The Matrix

Then it is now my headcanon!

John Wick really was The Matrix the whole time. I can dig it.

Got to wonder what the deal was with Man Of Tai Chi though. I guess Neo was going through a villain phase.

Edited by Soble on Aug 20th 2019 at 2:52:09 AM

My interpretation of Man Of Tai Chi was that was a Previous 'One' who was a little faulty.

Edited by Guy01 on Aug 20th 2019 at 2:58:13 AM

Shouldn't be too much of a problem to digitally de-age Carrie Anne-Moss, when you compare side-by-sides of her as Trinity from 20 years ago to her as Jeri Hogarth in the present.

Geof Darrow, concept artist for the original trilogy, says he's working on the new film, that it's a sequel, not a reboot, and that most of the original cast is returning.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Aug 20th 2019 at 5:39:37 AM

How are they gonna retcon Neo's and Trinity's deaths?

Dunno… Hollograms? Shapeshifting robots?

The Machines remade them as programs in order to understand humanity better.

Was Neo confirmed dead? I remember it being kinda ambiguous.

It's fairly trivial to bring back Neo and Trinity; you just need another cycle of the Matrix in the continuing war between the humans and the machines. Or you could (ugh) use the Matrix within a Matrix idea (ugh) which I'm not a fan of.

I actually have thought significantly about what I'd want Matrix 4 to be; I'll be more excited about this movie if they choose a title like "The Matrix Deception" or "The Matrix Delusion".

I thought it was that Neo's archetype existed in each cycle, just that they weren't always played by Keanu Reeves.

And I thought they'd ended the "cycles" of the Matrix by Neo... having a climatic showdown with Smith in the Megacity.

I must say, I'm quite hyped, as being a major fan of The Matrix, I always wanted to see at least one more good film in the franchise, as Revolutions was a really weak way to send it off. Helps that this new film is being written by two highly acclaimed authors.

By the way, do we know why there's only one sister at the helm this time around?

It looks like Lilly Wachowski also retired from doing Sense8 for the second season, so perhaps she's busy with other things or just too tired?

That is exactly what I was thinking.

If I was making a Matrix 4 and had to fit Keanu and Moss into the film, I'd have their characters be human-machine interface AI in the new post-revolution Matrix. Maybe bring some of the other dead cast back to fill similar roles as interface and utility AI.

Have some disgruntled humans complaining about how the machines stole our faces to trick us into buying what they're selling. Throw in a conflict about a burgeoning issue that might upset the delicate peace between humans and machine. Maybe feature an Agent program as one of the mixed humans-and-machines group of protagonists.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 21st 2019 at 9:50:48 AM

Ooh, having an Agent as a protagonist would be a nice twist. Like making the Terminator into a good guy for Terminator 2.

It's nice there's going to be Matrix 4, but there is no happy ending for it just like John Wick 4.

There is a happy ending in John Wick 4.

The main character kills everyone. Everyone.

It would be interesting if part 4 addressed the issues/inconsistencies with the first three. Like humans being a power source. Make Matrix an elaborate hoax to make humans feel special, to give the ones that need meaning a struggle; their fight. While in reality machines are there just to preserve humanity and make everyone happy. Maybe mankind created machines that became too smart too fast and took instructions in a completely unexpected way? Maybe the first generations consented to the matrix as a way to transcend the body? So many interesting places to take this movie.

Make it philosophical again but from a different angle.

Edited by googlebot on Sep 1st 2019 at 11:50:14 AM

The series already works fine if you assume that the machines were using humans as a Wetware CPU (which was the original explanation before execs nixed it for being "too complicated"), so you can do a minor retcon to put that back in canon. No need for a huge retcon like the one you're suggesting.

When writing a sequel, it's best to just build on what came before and not get caught up in the weeds trying to "fix" things from previous entries. Dedicating a 20-minute plot point to how the first three movies were wrong and don't understand how batteries work might seem satisfying to a writer with an axe to grind, but it would just bog down the movie in practice.

Fix Fics are much more compelling to their writer than to the actual audience; they tend to just come across as egotistic and self-congratulatory in practice. Just look at the live-action Scooby-Doo: it's basically a two-hour essay about how Scooby-Doo sucks and you should hate it, disguised as a film adaptation. And it's terrible.

"Humans are batteries" is dumb. But it's baked into the films now. If you were writing an adaptation or reboot, you have a legit reason to revisit that plot point and tweak it into something more sensible like "Humans are CPU processors". But as it is, going back to go "NO, Morpheus was WRONG, this movie was WRONG, everything is WRONG," would just wreck the movie's tone. Best to leave it be and work on telling a compelling and interesting story instead.

There's a principle of improv known as "Yes and". When performing in a collaberative work, you don't want to undercut or undermine other performers. You can build off of what they do, but you don't contradict it. If someone says "I was kidnapped by alien Nazis," you don't go, "No, you were not kidnapped by alien Nazis." You just keep building the scene. Even if it's dumb.

The same is true of writing. It doesn't matter if you're writing My Little Pony. You take that cue and you goddamn write My Little Pony. If you're too good for My Little Pony, then maybe you shouldn't be on the My Little Pony creative team. I've seen films and shows where it felt like the creative team didn't actually want to be working on this film or show, that they didn't really respect the material they were given to work with. And that never produces good art.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 1st 2019 at 6:25:09 AM

Good point. I feel like 2 and 3 did kind of a soft retcon of the battery thing by never mentioning it specifically, just leaving it as a vague "machines need humans", which is probably as far as they'll go in the new movie. Doing any full retcon, even a relatively minor one like that, can easily feel self-congratulatory, even when it's made by the same people who did the original.

I can think of a way to fix the "Humans as Batteries" thing without a full retcon: The Machines have access to some chemical or something of that nature which safely produces some form of harness-able energy when exposed to organic brain activity. In other words, humans are one component of a battery.

And yes, you can introduce this pretty quickly, too. Have someone mention the material by name, have Neo ask "What's that?" and then have the the character quickly explain it. Then, have Neo ask why nobody's told them about it so far, and have the side-character say "Oh, I didn't know you were interested in how their batteries worked", to which Neo will sigh and say "I suppose I'm not".

Edited by Protagonist506 on Sep 2nd 2019 at 7:31:16 AM

Jada Pinkett Smith is in talks to return as Niobe.

I'd always hoped that if they made another Matrix movie it would be a sequel that initially looked like a reboot. Guess they're not doing that.