Also: In the original movies you were afraid for Neo. By the time you get into the sequels he’s super amazing, basically invulnerable and all character growth has stopped.
Plus I hated all the shit with the robots and Zion. We like watching people doing amazing stuff in dank bathrooms and offices in New York, not this stupid underground tribal society.
Really, the flaw with the latter two movies was the same flaw as the first movie.
In the first movie, they revealed everything there was to know within the first 15 minutes. The rest of it was just action scenes. The latter two movies? Just action scenes. They’d already revealed everything there was to know within the first 15 minutes of the first movie.
But I’d personally vote that one of the major killers of the sequels was that the music sucked. During the first, there was a sort of up-beat, edge-of-your-seat sort of music going on during each of the battles. In the sequels, they just had perfunctory music that made the scenes feel like they were dragging on endlessly. They may not have actually have been any longer or shorter than the battles in Matrix 1, but they sure felt like it.
This. In both the Pirates and Matrix sequels, there’s this ever-present feeling that they were the result of the Marketing suits seeing the success of the first movie, misunderstanding what it was that people liked about it, and then demanding that the sequels be all about the things they misunderstood.
For the Pirates movies, this resulted in Wacky Jack Sparrow Overkill. Specifically, it was noted by the Marketers That Be that the bulk of praise for PotC1 seemed to be going to Johnny Depp’s side character, rather than to the dashing, sexy young lead, Orlando Bloom. They also noticed that Johnny Depp’s character adroitly served the role of comic relief. Figuring that more funny Johnny Depp = more money, they demanded that the sequels be all about Jack Sparrow, and that Mr. Depp be put into as many hilarious situations as possible. And thus, we get Jack Sparrow running through the jungle balancing fruit on a pole.
For the Matrix prequels, there were two things the Markethulu demanded. First, they reasoned, everyone seemed so impressed by that computer-generated bullet time stuff the first time around. So this time, let’s CGI everything! In fact, let’s add extraneous action sequences specifically so we can cram more CGI into the movie! Audiences will love it!
And lo: the Burly Brawl.
Secondly, the first movie seemed to have everyone in a tizzy about its philosophical depth. I tend to agree with AClockworkMelon and Red Barchetta that “The Matrix” did presented some cool ideas, but I think what made it work was that the philosophical stuff was strictly in the background. You could find it if you looked for it, it was definitely there, but you didn’t have to do so to enjoy the movie.
Of course, our friendly neighborhood Marketing Geniuses didn’t see it that way. With all these books coming out about “THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MATRIX” and making mad bank, it must be that people liked “The Matrix” because it had philosophy an’ shit. So for the sequels, we need to do more of that. Like, a lot more. Crank it up! And let’s not be so subtle this time - I mean, think of all the money we left in consumer’s pockets by not bashing them over the head with the philosophizing last time around. Let’s put in some scenes with Cornell West and have dialogue of Neo pondering the meaning of existence. People will love it!
And thus, we get craptacularity.
Tanbarkie’s explanation nails the suckiness of Phantom Menace, as well.
Nicely done!
I literally fell asleep in the theater while watching the second one. That told me right there that I didn’t need to bother seeing the third one. I’ve tried, and if I succeeded, I’ve blocked it from my memory.
I agree. Reloaded was being hyped as a deep philosophical examination on the very nature of being. It made the cover of Time magazine for crying out loud. This was supposed to be an important film, the type that would change your entire perspective on life. And it tried to be that, but ultimately its philosophical waxing fell that. Even more so when Revolutions came out and failed to build upon the more interesting ideas brought up in Reloaded.
Now, as I mentioned in the other thread, I actually thought that as a standalone action flick, Reloaded wasn’t half-bad. And I would not hesitate to state that the freeway fight scene was one of the greatest, most heart pounding action sequences of the past 10 years.
But with Revolutions, you feel that the filmmakers came to the realization that they had packed too much into the second movie and there was no way they’d be able to wrap up everything satisfactorily, and they just offered rushed explanations of the potentially interesting concepts from Reloaded and just came up with, what one poster said above, a perfunctory ending. So we have Neo with real life superpowers and trying to make nice with the machine entity, but then what? You end up with a father and daughter literally walking off into the sunset and more questions than you had when you started.
Wow, the second one was thrilling compared to the third. It’s so boring, I fast forward a lot of it when I re-watch it.
In the first one, Zion was the MacGuffin. The agents wanted the codes for it, the probes were looking for it, our heroes protected its location. But we never saw it and didn’t need to to know what it represented (hope, civilization, etc.)
The second two movies are under the delusion that we care what life in the MacGuffin was like. What are its politics, its culture, its daily life, its anthropology, its fashion sense? Who Cares?!?!? It’s a MacGuffin!
Essentially, the first film was an exquisite, finely-calibrated hybrid of kick ass action and existential philosophy, but it was pretty modest on both fronts, pulling out the stops when it needed to but setting things at a low boil (much of the training stuff) so we could get our bearings.
The other two assumed the responsibility of answering questions that nobody was asking; delving deeper into the navel-gazing mythos until it because confused, bizarre and stupid; and making all the action so CG-heavy and over-the-top that they stopped being exciting and became simply noisy, boring distractions.
Before I get into specifics, let me say that my memory is crap, especially when it comes to details, so I won’t remember some of the characters names for example, but I did see the second movie, I swear.
For me I first got bored with the stupid Zion speech. And the “love scene” where people are chanting and Neo and Trinity are getting it on, wasn’t sexy to me in the least. Neither was what’s his name’s wife or girlfriend making Neo kiss her passionately before helping Neo and his pals. I didn’t find the kiss sexy or passionate.
The fight scenes were too fake looking and the vampire brothers, or whatever they were called, seemed lame to me, even though lots of people apparently thought that they were cool.
There’s only one tiny part of the movie that I like, and it only lasted for like almost literally a minute or two.
I enjoyed both sequels because, well, more Matrix! I was so obsessed with the original that you could have given me The Matrix breakfast cereal and I’d have enjoyed it. It’s still my favourite movie of all time. That said, when I first heard there were going to be sequels made I was not at all happy. My immediate thought was “What more is there to say?” The first one dealt with great themes, the whole hero’s quest was done to perfection and wrapped up nicely. The sequels could never have been anything but disappointments, because the quest was finished.
What the directors/producers decided to do was more or less the only thing they could have done: they recycled the entire plot all over again, just bigger and with more explosions and powers in the real world and mechas and anything cool they could bring in to disguise the fact that everything had already been said.
So, I guess my opinion is that:
Maybe the Matrix doesn’t know what good sequels were like…
The original Matrix wasn’t all that good in the first place. People were so enthralled by the fight scenes (which were quite good) that they forgot most of the film was deadly dull.
Is Neo the one? Well, if he wasn’t there wouldn’t be much point in the movie, would there? Yet this “mystery” was dragged out forever. Same with the “training scenes.” Same with the psychology 1010 that was pretended like some great revelation. Same with the fact that the movie drained any chance of suspense or excitement from the plot whenever it could. But since it ended with a great fight scene, people forgot how tedious it was.
The second film was more of the same, only the fight scenes weren’t new, so they were less interesting. The battle on the freeway was just plain stupid; since there were no rules, then there was nothing to be excited over. There was always another deus ex machina around the next bend. It also failed in any internal logic: Neo gets teleported to the North Pole instantly, but has to fly the distance back. Why can’t he teleport? Because it would have ended the fight scene too soon (which would have been a blessing).
I didn’t bother with the third. Enough was enough.
Yes, let’s project your thoughts onto what everyone else thought, despite several posts to the contrary already in this thread…
The original Matrix was a fairly dumb story (batteries?? :rolleyes:), but it was done with extraordinary style - style which influenced the look of movies ever since. The sequels? Not so much.
Yeah, go ahead and rant if you must, but plenty of us thought that the first was just OK, and that therefore it wasn’t that far a fall to the sequels. That’s my response to the OP at any rate.
It might have helped if the first didn’t have that great big huge suspension of disbelief sucking plot hole shot right through the middle of it. I read, I think on these boards, that the original story called for humans to be part of a computational matrix rather than an energy source, but that it was deemed too technical for the unwashed masses. Bummer, the whole ‘copper top’ thing was lame. Plus the whole ‘how do you know the world-as-you-percieve-it isn’t just a construct’ is hardly new or original.
So, yeah, I thought the first was a fun Scifi action romp with some cool visuals if you don’t think too hard about it. The sequels were more of the same with the inevitable loss that comes with trying to carry too much over, like Tanbarkie said.
Almost every story ever says hi.
Quick, without looking it up, which was the second movie, Reloaded or Revelations? By looking at the DVD cases, you can’t tell. I rewatched the first one, and wanted to see them in order about a year after they were all out. I was a good 45 minutes in before I realized I’d put the third movie in next.
That said, they weren’t bad once you got away from the initial hype and let-down of the theater release. They were filmed at the same time, and it shows. It wasn’t new and it shows. A Major Mystical character died IRL before they started shooting and that was unfortunate.
The Matrix was pretty darned different from what had come before and generated a lot of talk as a result. The over the top Kung-Fu, Hard Sci-Fi concepts, and Bullit Time were unique in American Cinema.
The other two were ‘supposedly’ part of the whole story, all along, but I don’t think they got the love the first movie did.
Unlike the POTC trilogy…parts two and three sucked. Hard. (With the exception of the Captain Jack in the underworld-of-the-dead, that was freaky cool.)
You can do this with just about anything.
Lord of the Rings has a fairly dumb story (a ring? :rolleyes:).
Fight Club has a fairly dumb story (naked guys wrestling? :rolleyes:).
The Lion King has a fairly dumb story (lions? :rolleyes:).
A race of machines using bio-energy isn’t a stupid story idea.
It isn’t? I thought the idea of getting a net energy gain that way was, well, stupid.
I didn’t think so, no.