Ab und zu findet man ja Sachen da kann man nicht viel zu sagen ... außer vielleicht ... gibt es die Wahrheit vielleicht doch?

John Sutherland

Sorry, Saddam, but you're just another part of Hollywood's publicity machine for the new Matrix films

Monday February 3, 2003
The Guardian

There is a libel currently going around that the American campus is quiescent. Torpid even. Untrue. I have rarely detected such excitement in the student body. Not the war, of course, but the imminent release of Matrix II and Matrix III. Bliss to be alive in 2003, but to be young is very heaven.

Many movies fill theatres. The Matrix was something else. It filled that hole in the young American psyche where religion used to be. The storyline is well-worn SF. Machines take over the world and become body-snatchers - storing human bodies in underground vats to generate energy for their own nefarious ends. The human race is a worldwide battery farm serving a mechanoid Enron.

The twist is that homo sapiens doesn't know what's happening. The machines have created a virtual earth - the Matrix. In it, human beings think they are living their normal lives. Paranoid, or what?

A saviour named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is plucked from the vat by a small band of guerrillas. Neo is the "One" (he used to be the goofy one in the Bill and Ted films, if you recall). He learns his destiny from a lady Oracle and is trained by a macho master, Morpheus (Larry Fishburne), under whose instruction he becomes nimbler in martial arts than Jackie Chan, faster with a gun than Clint Eastwood, and holier than the Dalai Lama. He re-enters the matrix and kicks mechanoid butt.

The first film in the series got the kind of lucky break money can't buy. The warrior Neo is kitted out in ankle-length black trench coat, shades, and shotgun. The film was released three weeks before the Columbine massacre and worldwide fame for trench-coat mafiosi, Harris and Klebold - the Keanu lookalikes. Wonderful PR.

What made the movie addictive were the special effects; particularly the 360-degree flicker gyrations in the fight scenes. Zero-G kung fu, cognoscenti call it. Technicians call it the "bullet time effect" (if you're curious, go to www.howstuffworks.com).

Newsweek proclaims 2003 "The Year of the Matrix" (tough luck, Saddam). The first ads for MII, costing £30.4m, went out last week during the Superbowl. "Animatrix" teasers will be released on the internet in February, just as the smart bombs begin to fall on Baghdad - perfect synchrony. Beats Columbine.

A franchise industry of Star Trek proportions is being generated. For the truly cultish there is William Irwin's The Matrix and Philosophy, a book in which a squad of big brains think deeply about what it all means (heavy, heavy). Down the cultural food chain come the novelisations and Samsung cellphones, tricked out to look just like Neo's handy gizmo. Video games are scheduled for simultaneous release. And for the kiddy winks there will be ludicrously overpriced action figures.

MII (The Matrix Reloaded) will hit the screen in early May and MIII (The Matrix Revolutions) in November. The Wachowski brothers (who directed and wrote the screenplay) are not making George Lucas's mistake of having the audience grow old between instalments.

Security has been tight. It is known that the effects got so expensive that Keanu kicked in £23m to prevent Warner Brothers from cutting the budget. Spoiler sites claim to have got the storyline. In MII, the machines invade humanity's last redoubt, Zion (a name which should ensure good Israeli bookings). They use "Virii" (viruses?) - nasty little critters which degrade "reality" in amazing ways. There's great excitement about a freeway chase against the flow of traffic which, as Fishburne says, follows the rabbit down the hole as far as it can go. The last of the trilogy, Keanu solemnly divulges, will feature Neo crucified and resurrected (Jesus&#33.

But who cares about story. It's the F/X, stupid. And, of course, the dollars. You want free religion? Try the Salvation Army.

Geklaut von: http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featur...,887681,00.html