Last Wednesday, Warner officially announced:
company will gather its original team and prepare to start filming " Matrix 4".
The male lead is still Keanu Reeves , and the female lead is still Carrey Ann Moss. However, the director changed from the Wachowski brothers at the beginning to the Wachowski sisters (it seems that only the sister is directed).
should have been a big news that exploded across the Internet, but it encountered "Little Spider Leaving Marvel".
eventually became a lonely carnival for a few movie fans.
Picture source Sina movie Weibo
But 20 years ago, it was not the treatment.
After it was released that year, even the costumes of the protagonist in the drama became popular all over the world.
I don’t know how many people are imitating the movies to wear black windbreakers and black sunglasses.
I don’t know how many people have watched it dozens of times because of their love for movies and looked up countless information.
In the film industry, the hacker trilogy has caused countless latecomers to imitate and pay tribute.
Nolan once admitted that when he created " Inception ", " Matrix " gave him a lot of inspiration.
What story does the trilogy tell? Why is it regarded as a classic? How will the fourth part be filmed?
Today, let’s take this opportunity to review the “Matrix” trilogy.
dare not talk about it and understand it, and this article is just a throwaway.
I hope that while revisiting the classics with you, it can trigger more beautiful memories and more wonderful thoughts.
"The Matrix"
The Matrix
1999.3.31, 2003.5.15, 2003.11.5
"Matrix1" US version poster
丨Set the setting of the
movie originated from a thought experiment called Brain in a Vat.
This concept was proposed by American philosopher Hillary Putnam in his book Reason, Truth, and History (1981)—
Imagine that your brain is cultivated separately in a container, and a computer next to it sends signals of daily experience.
So, how do you prove that the surrounding environment is real?
This is the title of "The Matrix", the direct meaning of The Matrix.
丨Story
Let’s talk about the basic story of the movie first.
In the future world, humans have cultivated robots that will produce self-awareness.
Later, for various reasons, the two sides fought a war in the end.
Humans want to block the sky by blocking the sky from robots, but they still failed.
But the machine did not kill all humans.
Instead, they were inserted into tubes, filled with nutrient solution, and put them in a petri dish and started breeding like crops.
Looking around, it looks like a dark mechanical farmland, making people's scalp numb.
is said to want to seize bioelectricity in the human brain as energy.
This paragraph belongs to the prequel of the Matrix. It comes from the animated version of the movie
In order to maintain the stability of the human spirit, the machine even specially designed a huge human simulation social program:
Matrix ( matrix ).
In this world, people seem to have never experienced any world war, but live the same life as us.
Most people are happy and never doubt the authenticity of the world they live in.
But there are always some people who are born with rebelliousness.
Our male lead Neo (NEO), is one of them.
During the day, he is a programmer of beauty in the prosperous times, and at night, he is a hacker of beauty in the prosperous times.
He often suffers from insomnia and always has the illusion that Zhuang Zhou dreams of butterflies, and cannot distinguish between dreams and reality.
We all know what happened later.
After being rescued by Morpheus, Trinity and others, he realized that all this was not a dream.
He was really stripped of his clothes, his whole body was covered with tubes, and he was still sleeping in the sticky culture medium.
According to the prophet prophet (Oracle, the guide of the human rebel army), he is the savior of mankind (The One).
Only under his leadership can all mankind be rescued.
And the story of the trilogy is basically Neo's story line:
Neo's awakening, Neo's upgrade, Neo's martyrdom.
丨《The Matrix 1》
The first part is the best understanding.
To put it simply, it is nothing more than humans fighting robots (intelligent programs), good vs evil.
But even if you put aside the various complicated metaphors and ideas it contains, it is still a very excellent movie.
The tense and exciting rhythm, the classic showdown, and the exquisite visual effect presentation...
Just watch it as an action blockbuster (the martial arts director is Yuan Heping), which is enough to shock you to the point of being speechless.
I feel sorry for the weak, pitiful and helpless Smith
. The most commendable visual effects it presents is naturally the well-known "bullet time" :
First use 120 cameras to accurately place it on a route set by the computer tracking system, surrounding Keanu Reeves in front of the green screen.
Then, according to the shutter sequence and time pre-programmed by the computer, the entire action that needs to be shot is recorded in full.
Then virtually patch the differences between adjacent photos, and finally the computer blends the coherent dynamic image with the background. The final effect of
is so handsome that it is extremely cool.
But have you ever thought about it?
Triniti's must-have roc in every Matrix, spreading its wings is also very handsome. Why is it not famous for "bullet time"?
Personally think that although this plot is cool, it has its inner story logic.
i.e., Neo's awakening.
is not a banner, not a wind, but a heartbeat
In the movie setting, the degree of Neo's awakening is proportional to his ability in the matrix.
From the beginning, I didn’t even dare to walk on the window ridge to the current dodging bullets, it is the audience who witnessed his awakening step by step. How can it not make people happy?
As for Trinity, who has already awakened, Dapeng spreads his wings and is handsome, and the effect is obviously slightly inferior.
movies do not use too many lines to "tell" stories, because its images, editing, and soundtrack themselves are stories.
For example:
Before Neo awakened, the matrix was real to him, but with a little abnormality.
And for this, how does the movie show it?
has color tuning:
Needless to say, many people must have noticed it.
is the green that starts from the beginning and continues to the end of the film.
green to glow · Warner
has a sound:
If you still remember, when Neo was training in the boss's office, the sharp sound of scratching the glass was always strengthened in the video.
is probably similar to, chi——
realistic scene, non-realistic element.
Please make up your voice by yourself
Photography:
An ordinary office, shot at low angles, and there are down shots behind it, plus minimalist sets and props, which are photographed with a cramped and suffocating feeling.
has a design:
The famous "girl in red" in the film, the design team specially found a lot of twins and triplets to let them wear different clothes.
provides this creativity, of course, it is not just idle and has nothing to do, she also hopes that some viewers can notice it.
But in her opinion, no matter whether the audience can see it or not, this creativity must first meet the requirement of "abnormality in the matrix world".
This is the attitude you should have when making movies.
is the screenshot of the movie, and the lower one is the documentary "The Matrix: Revisiting the Matrix"
Although, these may not necessarily make a classic movie.
But in movies that can be called classics, these unforgettable pure movie languages are bound to be included.
For example, in "The Godfather", a scene where two generations of godfathers look at each other from a distance seems to have spanned decades, but I don't know if I should sigh.
Another example is the horizontal move shot in "Taxi Driver" that informs the sad ending in advance.
Part 1: "The Godfather 2",Part 2: "Taxi Driver"
Commerce and art perfectly combine, and the two can also be unified due to the theme of the film.
This is what I think is the most exciting part of the first one.
The Wachowski sisters once said that they don’t like the kind of movies that can guess the ending just by seeing the middle.
This is probably the cause of Neo's death at the end of the first part.
I don’t know how many people are watching the Matrix for the first time worrying whether Neo will die, but my heart is in my throat anyway.
I didn't expect that he was really dead.
I know he will live, but I can't think of how he will survive if he beat me to death.
is in this half expectation and half doubt. The director uses the internal logic of the story to give a scene that can be recorded in the history of film -
A rain of code that makes people goosebumps.
This is the director's confidence (dare to let the protagonist die) and also the director's talent (can make the protagonist resurrect perfectly).
Although there is no specific reason why Neo was awakened by a kiss, we can more or less guess:
Trinity's function is to awaken Neo and complete the upgrade.
Neo has also become the savior that everyone is looking forward to in and out of the film.
he also declared war on the world of machines on the phone at the end, and he was so handsome.
basically means: I'm here, you guys are GG.
Then, like a superman, rose up from the ground, flying over in the sky, as if life had reached its climax.
Many viewers are counting on him to fight to the death with the machine army in the sequel, fighting the sky and the earth.
But the Wachowski sisters are not.
They made another shocking reversal -
The so-called savior is just a chess piece used by machines to evolve from their own evolution.
丨"Matrix 2, 3"
If the first part gives the world framework of the Matrix relatively roughly.
Then the second and third parts (can be seen as a whole) are perfectly used to install everything the director wants to express with this world view.
mainly talks about a shocking scam set up by the machine.
There are already many detailed explanations on the Internet about the machine's layout.
I will not analyze it more here, but only talk about some conclusions with high acceptance.
First of all, one premise is that
The statement that bioelectricity is an energy source is not very reliable, so how much energy is there.
Moreover, since Zion's own spacecraft can fly through the clouds and see the sun, there is no reason why the machine cannot build it.
So the question is, then what are they keeping humans for? Nostalgia? Of course, it is possible to
.
After all, no matter how weak humans are, they are still their creator.
Triniti and Neo fly over the clouds in a spacecraft
As of now, the most credible statement is the following -
The reason why machines retain humans is to learn from human civilization something that is conducive to the evolution of machine civilization.
This is not surprising. Rulers and strong people are not the same as absolutely correct and absolutely advanced. There have been many examples in history.
For example, the Qing army was Chineseized after entering the pass.
As for what machines want to learn, no one actually knows because it has not been discussed.
There are so many sayings online, after all, I’m just guessing.
One of the more popular and reasonable inferences is that the robot wants to learn human creativity.
Because they don’t look at the falling apples, they think: Why don’t the apples fly into the sky?
But humans will.
All we have the law of gravity.
Newton
Of course, this is just a guess.
In short, the machine has established a matrix for humans and hopes to maintain the stability of the matrix.
However, since the matrix is a program, it will inevitably generate bugs.
is mainly divided into two types in the film:
, one comes from people. Although most people are willing to live in the matrix world, there are always those 1% of people born with rebelliousness and always doubt the authenticity of the world they live in.
In order to facilitate centralized management, the machine acquiesced the awakening of these people and exiled them to Zion (Zion), which is the base of the human rebel army.
and other classes come from the matrix source program . Those programs that have errors or are eliminated become "useless things" and become bugs. The French subordinates who appear in
films are basically this kind of program.
To clear these two types of bugs, the architect (the man who designed the matrix) designed the "savior program" and implanted it into Neo's mind.
Every time a certain time, the Savior will be activated and begin his journey of collecting bugs.
Then, through what the prophet calls "prophecy", he guides the Savior step by step to finally go back to the source program (The Source), and transfers the code he collected into it to complete the system upgrade (similar to updating patches).
At the same time, the machine photographed the army of squids destroying Zion.
Finally, let the Savior lead 23 people to rebuild Zion, and this cycle is repeated.
has been updated in the sixth generation.
So this seemingly magnificent path of human resistance is actually just to be better enslaved.
However, this is a little different for the sixth time.
main change lies in the prophet.
She is also an intelligent program with high authority similar to an architect, and its function is to study human behavior and psychology.
From the original intention, she still exists to create a more stable matrix.
But during the long process of studying humans, she began to gradually understand human emotions and developed a consciousness that wanted to help humans.
This can be seen from her taking in many little boys and girls in the film, and her attitude towards many people.
So she secretly implanted Neo the variable "love".
then gradually induces Neo to finally choose another path that is completely different from the previous five saviors -
gives up entering the source program and runs to rescue Trinity.
This is the first step.
Because the architect also said that if Neo did not choose to enter the source program, he could accept it, it would be nothing more than the complete destruction of human beings.
Even if the machine civilization loses human creativity, it is no big deal.
So the prophet took the second step -
Smith.
After he became a virus, he finally found the prophet.
In fact, it is obvious from this conversation that she had known Smith's movements for a long time.
To put it bluntly, the prophet is waiting for him to come and copy himself.
When Smith infected a highly authorized program like the Prophet, he truly had the possibility of threatening the machine world.
At this time, Neo had the capital to talk to the architect.
After the resurrection, Smith was associated with him, and it might even be understood that they are a symbiotic relationship.
So Smith wants to copy Neo in order to achieve a control effect.
I never expected that Neo had decided to die at this time and had negotiated with the architect.
result is naturally copied and positioned by the architect and then completely deleted.
Nho's sacrifice eventually brought about a brief peace between humans and machines.
mentioned above is the basic content of the trilogy.
but don't forget.
This is still just one of the many explanations. Because of the many metaphors and blank spaces in the film, a sentence has also been circulated on the Internet: There are 1,000 viewers, and there are 1,000 Matrixes.
The most debated one is: is Zion real or virtual?
Originally, based on the lines and reactions of the characters in the film, Zion should be in the real world, and there is nothing wrong with it.
But the director added a few incredible plots to the next two movies -
Neo tear the squid with his hands;
Neo can still see Machine City and squid (expressed as golden light).
So the "Zion Virtual Theory" that is widely circulated among netizens was born.
first set the conclusion.
Personally, I prefer to speak realistically.
On the one hand, because in the film, there is no other hint that Zion is virtual.
On the other hand, if Zion is real and virtual, it means that everyone's struggle and efforts are nothing more than a mirage.
This is too dark, too pessimistic, and it is not very consistent with the prophet's reaction.
ending with a smile on his face, looking at the new Matrix world
but.
The reason why I believe in reality is the last dialogue between the Prophet and Neo in the third part.
can basically be regarded as directly explaining Neo's "superpower".
Although it is in a "unexplained" way -
The reason why he is so awesome is because he has come into contact with the source program.
As for more details, the director doesn't seem to be planning to tell us.
However, many netizens still have made up various ideas.
The most popular one is the "remote sensing theory": After the awakening of , Neo can be directly associated with the machine world.
The reason why Neo fell into a coma due to catching squid empty-handed for the first time was because he was not ready to wake up to this level.
Prophet also spoke directly in this conversation. When will
be ready?
The moment when Neo makes the choice back to the machine world.
This is also one of the philosophical propositions throughout the trilogy, the choice under free will
丨The connotation behind the Matrix
Don’t look at what I said so much, in fact, this only involves the skin of the Matrix.
is its story level.
And its connotation involves various religions, philosophy, semiotics, science, and even Buddhist issues, which are diverse and complex. The various names in the
light film are enough for you to study for several days.
For example, the name of the film Matrix has both the meaning of "matrix" in mathematics, and the meaning of "uterus, maternal body, and life-raising".
For example, the virtual and reality that have been discussed in the film, the core comes from "Simulacra and Simulation" written by the postmodern philosopher Baudrillard.
At the beginning, Neo's hollowed-out book was released on the pirated CD.
And the page he opened was titled "On Nothingness".
Then if you think about these trilogies, isn’t it just a kind of worry about the existence of oneself?
There are so many in this movie.
For example, the rebels in the movie can't let go of that piece of beef, which is almost the same as we can't let go of our phones now.
virtual virtual brings us more real than real reality.
This is the charm of "The Matrix".
Even if its special effects may appear outdated after twenty years, the ideas it contains will not be outdated.
Here I will just act as a way to attract jade. I won’t repeat it. If you are interested, there are hundreds of papers waiting for you on the Internet.
丨Part 4 prediction
After talking for a long time, I have to return to the discussion in the fourth part.
One premise is that the matrix world has entered the seventh generation updated system.
In addition, from the end of the third part, we can know that the little girl Sati in the film seems to have become a new generation of architects.
And she herself is the product of "love" between programs.
Judging from the "Colorful Sky" computer wallpaper program she wrote last, she already has what we called "creativeness" at the beginning.
If the sequel is made, I guess she will probably become the protagonist.
Moreover, if humans were fighting against her, the way of fighting should be completely different from the first three.
because she looks more like a human.
Although she seems to be the "loved" party, she represents the machine world after all.
If we "judgment a gentleman with the heart of a villain" -
then it actually means: The matrix she wrote is more in-depth and perfect for human beings.
And the key to the sequel is how the peace between the machine and humans broke.
I guess there are probably two types.
first type.
Whether Zion is real or virtual (virtual theory is still possible because there is no evidence of refuting in the absolute sense).
or human beings are developing more and more powerfully, and they actively resist in order to gain more living space (realism);
or because the machine promises not to destroy Zion, people in virtual Zion will eventually face awakening (virtualism).
In short, in the end, it was inevitable to fight.
second type.
Perhaps to the future, machines are becoming more and more like humans.
thus created two machine camps with completely opposite positions.
One type wants to break its promise and eradicate the potential threat group of human beings, while the other type insists on peaceful coexistence between human beings and machines.
Then the contradiction broke out.
But, in fact, my biggest feeling is still my concern.
First it was Warner.
Why did it drag until now to shoot the sequel?
Although I am reluctant to admit it, the most reasonable explanation seems to be: sells feelings and stir-frys cold rice.
On the one hand, the Wachowski sisters decided to shoot the trilogy at the beginning, and they did the same.
It doesn't make sense after 20 years, I suddenly wanted to shoot the fourth part I hadn't filmed before.
On the other hand, what happened to Warner in the past will be a look at: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Matrix...
Which one is a world-class IP with countless fans and a strong momentum.
But now, if you say too much, you will be tears.
Considering Keanu Reeves' return with the popularity of the "Speed" series, it's hard to believe that Warner did not take advantage of his popularity.
" Rapidly Chase "
is the return of the original cast.
I have no objection to the actors, and Keanu's return made me so happy.
But when the Wachowski sisters filmed hackers, they once said: these three movies put almost all of their stuff.
What they love: various philosophy, animation, oriental culture...
What they feel: panic about technology, concerns about artificial intelligence...
Although these things can be repeatedly discussed, whether the director can integrate them into today's society is also a big question.
You can't pass 20 years, and it's still green digital rain.
even if they really have their own new views on today's society and the Internet.
But it is recognized that their filming level has been declining since "The Matrix".
In short, personally, it is hard for me to believe that the Wachowski sisters still have their previous creative power, and I am more suspicious of Warner's original intention to restart this series.
But Warner won't want me to think, it just needs it to feel.
Since they are going to shoot, we and the little movie fans have to pray silently -
million, and we must slap me in the face.
