The Matrix Rebooted

September 14, 2011

For this kid, there is no poon

In my mind, the Matrix sequels do not exist. They are one with the spoon in the amount of "there is no"-ness that they have. They sucked so much dick that they are like a black hole that's filled only with penises.

Here's the 5 reasons they sucked.


1. The Double Movie.

This shit needs to stop. A movie is a hit, so they skip the 2nd film and go straight to making it a trilogy all at once. The end result is a first movie that's awesome followed by a 4 hour mini-series that has one big meandering shitty plot. If you've ever written something long like a screenplay or a novel, you'll know that when you begin you have tons of ideas, and as the project goes on you have to abandon some of them, hone others, and take a bunch of ideas and make it into one tight package. This whole two movies at once thing is an excuse for the writers to say "Oh fuck it, let's just do this shit I made up." They don't have to cut things or make the story tighter since they have 4 hours to work with. Look at The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. They feel like different films. They have different tones, the plots are quite different, in short, they're distinct movies, like a middle child and a youngest child, they share some of the same DNA, but they're different. If the Star Wars sequels were made today, they would have been "The Shit that happened after we blew up the death star part I and part II."

The HIV Virus AKA Gay Death Star

If you'll remember, the entire goal of Matrix 2 is for Neo to decide between saving the world and saving the girl. He pulls a rabbit out of his ass and does both (don't ask how the rabbit got there). Then she just dies in the 3rd one anyway...Cool.

The reason you do the 2nd movie and then 4 years later make the 3rd movie is that you have time to step back from 2 and reflect on it, to examine 1 and 2 together, to think about what you really want 3 to be about. (Imagine if they made all 3 Star Wars prequels at once...Lucas wouldn't have had time to realize how much Jar Jar sucked and we would have been stuck with him for 3 movies...seriously) When you skip this middle step, you end up with a pair of movies that were made in haste, without a lot of thought or reflection, and the whole thing begs for a complete do-over.


2. They break their own rules.

The world of The Matrix has rules. The story is unique because the rules are different from the ordinary rules in reality. So to create believability what you have to do is have clear rules. This is my problem with Fantasy/Magic/Vampires, while they sometimes have clear rules, more often than not they can just make shit up whenever the writer needs to get out of a jam.

So in the Matrix they have some rules. If you die in The Matrix, you die in real life. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but okay. In the real world, it's the real world, no magic, no dodging bullets. In the Matrix, since you're in a computer, you can dodge bullets and do crazy shit. Got it.

Then in Matrix 2 we have an agent, a computer program, escape into the real world by taking over a real person. Ummm, wat? How the fuck does that work? It's never explained. I guess Bane didn't have very good Cerebral Anti-virus (I told him Norton sucks). Then Neo somehow creates an EMP out of thin air with his hands. So...that whole real world being reality thing? What happened to that?

This same problem came up in just the first hour and a half of Inception. Rules are established, then they're broken. This destroys both the believability and it's sloppy since you need to either do what they do in Inception and explain why the rules have changed, or just pull the Matrix sequel technique which is to pretend like it's perfectly rational.


3. It makes no god damn sense.

Wait, you guys know that batteries just store power, they
don't create power...right? Oh, you're just idiots. Got it. 

So the evil computers need Humans to be their batteries. This makes no sense. Even if holding a living thing in a tub of jelly somehow created lots of electricity, wouldn't that be true of all large mammals? I mean, why not just keep a bunch of chimpanzees or whales in tubs of jelly to make power?

Okay so even if we buy that humans are just a power source, well, why keep them in the Matrix? Why not just keep them in a coma? What's the fucking point of deceiving these billions of people? The AI could have designed a Matrix that's set in Medieval Europe, so when Neo wakes up into the real world and Morpheus is all like, hey plug your brain into this computer and lets go hack the Matrix, Neo would shit his pants and call them heretics for making moving lights. Seriously, the AI are basically training computer hackers. WTF?


4. Zion is lame

ZION! BEER ME!

Zion is cool in The Matrix because you don't ever see it. It's the last remnant of civilization. It sounds cool and mysterious. Then we find out it's a glorified night club going through a grunge phase. The cool thing about The Matrix universe is that you can go inside computers and do impossible and awesome looking things. But the sequels spend a ton of time in this dank hole of a city trying to make us care about ridiculous characters fighting off flying octopi with machine guns.

It's jaw shatteringly good.

5. The ending is lame

Honestly I don't even remember how 3 ended. I remember a baby-like face computer thing and then you see sunshine for the first time in the real world. Something like that. Zion and the evil AI make a deal or something? I don't really recall. It was just so lame and weird and didn't follow any kind of logic. I do remember a pretentious Colonel Sanders. That guy was pretty cool.



So I think they need to Reboot The Matrix. Forget the sequels ever happened, like I've tried to do, and just make a new 2 and 3. It's Hollywood so they'll probably wait 10 years and then just reboot starting with 1.

When that happens, here's what they need to do in the sequels.


1. Fix the battery bullshit.

But how do you kill that which has no life?

Here's a good reason for the AI to keep humans alive and in a matrix world where they're not only educated, but given the abilities to use computers that once they are extracted, they're trained hackers:
The AI still needs help. Clearly the AI can create new systems and fix problems, but maybe there are still some things they aren't good at. The AI isn't as creative as a real person or something. So they keep these  people in a Matrix, like Neo, who is in fact a computer programmer. What's his day job? Maybe he thinks he's developing software for an iPhone but in reality it's helping the bad guys fix some kinks in their communication systems.

This way not only are the humans inside the Matrix powering the bad guys, they're even actively helping them without knowing it.

Then you can have some crazy general in Zion who thinks they should just nuke the Matrix, kill all those  deceived people, but cripple the bad guys. It leads to an ethical dilemma, and of course Neo and Morpheus would be against that and would hatch a different plan to defeat the AI. Perhaps that involves waking up some section of the population inside the Matrix without extracting them. If you'll remember the ending of The Matrix, Neo calls the AI and then tells it he's going to "show these people a world without rules, a world without you." Then he flies away. So...what happened to doing that?


2. Stick to the god damn rules

That totally looks like it would fly in the real world.

After watching Reloaded in which a person in the real world is taken over by a virus, Neo makes an EMP with his bare hands, and then in Revolutions Neo can magically see through his blindness in a pseudo Matrix-vision even in the real world, I came up with an explanation for how these rules could be broken in what was supposed to be reality:

This isn't reality. What if midway through the 3rd movie we discover that Zion and the hovercraft and all this is not reality, that they're still in a computer simulation. A. That would be a big holy shit moment just like in the first one, B. It would raise the stakes immensely, and C. It would make some fucking sense.

So if they're going to insist on having miracles happen in the supposed real world, then they better make it not really the real world.


3. Make the ending not suck

Imagine if the ending was the result of a struggle for control of the minds of the people in the Matrix. Neo and gang are trying to wake them up and create resistance to the AI, keep programmers from helping, or in fact plant double agents that write malicious code. How the fuck do you beat a computer? With a virus stupid! Perhaps the Agents start just offing people left and right, causing Neo and gang to question if it's moral to risk the lives of all these people. But the AI can't just kill them all, they need power and programming. Maybe the AI strikes back by changing The Matrix, making it post-apocalyptic so the people in it can't become hackers. Perhaps there are many Matrices with different settings and rules. We know they tried many other variations of the Matrix because we're told so. Smith says they tried to make utopia but entire crops were lost because their primitive minds couldn't accept it. Maybe there's a steampunk Matrix out there with rudimentary computers. Maybe an old west matrix? There are all kinds of possibilities because it's virtual reality. Fucking anything can happen.

Try hacking Western Union whilst my wenches perform
 fellatio on you and I hold a blunderbus to your back

Instead of that, we get an ending that splits between trying to save their hole in the ground city from flying octopi, and climactic battles where Neo and Smith try to break the laws of physics by flying and punching each other while millions of Smiths watch or something.

The entire reason the Matrix is interesting is because there's billions of people alive in the Matrix where crazy shit can happen. The sequels decided to ignore all that and make movies about punching and bad romance and hovercraft.



Clearly The Matrix 2 and 3 need a good hard reboot.