kartooner

I’ve seen the Matrix, actu­ally saw it on Open­ing Day last Thurs­day. My ini­tial impres­sion with the sec­ond movie is that the dia­logue was too heavy and the fight scenes too sparse. How­ever, my mis­take was that a good movie­goer would watch the orig­i­nal Matrix to fully under­stand its sequels. I didn’t, except for the brief view­ing of it when it ran on Cable a week or so ago.

The story of the Matrix is very meta­phys­i­cal with dra­matic reli­gious under­tones. My phi­los­o­phy is that the Broth­ers Wachowski were sit­ting in church one day and thought, “What if we mixed reli­gious per­spec­tives and beliefs with tech­no­log­i­cal themes?” When they had this rev­e­la­tion each of them ran home and with­out wast­ing any time wrote the Matrix in it’s entirety. It’s only Hol­ly­wood and I’m sure the choice of the Broth­ers to split the movie into three dis­tinct pieces. The first being the intro­duc­tion as “orig­i­nal” movies usu­ally are, the sec­ond explain­ing the pur­pose and char­ac­ters fur­ther and finally the third lead­ing to the cli­max and ulti­mately the wrap up of the entire story arc.

The Broth­ers are smart. Indeed, they have cre­ated a deep story with strength in it’s mean­ing. Yet, they have also mar­keted the movie into other sto­ries and chap­ters (Flight of the Ori­sis, Ani­ma­trix) and a video game enti­tled ‘Enter the Matrix’ which fills in the plot for the sec­ondary char­ac­ters Niobe (Jada Pinkett-Smith) and Ghost (Anthony Wong). It’s a phe­nom­e­non that has struck the world’s chord and caused a mas­sive cult fol­low­ing for the Matrix.

Even­tu­ally, when the third movie is released (Matrix Rev­o­lu­tions), the tril­ogy will make it’s way on DVD. It is then that I would like to sit down and watch the entire tril­ogy and con­nect the dots. Already by play­ing the video game and watch­ing a cou­ple episodes of the Ani­ma­trix (Detec­tive and Pro­gram) I’m begin­ning to under­stand the Broth­ers vision of this epic story.

Read this excel­lent expla­na­tion of the Matrix here as writ­ten by the Cor­po­rate Mofo.