Followup To My Followup Article.

Alo Party Peoples.

I emailed a rough draft of the Matrix followup post to my father, and he said that perhaps Blade Runner should have been listed as part of the science-fiction movie canon. He is probably right, and I considered putting it on there, but I haven't seen Blade Runner, or Soylent Green, or Star Trek II, or the original Japanese Godzilla. He also went into a statement about how Star Wars and Alien still hold up because the sci-fi elements of them aren't what they rely on in order to work as stories, while the "speculative" part of the speculative-fiction elements of The Matrix are central to the film's story.

He has a very good point, one that destroys my conclusion from the original article to be honest. If you retold Alien as a contemporary psychological thriller, it would probably still hold together. If you retold Star Wars as historical-fiction set during the last days of the Roman Empire, if you replaced the Rebels with Visigoths and Luke Skywalker with Alaric I, it would probably still work as a movie.

The Matrix on the other hand, is about the sci-fi elements. It's about solipsism, Neo being a sort of savior figure, the harsh, unsympathetic true nature of reality, and all that stuff. It's unprecedented degree of computer effects, harsh cyberpunk aesthetic, and edgy extrapolation of the then new Internet's slow crawl towards being an essential part of our lives, that was all new back then, and they made the Matrix special. When the rest of popular culture absorbed that, when it wasn't so special anymore, not very much was left to stand out. Trinity doesn't have any real character, the performances aren't anywhere but serviceable, and it just feels like another tread down the well worn road of the heroes journey.

And after all that, one question still remains. Why am I going on about The Matrix? It stopped being relevant around 2003. Well, the web is alight with rumors that the Wachowski's are planning a prequel trilogy, and unless they have some new visual scheme they can bring to the table, I don't think that just throwing the "Matrix aesthetic" back out again is going to work.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B