The Matrix

I have the deluxe 10 disk boxed set of the trilogy.  I watched them again recently.  It got me to thinking.

"The Matrix", the original film in what eventually turned out to be a trilogy, was a trend setter and a huge box office success.  Its success was what enabled the subsequent two movies to be made.  Although they made a lot of money, chapters 2 and 3 (go ahead, try to remember their titles) did not have the impact the first movie did.  Why?

The Matrix movies fall into the general category of "Action Movie".  As such there are three components, the plot, the babe, and the action.  A good action movie will have all three in the appropriate balance.  The long running "James Bond" franchise is a classic example of the action genre.  So I will use them to examine these components in a little more detail before moving on to the Matrix movies.

The Bond series highlighted the role of the babe.  There is such a thing as a "Bond Girl".  I even have a book devoted solely to Bond Girls.  Most Bond movies have only one but several have two or three.  Being a Bond Girl has been the high point of many an actresses' carrier.  Ursula Andress, one of the early ones, is almost entirely unknown outside of her Bond Girl persona.  And the quality, for lack of a better term, of the Bond girls in the various films, has been erratic.

The Bond series is also noted for its "set piece" action sequences.  Typically a Bond movie opens with one.  In one movie Bond is chased from what turns out to be a mountain chalet.  He is chased on skis down a steep mountain slope by the bad guys.  Finally he literally skis off a giant cliff.  After what seems like an eternity watching our hero fall through space, finally a parachute in the pattern of a British Union Jack flag opens and we cut to the opening credits.  For obvious reasons, this scene is still burned into my retinas even though the movie came out decades ago.  Other action sequences are peppered though each movie.  One standard set piece type is the chase.  It can be in cars, under water in SCUBA gear, in at least one case in space, and on skis as it was in my example.  Another action sequence type is the fight between Bond and the villain or his henchmen.  Finally, most Bond movies end with a giant explosion or series of explosions, which destroy the villain's lair.

Finally, there is the plot.  Early Bond films had elaborate plots.  Later the series settled on a standard plot.  The villain is trying to take over the world.  Bond first discovers this, then tracks the villain to his lair, and finally blows the place up, foiling the plot.  Usually Bond and at least one Bond Girl are thrown together and romance ensues.  Since it is important to be able to move on to the next Bond Girl in the next movie, a depressing number of Bond Girl characters are killed off.

The early Bond films were very successful and eventually the Bond films became the prototype that most action movies followed.  The "take away" for Hollywood was that the plot was not very important, the babe needed to be beautiful but was otherwise disposable, and action was king.  So the Bond films maintained a high standard in their action sequences throughout the series.  The Bond Girls were beautiful for the most part, but generally unmemorable.  There were usually given little to do but hang around looking beautiful.  And the plots were allowed to deteriorate.  You had the villain du jour implementing the "plot to take over the world" du jour.  No one, even fans, paid any attention to the plots of the later movies.

This formula worked very well for many years.  The first Bond movie came out in the early '60s and the films were reliable money makers for decades.  But by 1999, when "The Matrix" came out, the formula looked vulnerable.  A lot of action movies with a non-existent plot, a great babe, and the usual number of well executed action sequences were no longer doing well at the box office.  And, since the action sequences were expensive to create, action movies need a large box office to be profitable.  For several years, Hollywood could count on foreign revenue to close the gap.  Action movies, with little dialog to translate and not much in the way of story that might not go over well in a foreign culture, did well in the foreign market.  You might have to cut back on the violence and/or sex to cater to a specific foreign market segment but that was easy to do.  Eventually the foreign market saturated out too leaving some to believe that the action genre had run its course.  And then along came "The Matrix" in 1999.

I am going to delay talking about plot and talk about the second component first.  In the case of the Matrix movies the babe was "Trinity", played by Carrie-Anne Moss.  Some commentators say she was not beautiful enough but I disagree.  And for the "matrix" parts of the movies (you know what I am talking about if you have seen any of them, and as for the rest of you . . .) she was dressed in a shiny bondage style outfit.  She made a real and positive impact on me and that's what the babe is supposed to do.  And, unlike the Bond movies, the Matrix movies stuck with the same babe through all three movies.  And Carrie-Anne turned in solid performances in all three movies.  I know of no action movie that has been made or broken solely by the babe.  If Carrie-Anne was weak in the second and third movies, she was weak in the first one.  So she wasn't the deciding factor in why the first movie has a much better reputation than the other two.

Moving on to action, here I see a decided difference between the first movie and the last two.  (It should be noted that the last two were made at the same time and are best seen as two parts of the same movie).  "The Matrix" came out in 1999.  This was a period of great advances in CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) capability.  A lot of the action in "The Matrix" was made or augmented by CGI.  This allowed not only new effects but a seamless integration of CGI effects with "practical" effects, effects using camera tricks and effects based on mechanical devices.  An example of a camera trick was "bullet time".  This was done by positioning a hundred or more still cameras and then setting them off in a precisely timed sequence.  When the still pictures were assembled a frame at a time into the movie it was as if a fast moving movie camera had been used.  This resulted in several dramatic "swoop around" and slow-motion scenes that were highly effective.  For mechanical devices think R2D2.  For many scenes there was a man inside the "robot" operating the various appendages.  With good editing this resulted in a very lifelike R2.

By 1999 the cost of an elaborate CGI sequence had plunged.  CGI takes vast amounts of computer processing power.  By 1999 the CGI people had figured out how to hook together a large number of relatively cheap computer workstations.  It might take hours to do the computations necessary to create one frame of film.  But with many processors it became possible to do many frames in one overnight run by distributing the work across many processors.  Cheap processing power also made it possible to move to digital editing.  There is a limit to how many separate components can be used in one frame if you use traditional film techniques.  If you look at the original "Star Wars" move, not the cleaned up reissue, there are several places where you can see lighter or darker squares where a space ship image is laid into a complex scene.  So many images were combined that it was not possible to maintain a uniform black background.  Digital processing does not have this problem.  You can combine a virtually unlimited number of images into one frame without anyone being able to tell where the component from one source meets a component from another source.

The Wachowski brothers did a brilliant job of understanding that these new capabilities allowed action sequences to be taken up a notch in "The Matrix".  They designed and implemented a number of memorable sequences.  They also integrated the action sequences in a seamless manner.  In the early days of sound the typical Musical would move along doing the usual dialog and story thing.  Then it would stop and do a musical number.  Then it would go back to story and plot.  Action movies often used the same structure.  You could almost see the transitions between the normal movie and the action sequence.  With CGI advances and digital editing the Wachowski brothers were able to integrate CGI effects into what appeared to be the normal part of the movie.  So there was no sharp boundary between the "normal" part of the movie and the "action" part of the movie.  So one of the things that made "The Matrix" such a success was the outstanding action sequences that did not stand out from the rest of the movie.

The two sequels that completed the trilogy were released in 2003.  With the success of the original the Wachowskis were given a boat load of money.  The state of the art in CGI also advanced.  Computer workstations continued to get cheaper and more powerful.  So the amount of computer power that could be deployed in support of the second and third movies was far greater than that available for the first one.  And again the Wachowskis designed and implemented action sequences that took advantage of this additional capability.  They raised the bar.  The action sequences are more complex and more elaborate than the ones in the first movie.  But in spite of, and I argue because of, these very advances the action sequences in the second and third movies are less satisfactory than the now primitive looking action sequences found in the first one.  Why is this?

One problem with the sequences in the latter movies are that they are generally "more" rather than "better".  The villain in the first movie is called Agent Smith and is played brilliantly by Hugo Weaving.  Smith is also carried forward to the second and third movie.  In the first movie Nero, played woodenly by Keanu Reeves in all three movies, battles one Smith.  In the second movie he battles several then hundreds of identical Smiths.  By the time of the grand finale at the end of the third movie he is battling one Smith while thousands of Smith clones watch, presumably ready to step in to help if the "Hero Smith" needs it.

There is so much going on in the action sequences in the last two movies that it is hard to follow them and they seem to go on forever.  In the second movie there is a big chase scene.  It starts out in a nightclub.  Then it moves to a garage.  Then it moves to outside streets.  Then it moves to a freeway.  On the freeway we dodge between cars while people shoot at each other.  Then there is the Samurai sword fight on the top of a truck.  Then there is a motorcycle chase.  Then there is a big scene where two "18 wheeler" trucks slam into each other head on.  It's just too long and complex.  We start out excited.  Then we become worn out.  Then we just become bored.  When can we get back to the plot?  It's a bad sign when you are waiting for an action scene to end because you are bored.

In the third movie there is an epic battle for the dock (it doesn't matter what the dock is).  In this case we have the usual rag tag band of good guys.  But there are about 250,000 bad guys.  I'm not going to run you through another "first this happened then that happened" description of the scene.  Instead let me do some math.  There are a bunch of good guys shooting at the bad guys with machine gun-like weapons.  Let's say they are shooting 250 rounds per second and they manage to hit a bad guy with every single round.  Now this is a stretch, even for a world in which the good guys are inevitably good shots and the bad guys are inevitably bad shots, but stick with me.  At this rate it would take 1,000 seconds, or almost 17 minutes to kill all the bad guys.  Just how long can you stay interested in a good guy grimacing and going rat-a-tat-a-tat. In my case, and I imagine in yours too, its far less than 17 minutes.  While the titanic battle is going on the movie cuts back and forth to another scene.  But it's the usual "can the good guys make it through the gate before the bad guys get them" stuff.

Now from a technical point of view both scenes are brilliantly done.  It is wondrous how the zillions of bad guys are realized in the "dock" stuff.  It really looks like there could be 250,000 of them.  But that's just too many.  Similarly, there are too many bad guys chasing the other group.  And there is only so much "swoop and shimmy" as they are chased around obstacle after obstacle.  And just how many parts can you knock off a vehicle as you cut it too close time after time, and still believe the vehicle will not be put out of action?  It's all just too much of a good thing.

There's another way to look at it.  In the first movie most of the action is fights.  And most of the fights are mano a mano, say Neo against one Smith.  In the other fights it's one good guy against a few bad guys, say three, or a small number of good guys against a roughly equal number of bad guys.  All this is human scale.  We can develop a rooting interest in our hero.  And in the early part of the first movie it's established that the bad guys are more powerful than the good guys.  So you have a number of scenes where a good guy will end up fighting a bad guy.  Then when things start going badly the good guy will break off and run away.  All this creates dramatic tension.  Now let me create some dramatic tension myself by breaking off and talking about plot.

Frankly, one of the things a good plot does is justify the action.  The plot should logically force the hero to come into opposition to the villain and be forced to fight him (or chase or be chased or blow stuff up).  That's kind of the minimum the plot is required to do.  In the later James Bond movies we took it as a given that Bond was a hero and the bad guy was a villain and that Bond's job was to stop him.  So the minimum requirements were barely met.  Unconsciously we knew the plot was just going through the motions and that diminished the whole endeavor, which in turn made watching the movie less of a pleasure, which finally resulted in diminished box office grosses.

The plot of "The Matrix" was not any kind of minimalist effort.  It was inherently interesting and it did a great job of justifying the action.  The core of the plot was of all things a philosophical question:  What is reality?  In "The Matrix" it turns out that what appears to be the real world is actually a computer construct.  But it is so cunningly constructed that it is essentially impossible to tell that it is a construct, the Matrix of the title.  It turns out that if the construct is done cunningly enough it is literally impossible to show that it is not actual reality.  Of course the Matrix is flawed in small ways, allowing the good guys to know that it is a construct.  If the Matrix was perfectly constructed we wouldn't have a movie.  And the reason why any one or any thing would feel the need to construct such an elaborate illusion is a complete joke.  Supposedly human beings make great batteries.  In reality the laws of Thermodynamics require that human beings make lousy batteries.  You end up putting many in times the energy in the form of food into them than the amount of energy you could possibly get out of them.  But that's nit picking.  A cool movie always demands a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

Since the Matrix is artificial, if you are in the know you don't have to follow those pesky laws of physics.  Instead you can have fun.  And specifically, you can be a way cool Kung Fu fighter.  And, again for reasons that are best put into the "suspension of disbelief" bucket, the best way to defeat the bad guys is to be a much better and cooler Kung Fu fighter than your normal bad guy.  So there's our justification for lots of cool Kung Fu fighting. And this "you can bend the laws of physics" thing permits and justifies all kinds of jumps across impossibly large distances, action with cool automatic weapons, action with helicopters, in short, lots of really cool mayhem.

And there are a number of other small pieces of philosophical conundrums thrown in, each in a very entertaining manner.  There is a really nice short bit where Neo knocks over a vase.  The philosophical problem results from the fact that Neo would probably not have knocked over the vase if the Oracle (another character) had not said "watch out for the vase" first.  So there is a nice "cause and effect" puzzle pulled off in about 30 seconds of film time.  These bits add gravitas to the movie.

Of course the whole thing is a bit of "I only read Playboy for the articles".  Hugh Hefner was smart enough to realize that by putting those articles in side by side with pictures of pretty unclothed ladies it would give his magazine some gravitas which would provide some measure of cover justifying more young males buying more copies of his magazine.  To see what I mean let's take the core of the Matrix premise seriously for the moment.

Neo is a computer hacker.  The Matrix is a computer construct.  By applying his knowledge that it's not real combined with that fact that it is computer generated, combined with his computer skills, Neo should be able to seriously bend the rules.  The problem is: what rules to bend.  Let's take a quick journey into the land of computers using Unix as our example.  (Don't panic -- this is not going to get very technical).  Unix uses something called "shells".  Shells fall into three general categories in terms of power.  The shell with the least power is called a "restricted shell".  It is only allowed to do a few things and the whole idea is that a restricted shell is not supposed to be able to break out into the wide world of the full Unix environment.  As the name implies, a "standard shell" has normal powers.  It can can navigate through the wide world of the full Unix environment but it is not supposed to be able to get into the guts of the system and break it.  The "root shell" is all powerful.  It can do anything it wants to do including change or destroy any or all of the system.  The root shell exists so the system itself has enough power to build and maintain itself.

In the Matrix world Neo starts out as a restricted shell.  He doesn't have enough power to see the real system so he presents no threat to the real system.  When Neo breaks out into the "real" (as opposed to the artificial "Matrix") world it's like he has graduated from being a restricted shell to being a standard shell.  He is not powerful enough to destroy the core system (called the Kernel in Unix-speak) but he can at least see it.  Any hacker worth his salt who is given standard shell capability tries to find a "back door" that gets him "root shell" power.  There is some business with the "key maker" in the second and third movie that is analogous to this.  If you go through the right door (a back door, perhaps) you disappear into the guts of the system.  In the movie this is represented by a hallway that is invisible to the normal Matrix environment.

In the movie Neo spends a lot of time doing cool stuff (e.g. Kung Fu, playing with cool guns, etc.) rather than going straight for the "root".  This makes the movie much more fun for the audience.  We get to see cool fights, chases, etc.  But those are not the thoughts and actions of a true hacker.  So the cool stuff (Kung Fu fights, playing with cool guns, etc.) is the Matrix equivalent of pictures of the Playboy unclothed pretty girls whereas the philosophy stuff is the equivalent of the Playboy articles.  Now in my callow youth I used to read Playboy.  I read the articles and I looked at the pictures.  And I enjoyed both.  I probably even enjoyed the pictures more because the articles were there.  But the articles without the pictures?  No!  I wouldn't have read that magazine.

And this is demonstrated by the other two movies.  The plot of the other two movies has to do with saving Zion.  It's a classic "save the town (western) or the neighborhood (modern cop movie) or the world (James Bond movie) from the bad guys" plot.  It's just not that interesting.  We've seen this plot enough times that we know that the "whatever" will be saved in the nick of time just before the closing credits.  And there's another problem with the second and third movies.

By the end of the first movie Neo has effectively become Superman.  In fact he flies using the exact same "right fist pumped in the air" style made famous in the Superman movies.  There's even a direct reference to Superman in the dialog.  The problem with being Superman is that taking on normal baddies is just not fair or interesting.  As numerous writers of comic books, TV shows, and movies have learned, if you have a Superman as a good guy you need a super-villain as a bad guy.  Now we learn that Smith has had "upgrades" early in the second movie.  That, combined with the fact that there are now Smith clones all over the place, is supposed to make for a super-villain.  But it just doesn't work.  But wait, there's more.

The problem with super-anything is how do you kill it?  This shows up most clearly in the climax fight at the end of the third movie.  Neo beats the crap out of Smith.  Smith beats the crap out of Neo.  But, since they are supermen, this does not kill or even seriously injure either of them.  So how do you wrap things up?  Well, first you have another action sequence that goes on for far too long while they try unsuccessfully to kill each other.  Then finally they decide that it's not important who wins the fight.  In a big letdown Neo ultimately gets inside Smith and all of his copies and explodes them from the inside then dies himself.

To wrap it all up, it's harder to make a good action movie than it once was.  In fact, it's just plain hard.  The first Matrix move was and still is a great action movie.  That's because it gets the balance right.  It has a truly interesting plot.  The plot has ideas and a great justification for the action.  It has a great babe, at least in my opinion.  The romance never works for me.  I think that's a result of weak writing of the romantic components combined with a wooden performance by Keanu Reeves.  But Carrie-Anne more than makes up for this by being a great action babe.  She looks great doing jumps and fights in the action stuff and is easy on the eyes the rest of the time.  Finally, the action scenes are great.  They are human scale, draw the audience in and cause you to root for the good guys.  They are also very creatively done.  With all three components in balance the movie rocks.  The other two movies in the series are not so good.  The most obvious defect is the plot.  It's just not that interesting.  The babe/romance is no better but also no worse in these movies.  And finally, in spite of the fact that they are technically far superior, the action sequences in the other movies are inferior to the first movie as entertainment.  The Wachowski brothers spent too much effort putting "more" into the sequences and not enough effort making them entertaining and human scale so they would draw us in.