Fixing The Matrix
A question made its way around the office today: What piece of media would you make if you could pick any subject and any format in the world and have it turn out exactly the way that you’d dream it to be? I couldn’t really come up with anything at the time, but the question’s been rumbling around in my head all day and I think I’ve just about found an answer. Probably not my all-time final answer, but one that’ll do for the time being.
I’d love to make the two Matrix sequels. Not the ones that already exist, for patently obvious reasons, but if I could somehow arrange things that they had just never happened and I could write the two follow ups directly then I’d grab the chance like the tastiest donut on the planet.
This has all been prompted by watching the first film again on TV a few days ago and remembering how completely badass it was. When you watch that film you come away with the feeling that you know kung fu. That you could take on the entire world and do it to an awesome soundtrack. The biggest crime of the two sequels is that they make you forget that you ever had that feeling. Not just that they don’t have the same strut and swagger themselves, but that they make you forget that the original did.
I think that the two existing sequels were corrupted by those old favourites: money and fame. Where the first film had to rely on clever hacks and inventive setups, the sequels had huge budgets and essentially unlimited scope, so everyone involved in the process seemed to over-indulge themselves. The stunts went too far, the CG went too far, the story crawled directly up its own arse, and the whole endeavour ended up being too over-produced to ever feel like something you could properly embrace.
In a way, making the two follow-up movies would probably be going too far however they were done; the original could stand pretty firmly on its own as a testament to human hope and determination, without needing the entire endgame to be played out explicitly in front of the viewers.
But this would be my project. It would happily accept human nature demanding to see the endgame eventually. It would be allowed to embrace the fact that the entire raison d’être of the series is nerd wish fulfillment. You have to see the righteous computer nerd kicking evil-computer-oppressor ass.
I freely admit that I don’t know exactly how I’d finish the story, but this is all plaintive fantasy so I’m allowed to leave the details fuzzy. I know lots of the constraints it would have: No huge budget, no allowing the religious aspects to tie themselves into a Gordian knot of intertwined theology, no shitty 500-man CG brawl just to show off the fact that the production has access to lots of computers nowadays.
I think by constraining it like this you’d be forced to end up with a better film. You’d have to rely on comparatively low-tech stunts like the first film did, you’d have to limit the scope of the story to something believable which can actually be wrapped up properly in two films, you’d have to do more riffing on the lines of Neo and Smith as personifications of two of the opposing sides (the third being some kind of representation of the actual system, which is obviously separate from Smith, and may not even be recognisably human enough to interact with at all. Basically anything other than “Colonel SandersTM! As! The Architect!”)
Essentially, I think that the series could be more epic, more grandiose, more memorable simply by keeping sight of why people loved the first film so much. It felt like the far future that could actually happen tomorrow, it felt like the amount of cool in the universe was increased purely by its existence, and most of all it felt like you could leave the cinema, find the nearest evil-doer and then kick his head clean off!