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>The Terminator franchise comparison is honestly a >pro-Wachowski one imo,
Not at all.
>because the second that sci-fi >franchise was yanked from the original creatives, they all >became increasingly derivative, generic, and lame— constant >ploys to try to appeal to the fans of the original, none of >which worked.
I mean, all of that is largely what this was. There's no guarantee that a different director would nail it. They could make it worse. But this was seriously flawed, and more closely resembles the post-Cameron films in terms of quality than it does T2 or The Matrix.
Reloaded/Revolutions were tepidly received at the time, and while you said that some of that sentiment has changed in certain circles, I'd argue that the broader reaction to everything after the initial outing is still much closer to the response to T3/Salvation/Genysis than it is The Matrix or T1.
It's not quite as bad, but it's still closer to that.
I actually liked the third well enough, because >it moved as its own thing… but enough people didn’t think >it stood up on its own that they kept switching directors and >creatives, and now it’s just one of the most consistently >bad franchises around.
I'm certainly not proposing that they take that route.
But finding someone to helm the franchise going forward, I think would be a great move the for franchise.
>Even if the Matrix sequels don’t work for some— and I >definitely get that they don’t— they at least aren’t >empty catering to mass appeal.
They don't need to *cater to mass appeal* to create something that *has* mass appeal. It just needs better storytelling, and perhaps a greater focus on additional characters.
Neo and Trinity are fantastic, and I love their love story- I just think the whole "your love is what's keeping us from maintaining control! speech was cheesy and creatively lazy.
Show, don't tell. Show us, through action, how their love for one another does that. And not in a "my kiss brings you back from the dead" way either. The way that was presented was clumsy.
But you can strike that critique entirely; the franchise is in danger of becoming the X Men franchise here, leaning way too heavily on the gravitas of Xavier, Magneto, and Wolverine, long after they were firmly established as the center of those films, while merely dabbling with much of the rest of the roster, much less the plots themselves.
They continue to build and defy >expectation, so even if the moves don’t all work, they still >are in the spirit of the original. (I also just don’t think >Keanu comes back without a Wachowski attached, in which case >there’s not really a point to the franchise’s continuation >imo.)
I couldn't disagree more. It's the Matrix, after all.
The Matrix Rebooted sells that without issue. Moreover, there have been multiple iterations of The One. The lore they built up lends itself quite organically to such a move.
Shit, after that ending, it would be easy enough to say that the machines, fearful that things had grown too far out of their control, shut the entire thing down and killed the bodies of Neo and Trinity, destroyed Io, the works.
How and why the Matrix gets rebooted would then be the challenge, of course.
Sure, I'm just spitballing, but I think there's an objective case that there are plenty of perfectly plausible directions it could take from here, even if they scrapped everything we've seen because the actors refused to return.
>I think most of this is a moot point anyway, as I don’t >think WB will green light more Matrix movies, and I don’t >think Keanu will star in more, so it seems this’ll be the >end either way. But I admire all the gambles the Wachowskis, >especially Lana, took every step of the way— even if I also >get why some aren’t gonna be on board with those choices.
No needling here, I promise. This isn't me poking at you for your fandom. Frankly, I love that sort of bond between an artist and their fans.
But ball breaking aside, what was the gamble here, from a creative standpoint? I'm sure there are personal, financial, reputational, etc gambles at play, So much of this was, to me, The Matrix Retread and Rehashed. Outside of what was a truly compelling exposition scene with The Analyst (my misgivings about how the Neo and Trinity love story factored there aside), there wasn't a lot that felt like they were challenging themselves creatively here.
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