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My son and wife have never seen "The Matrix". So I decided for fun to make a single movie that combines ALL four Matrix movies into one epic movie.
My intention was to make something more concise, less esoteric, and more grounded in traditional cinema.
I decided to reframe the whole series as a drama about simulation theory, mental illness, technology, and our cultural-addiction to mass corporate entertainment. Movies like Robocop, Blade Runner and Total Recall got there first, but maybe 'the politics' of "The Matrix" was the new something, something that made it connect differently. Yet, for film that had such an impact, no one seems to like nor respect the 3 sequels and many games that have come out since which puts the movies in a strange place in our culture.
For a couple of good reads on the cultural impact of "The Matrix", check out:
https://variety.com/2019/film/columns/the-matrix-20-years-later-1203176896/
Anyways, my take on "The Matrix" is now edited more like a traditional and classic movie with 5 acts. I've done away with virtually ALL scenes that take place in the grungy 'real world' wasteland, with only those scenes necessary to ground the film. With the reveals coming to us like layers of onion being pealed away. When my brother first told me of this film, I had this totally different movie in my head, where the reveal about the machine world happened later in the movie, and where there was more of emphasis on the virtual world of "The Matrix" itself. So I tried to re-edit these films to match that original memory.
The film now plays more like a Philip K.Dick adaptation, similar to "Total Recall" where you the audience can decide if Neo/Thomas Anderson is crazy or interacting with an underlying reality. I wanted the movie to be more Lovecraftian this way. And a bit like David Cronenberg. So with that classically minded thinking, I did a cuts only edit without any radical changes beyond that of the narrative. By leaving much more to the imagination AND to mystery I'm surprised how well it works. The audience was cut out of the fun of the storytelling here, which was a mistake by the Wachowski siblings. We want to let the audience help do some of the hard work of taking a story like this to different places of our imagination.
To recap, I decided to reframe the whole series as a drama about simulation theory, mental illness, technology, and our cultural-addiction to mass corporate entertainment. Movies like "Robocop"(1987), "Blade Runner"(1982) and "Total Recall"(1990) got there first, but maybe 'the politics' of "The Matrix" was the new something, something that made it connect differently. Yet, for film that had such an impact, no one seems to like nor respect the 3 sequels and many games that have come out since which puts the movies in a strange place in our culture.
My "Matrix" plays more like "Blade Runner" or "Total Recall" in the storytelling sense. In the movie sense, I tried to re-edit the entire series to be more like a Cyberpunk "Wizard of Oz" that leaves more to our imagination, and is more in sync with 'reality' and the true life scientific reality of dreams, mental states, other dimensions and existence itself.
As a side-note, my "The Matrix" is more grounded in cutting-edge "interdimensional theories" from the last decade about the theory of everything, the sci-fi exploration of sorts you will sometimes oddly find in pop-culture, especially in great subversive shows like "Adventure Time", "Gravity Falls", "Rick & Morty" and the movie "Interstellar". I don't find 'simulation theory' to be all that compelling, or interesting, and to be more basic than you may think. Reality and science is wild enough as it is IMHO.
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