in the film and we were among the first to run into the theatre when it came out. I think I was so stunned, I bought a ticket for a second showing right away, and a few more, pulling in friends. Imho, this has been a genre transforming effort, influencing fashion, style, language, even culture in a major way, and maybe only second to Star Wars in terms of it's cultural impact on the nerd/fan/geek/cineast/sci-fi aficionado scene. Everybody I knew was blown away by how cool this movie was, how great the choice of music, (I still have the sound track album), how deep the zeitgeist of the emerging internet was captured, and yet, leaving enough simple action-flick, pop-corn chomping fun to enthuse even the average viewer that did not want to have 4h discussions on the zen implications of living in a simulation. This movie picked up a thread from a 70's German movie (Welt am Draht) (World on a wire), that was the first movie to explore the situation of players in a virtual world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire For the serious movie enthusiasts on this blog, it might be a worthwhile historical reference and quite quaint, to see such a pioneering spirit coming from a German production. I look forward to the next installment for sure, although the first Matrix will be a hard one to beat.

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    1. In 1999, I was a fully paid-up member of all things Lucasfilm and vividly remember watching the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace exclusively in QuickTime on dial-up internet on my Apple Macintosh Performa 5200.

      Literally, knew nothing about The Matrix and was blown away in real ‘bullet’ time.

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