The Matrix (franchise) Puns

TL;DR: which is the better franchise (in action, sci-fi, both or in other and general ways)? Which was more of a game changer? And which franchise is more likely to continue in movies, even though neither have good odds?

If we want to make this more fair, we can exclude Dark Fate and Genisys so both franchises would have 4 movies each to compare

So, the 2 big sci-fi movie franchises centered around artificial intelligence and machines turning on humanity, causing the apocalypse, and there’s the one that must be protected at all costs for the one is the key to humanity’s victory

IRL, the masses believe the Terminator franchise should have ended with T2 while the Matrix franchise should have ended with The Matrix. Both have masterpieces of the 90s. Both have movies in the 2000s which are seen mostly as mediocre at best, terrible at worst. Also noticeable long gaps between releases except Matrix 2 and 3. Then, movies that shit the bed in the past few years. If I had to rank them, I’d go:

Terminator 2 Judgment Day

The Matrix

The Terminator

The Matrix Reloaded

Terminator 3 Rise Of The Machines or The Matrix Revolutions I can’t choose. They’re not great but they’re fun and underrated

Terminator Salvation

Terminator Dark Fate

The Matrix Resurrections

Terminator Genisys

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Round 1: Hand-to-Hand

Round 2: Terminators have present and future weaponry (automatic and plasma rifles, etc.), and Agents now have the ability to infect Terminators into Agents

Round 3 & 4: Same as R1 & R2 except with upgraded Agents from The Matrix: Reloaded and T-850s

I wished Blade Runner 2049 was a success soo badly so that Hollywood would have fucking balls and just make sequels to old movies without having to remake the first one. I don't like the matrix sequels but it's just fucking depressing looking at resurrections and be like wow you're just doing the force awakens thing like really? It's soo fucking lazy if I want to watch the original I can do that anytime I want. When I watch a sequel I want to see the story continue not backtrack to the status quo of the original film. Everyone wants to do nostalgia shit but not put any actual creativity in these decade later sequels. If a 2049 was a success you would not be getting terminator dark fate or matrix 4 or Ghostbusters Afterlife you'd be getting studios with actual balls.

I'm sure I'm not alone in my adoration of both film universes. They both offer killer machines that wipe out and control humanity in some way, and feature similar religious themes. Both offer complex stories spanning multiple timelines. You could expand either world indefinitely, there's just no shortage of amazing stories to imagine/unpack.

The entire premise of The Matrix 4 was spelled out plainly at the start of the film. Warner Bros wanted a new film in the franchise even tho the trilogy is already complete and a masterpiece as is.

So how do Wachowski et al. respond? They make a movie that is terrible on purpose while providing meta commentary on everything that is wrong with the film industry and modern media.

1. The Matrix 4 is fast paced, almost like a Marvel movie. It uses the bare minimum dialogue to get to the next scene so that it can keep your attention. With this editing, Wachowski was giving WB exactly what they wanted while also exposing modern media for its fast paced, pop bubble gum level of depth that is so prevalent in major theatre releases and even social media.

2. They include the “cute robots” in the film which feels so forced that it reads more like Wachowski poking fun at Marvel/Star Wars/etc always needing to include a character whose sole purpose is to be sold as a plushie.

3. The amount of flashbacks and fight scene callbacks is nothing short of ridiculous, which is commentary by Wachowski on the shameless reliance on nostalgia that modern reboot films use.

4. This could also explain why some actors/directors didn’t want to return. They were put off by the clear cash grab mentality on WB’s part but also didn’t agree with Wachowski’s “solution” for this (purposefully tanking the franchise).

These are just a few examples and there are plenty more. Please add your own.

In summary, WB wanted a new Matrix, so Wachowski delivered a purposefully terrible movie that is meant to tank the franchise so that it may Rest In Peace. While doing so, Wachowski took the opportunity to use the film as a meta-critique of the current state of the film industry/modern media (and also to have some artistic fun). It is breaking the 5th wall, which makes it one of the most original movies of all time.

Re-watching the Matrix movies for the first time in a very long time. I don't remember the movies at all. So... there's the original film, a feature-length making-of documentary, the sequel, the Animatrix, the concluding 3rd movie, and now the new one in theaters. Am I leaving anything out?

What is the Animatrix, and does it add anything to the trilogy, or is it just a fun add-on?

I guess i have too high expectations about the movie and was left disappointed.

I expected something else like there are other Matrix worlds in other continents

I expected The Seventh One

I did not expect Smith since he was destroyed

I expected the movie to be more than what I just watched

I feel the movie was created to make more money while Keanu is hot right now

But will definitely watch again, I feel I will appreciate it more after I watch it one or two more times.

Matrix 4 is a plot tool to help move the Matrix franchise story line forward. Since all Matrix Resistance (human) characters are now 60 years older, this means they are either very old or dead in the Matrix universe, for example Niobi in Matrix 4. Since the story line has moved forward 60 years, it will allow writers to move the franchise story line in new directions with younger actors (not just young versions of original characters).

Matrix 5 could become a "passing of the baton".

Also, in the real world actors aren't getting younger either...

dead = Gloria Foster (Oracle-1)

age 80 = Mary Alice (Oracle-2)

age 77 = Helmut Bakaitis (Architect-1)

age 76 = Bruce Spence (Trainman)

age 63 = Lambert Wilson (Merovingian)

age 61 = Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith-1)

age 60 = Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus-1)

age 57 = Monica Bellucci (Persephone)

age 57 = Keanu Reeves (Neo)

age 54 = Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity)

age 54 = Collin Chou (Seraph)

age 50 = Jada Pinkett Smith (Niobi)

I haven't seen Resurrections yet but for me, it's The Matrix, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, Enter the Matrix/The Matrix: Path of Neo (tied), The Matrix Reloaded & then The Matrix Online. I don't really have a least favorite tbh, my ranking is really on rewatchability.

How do you rank the films & games in The Matrix franchise? What are your favorite & least favorites, if any, in the franchise?

Hey there, everyone, with the recent release of Resurrections, I started thinking about my opinions on the entirety of the franchise. I personally have some takes that a lot of my friends disagree with, so I wanted to get some feedback online and start up some discussion.

1. The Animatrix

2. The Matrix: Path of Neo

3. Enter the Matrix

4. The Matrix: Revolutions

5. The Matrix: Online

6. The Matrix: Reloaded

7. The Matrix

8. The Matrix: Resurrections

This IS my own personal opinion so please do not get upset.

Preamble

I wrote this a while back like since like 2013 lost it and found it in an old harddrive sometime early this year and waited till Resurrections came out and to think about it before putting this up.
This write up doesn't reference any of that film's narrative, also I'm ignoring a lot of the Matrix Online

Yeah it's a bit fanfictiony, giving a reread but I still like it enough to put it up here.

Quick review of The Matrix Resurrections
I liked it, it felt very personal and auteur-driven (and a bit of catering of Baudrillard's critiques)

A lot of decent ideas and very interesting subtext but the establishment and worldbuilding was lacking, I would've loved to see an extended version of this as a limited series a la Watchmen.

I wanted more of the crew of the Mnemosyne TBH

I thought I would've missed Fishburne but I more missed Weaving if anything.

This is probably due to covid but everything felt too small, IO felt too small, the new matrix felt too small, action was okay but too small scale and uninspired for my liking.
The core conceit involving Neo and Trinity is what sticks and mostly works in my opinion.

Format and conceptualization

In my personal opinion the ideal format, is an 8-10 episode miniseries a la HBO's Watchmen.

This is the main reason a lot of legacy franchises suffer so much because it's solid ideas that in no way can be fit into 2-21/2 hr movie. (cough terminator)

The main protagonist is Sati, with her growing up in the fallout of the end of the War and the main themes would be justice, grievance, forgiveness and reconciliation in a post-colonialist context and the idea of deriving purpose from that.

A lot of focus would be on the Oracle and The Architect and their full history.
Spoon Kid and The Kid would be important bit players as well

Plot.

So it's about fifteen or so years after the end of Revolutions, Sati operates as a liaison between machines and humans, slow efforts at reconciliation by slowly waking humans up and freeing them and letting machines free to occupy the world

The first step is to solve the scorched sky problem and then revitalise earth's ecosystem by a type of nanotech engineering cloud that would create synthetic biology and would kickstart real biology to flourish from the genetic data in the matrix.
She's in a relationship (polypan) with spoon kid and The Kid and she spends a lot of time with human

However there are machines that don't agree wi

First off let me just say it was great to see the cast from Sense 8 brought into the matrix, a pseudo cross over between one of my favorite Tv shows and my fav film franchise was more than I could ask for. Adding to that Jessica Henwick was amazing as Bugs...another nod to a Sense 8 character. I felt there were a lot of great ideas introduced in resurrections but the execution didn't quite land.

1. The first 20 mins could have been 5-10 mins of exposition highlighting Neo's life within the matrix. Once we got to the office frat boys and his friend talking about Milfs it went on for far too long. Trinity's story should have been Neo's. He's a family man and they have to convince him that none of it is real and to leave it all behind. DONE. The whole meta discussion around Neo being a game designer felt completely unnecessary or at the least lasted far longer than it needed to.
2. Why was there so much added humor, the Matrix had humorous moments but they always took a backseat to the more philosophical dialogue. Here the humor was front and center almost as if Warner Bros told the writer they would only greenlight this if it added some Disney humor because that's all the rage now. I only suspect studio interference because humor was never the focus in any of the previous films.
3. My hope for the franchise was that we would be moving FORWARD, leaning on the past films but not relying on them to carry the franchise. I thought not including Smith or Morpheus was the smart thing to do but the writer wanted to move forward and stay in the past by recreating these iconic characters and it just didn't work. Yaya's character could have just been Morpheus' son or Nayobi's son and Smith's story closed so well that there was little need to bring him back.
4. I quite liked the idea of the machines keeping Neo sedated rather than allowing him to die and rebooting the matrix and even Trinity being a party of the code, all of that made sense for the story but it lingered for far too long and much of that could have been spent on this new city that replaced Xion and building on the idea that many people just don't want to leave the Matrix. Instead we had the Analyst tell us that at the very end....WHY NOT SHOW THAT TO US? This was a rare opportunity for social commentary on the effects of technology and social media on the populace, an opportunity the writer unfortunately failed to expand on.

Overall While I was happy to be back into the world of the matrix but I can u

Live now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtLbghso0Zc

>The Matrix trilogy is one of the most successful film series of all time. »Matrix 4« has recently been added to the franchise. Parts of it were shot at silent green Kulturquartier. In this conversation, Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, director Lana Wachowski, who co-wrote the screenplay with David Mitchell, who will also be present and Tom Tykwer, who had worked on the Wachowski series »Sense8«, provide insights into the writing as a team and the almost-nearly-always-impossible journey of turning that script into a film.

We are assuming Neo has his Matrix powers or whatever he does

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From a Czech interview behind paywall: https://denikn.cz/712218/zajimalo-me-jak-bude-matrix-reflektovat-zmeny-v-nasem-svete-a-beh-casu-rika-slavny-romanopisec-david-mitchell/

Translation:

>Let me tell you something that doesn't contain any spoiler. The first episode was so famous because it was an iconic virtual reality movie. You can only do that once. Two and three just expanded the original idea into a trilogy. I was a little worried about that. There are so many attempts to revive a film franchise that have failed. So many fourth episodes that ended up being flops that just watered down the original idea. So I thought, I don't want to be the author of just the fourth episode in a row.
>
>Lana and I agreed that Matrix Resurrections would not be number four, but that it would accommodate all three previous episodes. And that caught my eye. There's a lot of beauty and weirdness in that movie and... time. Time was an important quantity for us. Twenty years have passed since the previous events, and this fact was one of the cornerstones of the new work. It's a lot about aging. About body aging, aging characters and the whole Matrix concept. I was also interested in how the Matrix would reflect the changes that have occurred in our world in the meantime. That's about all I can tell you.

It's quite mind boggling. This is derived from Jet Li explaining why he turned the films down. Collin has said he still gets paid for the films and I thought it was odd with him being a minor character, then it turns out there's this and he also worked as a crew to conduct training for the cast. Now that the Matrix owns part of him, it's totally fair that he owns a part of it too.

But I have no clue how it works. How do you copyright kung fu moves?

edit: Just realized an error in my title, Jet Li said they were going to record ALL his moves not just from the film. That's pretty scary and kind of rude even.

Who wins