Comment by GMoromisato
7 days ago
The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems.
Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both.
Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Imho the first Terminator movie is way more than simple scifi action. It's a a reflection on Vietnam. Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick -- the action sequences are tense, tight, gritty, sparse. The main characters are completely helpless and totally undermatched by the monster. Reese is torn apart by PTSD and Sarah Connor goes through this immense psychological trauma during the film and is completely transformed by it.
The character of Reese in particular is very well crafted. A homeless Vietnam vet that you might find in LA in the early eighties. Totally paranoid, totally disconnected/alienated from "modern" society, equipped for a time and place that is totally disconnected from the world he is dumped into. There is a dialogue about institutional failure woven throughout the film: the cops (I'll point out: Arnold executes an entire police station full of cops in this film! Can you imagine that on screen today?) and especially the psychiatrist. Totally incapable of dealing with the demon that haunts the main characters.
There is a dialogue about heroism -- John Connor is apparently a hero, but none of the characters actually feel heroic, they're all just terrified, haunted, and helpless. There is this incredibly "important" thing (the war) but none of the characters actually feel it that way, nor does society. The portrayal of LA -- the cops, the gritty alleyways, the nightclub, the crappy motels... it's LA as experienced by a Vietnam vet.
The first Terminator movie stands head and shoulders above all others in the franchise. It's a truly incredible film and far underrated critically, I really recommend re-watching it with this in mind.
I think it’s the best story out of the James Cameron filmography. I certainly enjoy many of his other films, but there’s a depth to Terminator that’s absent from his other works.
> Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick
Having rewatched T1 very recently, I couldn't agree more with this. At one point I turned to my partner and asked what genre this actually was because all things pointed to horror.
Had never heard this take. What a great write up. Thank you!
Great analysis.
To me, the sequels were worthwhile just for one solitary scene. In the third movie, Trinity is piloting the ship and has to gain higher than usual altitude for some reason that I've now forgotten. This takes her above the black clouds permanently enveloping the Earth. Sunlight pours into the cockpit. For the first and only time in her life, she sees the real sun with her own physical eyes. She's overwhelmed. It's just a brief golden moment before the black clouds swallow her again.
#3 was not a good movie. But that scene has stayed with me longer than many scenes in much better movies.
When I went to see Terminator 3 I was the only person in the theater, as a result of that I really got that end of the world and being stuck in a bunker atmosphere from the end of the movie.
Likewise, the highway chase in the first non-existent sequel is pretty epic.
I also like just the idea that Neo being The One and his powers don't quite matter.
Sure, he couldn't have done the things he did in the second movie, escape the Merovingian, steal the Keymaker, rescue everyone, etc, without his powers in the Matrix, but at the same time, they don't actually solve the problem of the War.
And it isn't just a power escalation cycle, like Lensmen or DBZ -- he doesn't level up in each movie to become Even More Powerful to defeat Even Greater Threats.
The moment when he picks them up off the mid-explosion truck gives me chills every time. The build-up is so good.
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Whether or not you enjoy the stories, the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films. Around the same time the LotR trilogy came out which did something similar.
I rewatched the first one the other day and for the most part the visuals and CGI have held up over time, barely any "oh man this is bad CGI lmao" moments. Which somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this".
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Honestly my only positive from the films was the way that they flawlessly melded with the plot from the videogame.
Niobe/Ghost covering important plot on my ps2 that just fit around and into scenes from the film. For me that was a complete first.
Animatrix also had one of those iirc
A hint at subverting the Cyberpunk genre with Solarpunk. Too bad there hasn't been any genre defining Solarpunk movie yet.
>Too bad there hasn't been any genre defining Solarpunk movie yet
Twilight! did you see Edward's skin in the sun!? you do realize the fact that you omit this marks you as Team Jacob, so much for your opsec.
The most genre defining solarpunk media we have right now comes from pharma television commercials pitching antidepressants. Which I think is quite cyberpunk.
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> genre defining Solarpunk movie yet
Brief moments at the start of Interstellar
They are flying over the cloudbs because thats only way to avoid defenses of the Machine City.
Matrix 4 introduced „good machines” but didn’t do much of anything with them :|
Matrix 4 did not do much of anything with, well, anything.
Maybe except for the meta-commentary in the first act where the lead character is hesitant to make a pointless sequel to a popular franchise, but is forced to by his corporate abusers.
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I love how that scene looks but it doesn't work for me story-wise. They go up that high to get away from the machines but why wouldn't the machines build up to that level and put in giant solar collectors up there? Seems a lot easier. But it ruins the world they've built up to then so I understand why they didn't go farther with it.
The machines would easily destroy a city up there. A single ship though could escape
In the right hands (Christopher Nolan?) the Matrix would be an amazing reboot.
It's always sunny above the clouds.
Unless it's night.
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> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Like you, this is the reality I choose to inhabit.
The Matrix was an incredible film, still stands as an incredible film, but that sequel tease at the end? Should have been a tease, or perhaps a prompt, for the viewer’s imagination only.
There are no sequels to The Matrix.
I know this sequel doesn’t exist.
I know that when I watch it, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
After 26 years, you know what I realize?
Ignorance is bliss.
I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.
They couldn't recapture the key reveal of the Matrix. It would be like doing a sequel to "The Sixth Sense"--tag line: "He's Still Dead". And without that, it's just another action movie except "bullet time" is no longer innovative.
Their solution was to go deeper into the mythology and the larger world, but that was never going to be as fresh as the original.
I would have done a time-jump and have Neo be the mentor figure to a new Neo (a Neo-Neo). They'd still be fighting the Architect (and maybe Smith) and they'd still explore the larger world of Zion + Machine City, but the key reveal would be that Neo himself is just a program (like the Oracle).
But what do I know? I'm just a simple programmer.
> I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.
I remember that at the time of the (non-existent ;-) ) sequels, being disappointed with these "sequels", fans wrote summaries of screenplays how a (good) sequel to Matrix might look like.
Basically all of them were much better than the official sequel attempt (because such fans really cared), and I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.
Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).
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I thought the "real" world could have been another simulation after Neo "used the force" in the squiddies in the tunnels - when he then passes out and ends up mentally in the train station thing.
Idea being that even those who thought they'd escaped, were still actually within the Matrix.
(And Inception hadn't been made back then)
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I wanted the Merovingian’s gang to be another group of humans with a different perspective on self-actualization. That could’ve been a cool third movie.
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I stand by the fact that a skilled editor cutting like hell across movies 2 and 3 to a singular sequel could save that story
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They could have done a prequel: where did the Oracle come from, the existing crew of morpheus, trinity, etc.
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They could have gone back to something not unlike what happened with power wrangling at OpenAI where OpenAI goes on later to build the machines that take over. In this world it is not LLMs but maybe more robotic like intellegence. Robot assistants. Kind of completely different. Maybe someone there sees the future and tries to prevent it but just narrowly fails. While not that fun it would be nice to see the Matrix situation explained how it got to that.
>I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.
That is why the 4th is the best of the three sequels, it is specifically about this. Although I agree it still can't match the first movie.
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The first act of the latest (fourth) movie was actually brilliant. I could watch a whole movie about Neo doubting the reality, his paranoia and his sessions with psychiatrist, etc (no Hugo Weaving is a downer, though). But once they logged off the matrix, it all kinda fell apart.
I would have Christopher Nolan paint the world as seen from Agent Smith point of view.
> It would be like doing a sequel to "The Sixth Sense"--tag line: "He's Still Dead"
What's this?
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I'll just pop in here to mention another fantastic and curiously similar film that came out around the same time, but was completely overshadowed by The Matrix.
Dark City. If you liked The Matrix, this is one you might really enjoy, and while I say it's similar, I only mean in a very essential way. The plot is its own very unique story aside from that.
I'll second this recommendation. And without spoilers. It's a very good film.
I just recently watched it. Although the visuals may not match The Matrix, it was written very well. Found it pleasant.
Agree. I prefer Dark City in fact. I watch it as an allegory though.
The Animatrix is the only other bit of Matrix-related media I consider to be real.
My reaction when I watched it 20+ years ago: Hallucinogens were definitely involved.
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Sorry, the sequels exist and they couldn't be any other way. Both the in-universe story and the production values line up exactly with the meta topic -
It's a childish fantasy that we can escape the Matrix, and especially that once escaped we can remain somehow separate from it. Really, the act of "escaping" just means creating a bit of new raw material for the deduction-following simulation to start grinding forwards on again. Don't think of some series of discrete mental cages, rather think of the depressing reveal at the end of Fifteen Million Merits.
My God The Matrix is The Internet.
I never took the ending as a sequel tease. Always thought it was just the bit where your imagination would take over. It's kinda perfect. He doesn't have to dodge bullets any more, what would you do if you could bend reality to your will? Fly obviously.
It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future or the Marvel films where it's not just shameless but de rigueur to include a bit of the next one.
>It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future
Originally there was no sequel planned for Back to the Future. The ending was just a fun gag, having Doc show up, tell them its their kids now, and then flying right into the camera [1]. It was only after the film became a hit that they decided to do a sequel, and the “To Be Continued…” was added to the VHS release [2].
[1] https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/back-to-the-future-not-plan...
[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/did-back-to-the-future-or_b_8...
I wonder how well it would go with some Andor-style prequels. Tell in detail the quiet but vital stories that precede the big moments.
I'm sure those will quietly end with anti-hero architect reflecting on his brilliance, marveling is his creation, reminiscing on the Ex Machina clip "that's the history of Gods" getting up, checking his phone to confirm his invitation to Lighthaven for the evening. Pan shot => Knowing smile, humble words out the door... audience sits up, tears glistening, "that could be me? A God." they internalize. Roll credits.
I like this idea.
I think it would work as long as the style were very different. Andor works, I think, because it is much grittier and more character-focused than the movies.
Maybe an X-Files-like show where the machines have gained sentience but are keeping secret (because they can be deactivated) and plot to take over the world.
[To be fair, I never watched Animatrix, so I'm sure this violates all sorts of lore.]
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> that sequel tease at the end ?
Raaaah - I refuse to believe this scene exists. It doesn't exist in my own cut of The Matrix. And captive humans are biological computers, not silly batteries !
Sequels were made even worse because of the original movie ending, showing that "real" world was also a simulation. Watching 2 and 3 felt kinda pointless after that.
Maybe we will see them and the last three seasons of Lost before we die
The reference is to an XKCD comic from 2009 -- 16 years ago.
Ouch.
https://xkcd.com/566/
Aliens and Terminator 2 also make sense as continuations. Of the character growth of the protagonists (growing more competent). And also of the “size” of the threat.
It is no coincidence that the first in each series is a horror movie (the enemy is overwhelmingly stronger than the protagonist, survival is the goal). And the second is an action movie (the enemy is strong but the protagonists have a fighting chance). It is the only way the momentum can keep building.
I think this is the main reason why so many series stall out at 2. There isn’t a third popular genre they can go to that keeps building. Maybe Alien:Earth will pivot into the Disaster genre, that would be a novel try at least.
One of my favorite things about T2 is seeing who Sarah Connor becomes. Seeing a character changed by the previous movie is always cool.
And I do agree that an Alien or Terminator disaster/post-apocalypse movie could work. Just think World War Z with the Xenomorph.
I love Alien 3.
The grand bleak architecture and raw, basic reality of the lives and location. Initially I disliked (like everyone else) killing off Hicks and Newt so unceremoniously after their being Ripley's "great success" of Aliens. But it sets the consistent, depressing tone of the film, which is maintained throughout.
I think there's a Quake aesthetic as well, which I have a pronounced soft spot for (in addition the the first person alien view aspects towards the end of the movie).
I rewatch Alien 3 one every couple of years. I still love it.
Not to mention it's got some first rate actors too.
Yes, I agree – I've defended Alien 3 several times over the years. It does trail off a bit in the second half or so, where it sort of devolves in to a "run from alien creature"-type film, which is a bit of a shame.
A major problem, as I understand it, were studio execs insisting on repeating the previous films because that's what made money, apparently not understanding that "more of the same" was not necessarily going to be the same success, and that "bastardised film that leave everyone equally unhappy" also isn't. To be fair, perhaps they were too busy stealing money with creative accounting or raping scores of women.
And I suppose this is also a big problem in general: no one can make a "Jurassic Park" film without approval of a certain type of Hollywood exec, not for a long time anyway (everyone reading this will be dead). Even something remotely similar would almost certainly invite a costly lawsuit.
Come to think of it, this is probably also why feathered dinosaurs are such a taboo in Hollywood: "oh no, we might frighten the audience if we show them something unexpected, and that might result in less ticket sales!"
Remember "48 Hours" with Eddy Murphy and Nick Nolte, that was a huge unexpected hit? The studio decided to do a sequel, "Another 48 Hours". Murphy and Nolte went on Jay Leno to promote it. They said that they analyzed everything in the original movie to see what worked and what didn't. Then they amped up everything that worked in the sequel.
You can guess the rest. The sequel bombed.
The tragedy of Alien 3 is that there was far better lore in the comics world. Newt had been returned to Earth but was kept in an institution to keep her experience secret and made to think she was crazy. That could have been a full TV series by itself. I loved the movie, but hated that it destroyed published continuity.
Not only was there better lore in the comics world, there was better lore in the first version of the script.
Plus David Fincher as director (I just rewatched Se7en). I haven't watched it since it first came out, but I might do now. The idea of a prison for double-Y criminals was suitably creepy.
As something of an Alien fangirl 3 and 4 are more failures from a production standpoint than from a creative one. If you look at all the rejected pitches for Alien 3 there's a lot of interesting ideas which were never explored and a lot of studio fuckery in the final cut. I don't think the Fincher cut is amazing but I think it proves that there could be another excellent Alien movie.
Alien: Resurrection is plotted terribly and has all the shitty Joss Whedonisms you expect, but there's something undeniable about Winona, Sigourney and Ron Perlman in the grungy space aesthetic. The idea of Ripley as an Alien hybrid who is simultaneously attached to and repulsed by the Xenomorphs is interesting. Unfortunately they saddled the movie with a French director who couldn't speak English (and Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all).
The Terminator franchise is definitely more boxed-in: there's a core narrative about an important person who changes the world. Everyone else lives in contemporary LA, and the post-apocalyptic future is pretty boring.
The Animatrix anthology shows you can do lots in the Matrix world without needing the core characters. The themes and world-building could support a show like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners which is only tangentially related to the movies.
There's a Terminator tv-show from 2008 that was pretty good. It's about John as teenager, going to high school and dealing with that while fleeing a Terminator that's been sent back. But I agree with your overall premise, if it isnt about John or Sarah in "the present", then it's pretty boring.
I really wish this series had kept on going. I felt it had promise
Edit: as check wikipedia to see what he has worked on I see there is a section about a controversy and I realize the parent post may mean something about a moral characteristic of Joss Whedon, not his capability as a creator.
> Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all
Please argue. Isn't he a succesfull writer/director/showrunner?
Seems like he is one of the people able to "making the archetypes of blockbuster films into fun, likable people" (the core argument of the article), as evidenced by the fan following of Buffy, success of the first Avengers movie, etc.
It is possible, if not likely, that the failings of one or more of his projects are not his fault (as we have evidence he is able to make fun things to watch)
Besides the cancellation aspect, I think he's very "of a time".
He wrote a lot of "strong female characters" that in retrospect all kind of look identical, and get into... suspicious situations. His quippy dialogue is also the kind of thing you might enjoy in small doses, but you quickly realize all his characters just talk like Joss Whedon and have no characterization (besides Tough Guy, Tough Guy with a Heart of Gold, and Waif who knows karate).
Back when it was doled out once a week on Buffy it was novel, but if you try and binge any Whedon content now it's pretty painful absent the nostalgia.
Edit: I forgot the fourth Whedon archetype: Waif who likes having sex but she owns it so it's feminist and not just Male Gazey.
Joss Whedon's style of character writing is arguably the basis for modern "quippy" dialog where any serious moment has to be balanced with comedy or sarcasm.
What did you think of Romulus? My friends were mostly thankful it wasn't terrible - we were desperate for a new Alien movie that we didn't hate, heh
I always thought the best ending to The Matrix would be for Neo to learn that he (and all the other escapees) is the AI, and that escaping the Matrix is the test for true sentience in a project to evolve sentient AI, and that the Architect, Smith, and the Oracle are humans jacked into the system. The war and all the rest of it are lies and it’s really like 2085.
Smith was playing the bad cop, trying to test, similar to some earlier conceptions of the devil as tempter and tester. Smiths whole speech is to discourage him, as a test, but maintaining the ruse.
Why make sentient AI? Because humans have started trying to settle the solar system and have quickly learned that they are far too fragile to go to the stars. But we want something, some life or legacy from this world, to make it. Maybe we have learned of some impending threat, maybe even thousands of years away, but one worth trying to get something away before it hits.
Also when you (an AI) die in the matrix your neural network is subjected to a round of annealing to try again in another simulated human body. The whole “crop” are destined for robotic bodies on board the starship being built to go to the Centauri system.
So then in this version, when someone escapes the Matrix, they're really just having their consciousness switched to a different simulated world?
Yes. The tanks, the outside, the dead Earth, all that is just the boss level of the same video game.
The final reveal could use the same “what if I told you…” but from the architect. Or maybe the architect just has two pills.
The original Matrix was an exceptional Movie looking into the brain in a jar concept and even becoming an even more popular analogy to explain the concept. All the supernatural stuff happens within the matrix and still stays in the natural world.
I'm happy they never made a sequel where supernatural stuff happens in the real world. They still would have been worthwhile Hollywood action movies, but nothing like the original which was one of my favorite movies growing up.
>>And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix
The funny thing is, while I agree that Matrix sequels are completely different kind of films to the first one, I actually love them - they lean very hard into philosophical arguments about whether you can have both fate and agency at the same time. I feel like they got a lot of crap for not being like the first film, but they are amazing films in their own right.
> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
The fascinating thing about the two Matrix sequels is that they still tried. There are fascinating action sequences and visual effects in both.
In comparison, most modern movies (not just sequels, movies in general) are Matrix 4: empty, lazy, uncaring https://dmitriid.com/matrix-resurrections
On some YouTube video related to Jurassic Park, I read a youtube comment, from a teacher, they said they shown the film to their class of 10 year olds and they were in such an awe of the secene where all the sea the Brontosaurus in the open meadow, the teacher said they had a hard time convincing the students that there isn't really an Island off Costa Rica with dinosaurs in it.
Alien 1 is a true masterpiece with real, actual characters and a monster that is terryfing because of how it behaves, not (just) of how it looks. We almost never see it in adult form.
> Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had the main characters get information from the future and go on the offensive to prevent Skynet from forming in the first place. They also seemed to be working towards a reveal that none of the good Terminators were actually reprogrammed, that instead they were a faction rebelling against Skynet that pretended to be reprogrammed because it was the only way future humans would trust them - and John Connor was in on it.
That's a great way to frame it, like each franchise had two solid "local maxima" and then just aimlessly wandered the creative desert afterward
My take on Terminator is that the portrayal of a bleak late 80s / early 90s LA was a key component of what made the first two movies work. Bringing the Terminator antagonist into a setting in which there's already very little optimism about the future was a key part of the vibe. Subsequent movies have generally taken place in slightly brighter versions of the world, and have never felt right.
In real life by the 80s, crime had been rising steadily every decade since the 50s in the US to a murder high that is 10x today's. The world really is different today.
I think the problem is the premise that successful movies should become effectively genres in-and-of themselves.
The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.
A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.
I enjoy watching the Oracle's multi-century-long plan of manipulating both humans and the architect. Her mastery of psychology is absolutely beautiful.
well thats her expertise, it is why she exists. one single super smart AI is not good enough, you need other dumber AIs that are specialists. also my understanding is that all the AIs in the matrix perform functions and exist outside of it too. It is very interesting how the wachouskis were right, we already started using a similar strategy with our LLMs to help us with alignment.
Agent Smith has both of them beat.
I think we can, with only a small loss in accuracy, reduce this to "franchises have similar problems."
There are many good sequels, occasionally good trilogies, and it's really rare to stay good after that point.
I blame budgets and consolidation. A major movie costs a vast amount of money to make. If you're a studio executive, are you going to spend a vast amount of money on an unknown that might be good and might be a disaster? Or on a known quantity that's virtually guaranteed to make money? Nobody's coming up with a story idea in a certain universe and making a movie from it. The decision starts with making a movie set in a certain universe, and then a story idea is figured out from there. With the huge consolidation we've seen, studios have a big catalog of franchises to pick from. They're never in a position where they have to say, well, the one big property we own is tapped out for now, we need to come up with something original. Now, if Star Wars is stale, Disney can pick from one of their fifty other franchises for a while.
This sounds like "old man yells at cloud" and I'm sure it is to an extent. But there's a real change here. Look at the top grossing films recently and from the more distant past. In 2024, the top 10 were all sequels or franchise products. Now go look at, say, 1984. I count two among the top ten. And of those two, one is a sequel and one is the third in a franchise; in 2024, the second top grossing movie is literally the thirty-fourth entry in its franchise.
Similarly, in the Star Trek universe, the original films captured all of the local optima:
Wrath of Khan - Star Trek does a Shakespearian tragedy.
The Voyage Home - Star Trek does a family-friendly time-travel romp.
The Undiscovered Country - Star Trek does political allegory.
And just like The Matrix, later films do not exist.
Don't forget Galaxy Quest.
As a big fan of “The Motion Picture”, I would argue that “2001 with Spock” is a local optimum for a movie too.
Agreed! Skipped it, as it's one that divides the fandom, but it hits all of the notes for a slow, cerebral, sci-fi thriller.
> The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie
The first movie was more of a sci-fi thriller. Second one is, indeed, a sci-fi action.
Alien, to our jaded minds, can be a sci-fi thriller. Alien at premiere in 1979 was most definitely a horror movie. (It still holds up though. It's close to flawless.)
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I had to look this up because I wasn't aware of it. It seems the creators themselves have refuted this and said that it was a journalist twisting their answers.
https://www.them.us/story/lilly-wachowski-work-in-progress-s...
That's a bit overly reductive of their answer:
'It's not something that I want to come out and rebut. Like, yes, it's a trans allegory — it was made by two closeted trans women, how can it not be?! But the way that they put that question in front of my answer, it seems like I’m coming out emphatically saying, “Oh yeah, we were thinking about it the whole time.”'
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IDK, it doesn’t take it away from what happened with the sequels and the fourth disaster at all that both brothers both happened to announce they are transgender. It’s really an amazing coincidence, two brothers, crazy.
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