The Fourth Poster of The Matrix
The Matrix: Matrix Reboot is a reminder of the inexorable passage of time — The Matrix is a movie 23 years ago, and The Matrix 2: Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution, which sparked a philosophical debate, are nearly 20 years old.
In fact, taking "The Matrix" as a reference, "Matrix Restart" has not regressed. In the movie, Alice in the Mirror appears several times, and there is a meaningful sentence in this classic children's book, which the Red Queen said to Alice: "You have to run fast to stay in the same place." "Over the years, the Wachowski sisters have been running fast, but they have only stayed in the same place, and their stay is far away and ancient for this generation of young audiences.
The matrix reboots, and the directors, the Wachowski sisters, openly ridicule the "reboot" in the film, and by the way, ridicule all Hollywood workers: we always tell old stories the same way. Dare to make this kind of joke of "cutting themselves off from their peers", it can be said that the sisters still have the psychological advantage saved by "The Matrix". Even after the first decade of this century, "The Matrix" was early characterized as "a commercial cool film benefiting from the dividends of technological development" in the classroom, but back at the end of the last century, the concept and audiovisual landscape it produced were ahead of its time.
Stills from The Matrix part IV
Another non-mainstream translation of The Matrix is called The 22nd Century Killing Network. In the context of the nascent network and virtual communities, when the mainstream western ideology that holds the right to speak coldly questions the parallel world of data and digital identity, "The Matrix" impacted the commercial film market at that time with a fierce anti-mainstream posture. The little clerk Anderson abandons the reality of material excess and bottomless desire, enters the "matrix" of data and code to find and defend the truth, he gets rid of the illusory material world that surrounds him, and transforms into the savior hero "Neo" in the matrix, which literally means "brand new" in English. Born on the tail end of the 20th century, the story is a preview of the various RPG games that have become popular for more than 20 years. Moreover, at the design level of audiovisual scenes, "The Matrix" provoked the mainstream context of Europe and the United States at that time, Anderson's world of material abundance, the right to speak and aesthetic taste of the Bourgeois class stipulated the appearance of reality, and in the matrix of data identity reorganization, all materials disappeared. The desolate, dim, barren "matrix" is the creator's resistance to the strong cultural landscape of that year, they stand on the side of being ridiculed and excluded by the elegant culture and have no right to speak, using games, gangsters, action movies and other techniques that are considered vulgar to create a landscape that is not elegant, in order to build another spiritual world of Zion City.
But the two directors did not categorically identify the matrix as a "better world", and the "Reloaded" and "Matrix Revolution" released in 2003 are deconstructions and reflections on the parallel world of data: even if the shackles of material are freed, the spiritual Garden of Eden is still unreliable, the matrix is not an ideal country, it can be designed and manipulated, can the awakening and escape of individuals really be realized? This is a flip of the praying mantis flycatcher yellow finches in the back, and it is also an open-ended issue for different opinions. 20 years ago, the Wachowskis, who did not have many cool words, paid tribute to "The Adventures in alice's Mirror", the framework of the trilogy of plays and Lewis's novel are echoed, mirroring each other's reality and dreams, both sides are true and false. At that time, the audience's discussion on the philosophical issues of the audience could actually be summed up in a simple sentence - Zhuang Zhou Mengdi, Butterfly Mengzhuang Zhou.
The Matrix trilogy seems to leave open discussion, but in terms of conceptual setting and play design, it is closed-loop. It was the studios, not the creators, who wanted to squeeze the dividends from the old work, and the Wachowski sisters were clearly tired of the discussion of the issue of "the world of the flesh and the world of data", and in "Matrix Restart", they openly teased with the words of the characters: It was Warner that had to "restart" this thing.
Time has turned many sharp-headed directors into old artists who look back at the classics, and the Wachowski sisters try to maintain a sense of avant-garde, but their feelings make a different choice.
Neo confronts the designer of the matrix again, who once again triumphantly states that "people in reality are immutable because they don't want to change", and Neo's response is: "We don't transform reality, we transform the matrix." "It's funnily, and Matrix Reboot can be seen as an old story tackling the trendy "metaverse" of new issues. The creators do not wishfully sing hymns for the "metaverse", nor do they want to dwell on whether the "carbon-based culture" of human reality and matter and the "silicon-based culture" of digital identity and data construction eliminate and replace each other, but they believe that in the cyber world, the symbols composed of data will inevitably obtain the subjectivity of identity.
This can be seen as the vanguard of moderation, and the essence of moderation is nostalgia. This determines the hesitation and inconsistency in the expression of Matrix Restart. The Wachowski sisters still look at the conservative and boring Bourgeois, denouncing the oppression of women by american middle-class culture, but the scene pointed to by the "American middle class" is no longer the cheesy small restaurants and inns similar to Edward Hopper's paintings in "The Matrix", but the MUJI-style mansions and large and uniform companies. Anderson's psychiatrist (who is also the "matrix" designer) has a strong Victorian atmosphere, a room illuminated with soft light and exudes a sense of security, and it is easy to feel through the picture that the director has no negative emotions about this space, and even, it is difficult to distinguish whether it is the director or Neo, with an unwilling attachment to the "doctor's office". 20 years ago, they thought that since they entered the world of data, they should abandon all their physical feelings, especially their appetites. Now that the matrix is restarted, the people composed of bytes have planted strawberries in the matrix, and the cyberbor people do not want to regurgitate reality, they want to extradite the color of reality. People in the matrix no longer imagine smashing reality, they care about how to create "feelings" in the matrix. Moreover, the ultimate factor that sustains and sustains the Matrix is the love between a man and a woman that spans life and death.
Gentle nostalgia becomes the director's blade to himself— when the matrix innovates itself for the sake of "love and feeling", it is not that it abandons the reality of "no cure", it is the earlier, pre-modern "historical reality" that completes the quiet evolution of the matrix. Standing on the threshold of the current "metaverse", "Matrix Restart" is a retro migration, so it is ridiculed by the younger generation of audiences as "old soil". "Soil is not soil" is a matter of opinion, and "old" is indeed old.
The first three posters of The Matrix
Related: Wachowski entered the room, and "The Matrix" transformed the mainstream style of Hollywood at that time
In 1996, the Wachowski group, who were still brothers at the time, completed their first feature film, "Crazy Flowers", an immodest film in which the "snake scorpion beauty takes risks for the snake and scorpion beauty", which imitated the classic bridge of film noir everywhere, mocked the tradition of film noir, and broke the stereotype of "snake and scorpion beauty" from the male perspective. The lads don't go the usual way, standing out from the independent film industry in California and attracting the attention of big studios. The brothers seized the opportunity to output to the producers a sci-fi concept mixed with Japanese manga and Hong Kong action movie styles.
Part of The Matrix was inspired by Yuan Heping's 1990s Iron Horse, a saga set in China in 1858. The film itself is not complicated, but Yuan Heping created many extremely elegant scenes in the film, such as a passage in which two actors facing each other in order to grasp the floating piece of paper, both flying in the air, and their bodies are as dexterous as paper kites riding the wind. These images had a great impact on the Wachowski brothers, who wanted to put the chivalrous legends of the East and the freehand Chinese martial arts dramas into the scenes of the Japanese anime cyberpunk they were obsessed with, and a chowder of mutant science fiction movies that had never appeared in mainstream Hollywood movies.
"The Man in Black Morpheus suddenly appears, and he tells Anderson, a hacker with the screen name 'Neo', that the world he lives in has been manipulated by the controllers of the virtual world of computers, and that humans must enter the matrix of ma t r i x to find a way out. The matrix was originally designed to fight for free will and rebel against human enslavement, and as a result, it was enslaved in reverse. Neo chooses the latter between the brilliant but nihilistic reality and the desolate but real matrix, which he constantly fights and discovers that the matrix is also manipulated. "In the late 1990s, when artificial intelligence and virtual communities were still not well developed, the high concept output of the "Matrix" concept impressed Warner Studios. The producers took the Wachowski brothers to Hong Kong, invited Yuan Heping to California to work as the film's action designer and martial arts finger, and gave him five months to train the male protagonist, Kino Levis, in which Neo's aerial bouncing, spinning, turning, kicking and soaring movements were personally filmed by Kino, without the use of stand-ins.
Yuan Heping's action design and the "bullet time" famous scene created by the Wachowski brothers using digital shooting technology, these two innovative elements give "The Matrix" a highly recognizable style, opening the door to a new world of mainstream Hollywood films. At that time, Hollywood commercial films pursued fast-paced editing, with shorter shots and shorter actions. The idea of "The Matrix" is the opposite, the director borrows from the late 19th century photographers to shoot motion decomposition action images, in the action scene paragraph, place dozens of cameras on the track of the motion lens, make a series of photos with still image effects, after digital processing, forming a "continuous motion picture", as if time stops, elegant play in freeze frame or slow motion. The spectacle of "Bullet Time" is both the convenience of digital innovation and the bold stylistic evolution of the aesthetics of film media by creators taking advantage of their technological advantages.
Time has passed, even if "The Matrix" explores the postmodern issues of the technologically developed era to expose superficial pretense, but a black-clad Neo faces the bullets that break through the air, with Yuan Jiaban's light body and flips backwards, time is frozen - these action scenes with spiritual charm have been paid tribute to in Hollywood, and have not yet been surpassed. Looking at the history of cinema, it is "The Matrix" that allows audiences around the world to see that the aesthetic taste of East Asia can so strongly shape mainstream Western films.
Author: Liu Qing
Planner: Xing Xiaofang
Editor: Zhou Minxian