Hacker Cinema
Making 'Enter the Matrix'
2003 · Film · documentary · 28 min
Directed by Josh Oreck
A look at Enter the Matrix: The game's story picks up just before The Matrix Reloaded and runs parallel to that of the film. Bend the rules of the Matrix with martial arts, pilot the fastest hovercraft in the fleet, or just fight with lots of guns.
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3 comments on Hacker News
I haven't played it since (and I know it's generally considered Not Very Good) but I remember greatly enjoying the Enter The Matrix video game, largely because the concept of tying the plot of the game into Reloaded directly was such a cool idea. it wasn't just your typical video-game-of-the-movie, instead it follows the story of two minor characters from the films that runs parallel to the second film. it's kind of a bummer that basically nobody else used this idea for anything else.
Don't forget Loki, or WandaVision for that matter.
I think there's been both qualitative and quantitative changes to American pop culture. Today's audience is able to handle more sophisticated or just convoluted complex narrative structures than in the past. From comic book cinematic universes to Christopher Nolan's gimmicks, we've come along way from straightforward standalone popcorn films. Now even dumb action movies have to be not just a sequel but intertextual, living within a cohesive fictional space. Everyone knows what "canon" refers to and most know common tropes. (Speaking of R&M, that show seems to be an example of running out of tropes to the extent of burning itself out, imploding into bigger and more meaningless reveals.)
That's also because of quantity. We've simply got too much content, across both films but TV shows, games, tie-in novels, comic books, and other media. Merchandising has been huge since the original Star Wars, but now every franchise has a Wiki and dedicated scholars. It's a whole new level of meta. Maybe that's the only way we can handle the scale of content we are bombarded by; to try to fit them together into cohesive contexts.
I don't know what that means for us as a society or as a culture, but I do note that The Matrix, or at least its sequels, helped to accelerate this process. Back in 2003, the series had both the Animatrix animated shorts and the Enter the Matrix video game that added to the story depicted on-screen, even introducing key characters that movie-only viewers would be confused by (such as the Kid).
I would say that dense intertextuality and cross-media world-building, not so much the Gnostic question your reality themes (which are old hat now), is the current defining legacy of The Matrix.
Fun fact: the sequels were supposed to be experienced by first watching The Animatrix, then playing the video game Enter the Matrix, then watching the 2nd and 3rd films. Try it sometime (if you can still find the game): it results in a much better experience.
There's a lot of weirdly introduced characters in the 2nd film especially that leave you thinking "wtf was that there for?" but were actually the continuation / conclusion / intersection of storylines started in one of the animatrix shorts (e.g. the kid) or the game (the other crew).