Hacker Cinema
The Matrix Reloaded
2003 · Film · 138 min
Part of The Matrix Collection
Directed by Lilly Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
The Resistance builds in numbers as humans are freed from the Matrix and brought to the city of Zion. Neo discovers his superpowers, including the ability to see the code inside the Matrix. With machine sentinels digging to Zion in 72 hours, Neo, Morpheus and Trinity must find the Keymaker to ultimately reach the Source.
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28 comments on Hacker News
I skip forward whenever someone starts singing, or there's a prolonged dance scene, or pointless montages with music. For example the Zion dance party in The Matrix Reloaded. Or the many movies showing people dancing at the wedding party for several minutes.
Taylor Sheridan shows: let's show a bit of nature with some country music playing for 20-30 seconds for no reason at all -- five times in a 42 minutes episode.
My god, the MTV Movie Awards Reloaded. My friends and I were obsessed with this when it came out. They included this on the DVD of the movie too. I remember going to someone's house and we were going to watch it for the millionth time but then we figured out we had the VHS of the movie which didn't have it. Great parody. Holds up better than the film.
I still like The Matrix Reloaded, despite its flaws and unpopularity. Revolutions is pretty hard to defend. Resurrections is genuinely one of the five or ten worst movies I have ever seen in my life and I can only assume it was bad on purpose.
> they will aggressively try to remove your property rights from it.... similar to the NYC squatters rights thing.
I think that's bad-faith reading of the quote from one arborist, not the CA Governor or Treasurer or Dept Director of Parks and Recreation. The way I read the article is that it was implied the state should have considered buying out the owner of the forest (or at least part of it) with state money and convert it to a park. I don't know whether that would have been economically viable and I don't understand people discussing here how forestry policy on redwoods changed after that, but it would be good to see numbers on all this, even if the answer was no.
FYI Lucasfilm shot the Endor scenes in Del Norte in Apr-May 1982, a year before release of RotJ. So, another huge errorbar would be estimating the film's popularity (if there's a deadline on the property being destroyed, as in this case).
99.999% of movies aren't memorable or profitable like the Star Wars trilogy, so they add no value. Also, this stuff isn't predictable at shooting time before the film's release. Compare e.g. 'The Matrix Reloaded' (2003) car-chase scenes were filmed in Oakland, but aren't that popular. But also the Boston Public Garden Bench from "Good Will Hunting", a low-budget $10m film by two young guys people had never heard of [0], or the prison location from 'The Shawshank Redemption' (the closed Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, OH).
[0]: https://www.livethemovies.com/home/the-boston-public-garden-bench-from-good-will-hunting
As someone who rarely watch movies/series, I was paying ~100$/month worth of subscriptions until I cancelled most recently. Why? Content fragmentation is mentioned by everyone, but to me, the main problem was that I could never get a proper watching experience even after finding what I wanted:
1- English subtitles only available with CC: I want subtitles because as a non-native English speaker I cannot understand some of the accents. I hate it when the subtitle says: "glooming musinca playing"
2- Quality issues: I'm watching on a 4k OLED TV. Watching the matrix reloaded for the 10th time, and seeing the actors appear in two places because of some weird compression artifact pulled the plug for me.
3- Quality issues: I used to buy Crave's 4k subscription. It limits content to 720p on my Linux machine. Let's imagine a world in which I'm OK with it, IT DOES NOT GET PROPERLY FULL SCREEN ON ANY OF MY MONITORS/TV. I paid for a 65" TV, I want to see a video fill at least one of the dimensions.
4- UX issues: Sometimes I pause because I want to check something in this scene. Do not dim the scene, I'm not interested in all the details you are spitting to the screen.
5- UX issues: I'm not OK with you showing me ads before I start watching my show
6- UX issues: Sluggish apps on some TVS/streaming devices
7- On my Chromecast, made by Google, I want my guest to use a guest session on YouTube premium, to not mess up my recommendations, ads start playing. This is the same device, I've not even signed out, just using a guest session.
8- I can keep going on
I understand that license holders play content availability, but the problems above could easily be solved if any of the streaming services cared about their customer satisfaction. I canceled because even when I found something to watch, I never enjoyed the experience. Now I'm an inch away from canceling YouTube premium, and then Spotify.
I think it's the opposite. I think the adults are watching series that have more complicated plots, and require a longer attention span. They're taking their kids to go see movies like Thor and Transformers where there might be sexuality (Megan Fox doing pretty much anything) but no one is actually getting it on. Part of this is almost certainly large movie studios not wanting to push the bounds of conservatism, but it might also be that actors nowadays are less willing to get their kit off.
Of course, my head canon is that Neo and Trinity killed off the movie sex scene in their Zion romp in The Matrix Reloaded. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes it so offputting, but it makes tortoise sex look hot by comparison.
ChatGPT's list is interesting, the data must skew more heavily towards old internet where culture was more America centric. The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, Avatar, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Westworld, Ex Machina were all very directly or moderately inspired by Ghost in the Shell 1995. Ghost in the Shell was likely inspired by the original Blade Runner. There might be others, but I am not as familiar with them. There are at least 5 films that seem to confuse inorganic AI with organic AI, almost like the model associated a larger class of aliens to AI because of specific strong relationships between AI technology and alien technology. I wonder to what degree it treats the word AI as being both artificial intelligence and intelligence that developed in artificially created life.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
I don't really see these as examples of bad CGI. But I noticed that I rarely notice "bad CGI". Maybe it's because I play a lot of videogames so I am more used to computer generated graphics? I keep reading online and my friends tell me how "the surf wave in Die Another Day looked horrible and I can't watch this movie because of it", "how fake Smiths look when Neo is fighting them in Matrix Reloaded" and I never really notice those things.
The largest crew is during "principal photography" which is when the live action scenes are filmed (i.e. involves actors on sets or location). This takes a few months for an average movie, longer for a complex shoot like the Matrix. It seem to have been four months according to the your quote. But the whole production takes a lot longer. Pre-production with storyboarding, planning, casting, set-design, costume design etc. starts a long time before filming. The Matrix was probably in pre-production for at least a year. And after principal photography we have post-production (editing, music, sound, color grading etc.). Traditionally CGI was applied in post-production, but todays blockbuster movies are basically CGI throughout with the live action scenes composited into the CGI. Post-production seem to have takes about a year for the Matrix.
In short, a lot of people work a long time on a movie on this scale. The credit roll are the names they have to mention due to contracts or union regulations, but a lot more are involved in various support functions or as sub-contractors.
And of course salary is not the only expense. You need soundstages, workshops, offices, administrative functions. Movie equipment is extremely expensive. Set building can be expensive - for Matrix Reloaded they literally built a two-mile stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere in order to film the car chase scene.
If you need on-location shoots, there is a lot of logistics involved. Transporting a large crew and equipment to some inconvenient location and establishing the necessary infrastructure.
I'm confused by this statement. I agree Matrix Resurrections is worth watching, it's quite good. But I'm also a fan of the other 4 films (Matrix, Reloaded, Revelations, Animatrix). Many people I've talked about the films with agree.
Personally, I found Revelations to be some what weaker than the rest, but they all form a pretty compelling and enjoyable series.
I was not able to watch the first movie when it was released in cinema because I was a year to young to watch it (Germany late nineties and no PG-13 madness as it is today). But I watched a double feature when Matrix reloaded was released a few years later. And I still remember that I saw the color grading of Matrix Reloaded and was really annoyed by it. For me Matrix before the sequels where released was blue (you can also see this in the movie poster, which you can find green graded versions now as well ;)). With the release of the sequels everything became green. I’m also the owner of the blu-ray release and was not amused by the color changes.
Mmm, so... Crazy amount of people sitting down and talking for an action movie, almost like a black and white French film. Anyway... I remember how people said at the time how the previous sequels 'Matrix Revolutions' and 'Matrix reloaded' were not as good as the original. 'Resurrection' is like a sequel to them...
Not all the time. Every once in a while we get the interfaces in Tron Legacy or The Matrix Reloaded:
https://ilikeinterfaces.com/2015/03/19/terminal-ui-tron-legacy/
and
https://nmap.org/movies/matrix/trinity-nmapscreen-hd-crop-1200x728.jpg
or sometimes they even use real software, like NMAP
https://nmap.org/movies/
But yea, for the most part they're only for show.
Didn't know this but yup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U - scene from The Matrix Reloaded where Trinity uses nmap and sshnuke. Looks like there's a re-creation of the on-screen display here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J2IdllfHh8 but the typing is faster than in the movie.
Also, the Jurassic Park scene to which you're referring was a real picture of SGI IRIX's 3D file manager. It was visual fluff, but functional visual fluff.
Trivia: On the "Construction of the Bay Bridge" one, pan down to the Southeast a little to the Alameda Naval Air Station. In 2001 you can see the construction of the freeway set[1] used for The Matrix Reloaded.
Direct link to view: https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse#v=37.79184,-122.33478,12.026,latLng&t=1.73&ps=50&bt=19840101&et=20181231&startDwell=0&endDwell=0
[1] - http://www.filminamerica.com/Movies/TheMatrixReloaded/FreewayChase/
Reminds me that the balance between logic and emotion within a sociological system was explored many moons ago in the Matrix trilogy through the relationship between the Architect(Logic) and Oracle(Intuition).
WARNING: Mild spoilers if you've not seen the Matrix films
The analytics led social media platforms are evolving towards the early versions of the Matrix created solely by the Architect and ultimately rejected by the humans within:
"The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equalled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being.
Thus, I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.
I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.
If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother." Architect - The Matrix Reloaded (via Wikiquote)
As an industry (and engineers) we have a tendency towards being led by logic and there has been a cultural focus (e.g. DevOps) on being led by metrics...we can sometimes miss or downplay the squishy yet equally important emotive side of systems ;)
> where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.
Narrative differences aside, this is what happens to Morpheus in the Matrix movies though. In The Matrix Reloaded Morpheus comes to realize that finding Neo doesn't end the war with the machines and that the prophecy he believed in was just another system of control. Morpheus says, "I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me."
Matrix: What if we are all living in a simulation and don't know it? What does this mean for the human existence and how we perceive it?
Animatrix: What if we get so smart we build machines that are so advanced that we can discriminate against them? What happens when humans create life and expect that life to remain servile?
The Matrix Reloaded: What if we fleshed out this world to show multiple societies co-existing, although not entirely peacefully? What if we throw a bunch of rehashed dialog from other science fiction films? What if we change the style to be slicker? Can we pull it off if we inject just enough substance to make people want to watch a third movie?
The Matrix Revolutions: Take the wheel, I have no idea how to end things but there should be some massive fight scenes. Ka-CHING, baby.
Also The Net, Antitrust and David Fincher's Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have very realistic computer sequences.
Antitrust and Social Network also show real source code that compiles (C, Java, Perl, Bash, HTML), Antitrust even explains "Open Source" to the audience. The camera work (especially showing relevant parts of the computer monitors and pan around to keep it engaging for a longer time) on all four movies is really fantastic.
* The Net (1995) - filmed one year before the World Wide Web got traction with the first fully graphical Mosaic web browser: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
* Antitrust (2001) - famous for highlighting the open source movement, features a "CEO" that resembles a mixture of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in one person as evil character, shows Linux desktop and command shell, and shows real Linux developer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
* Social Network (2010) - very realistic, based on real detailed technical blog posts from 2004 on LiveJournal from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin's memory: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) - nmap tool, etc.: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/
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* Jurassic Park (1993) - real 3D file manager application on Unix desktop, first use of OpenGL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/ , see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ and http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
* movies (like The Matrix reloaded) that use the nmap tool: http://nmap.org/movies/
"The Matrix Reloaded is a film that the Matrix would have made, if the Matrix had been asked to make a film about the Matrix" - Jean Baudrillard
In The Matrix Reloaded, Trinity uses nmap and then an OpenSSH exploit that was published a couple months before the film officially opened in theaters. Contrast this with Swordfish, where you get lines like (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "We have a DS3, allowing you to access eight systems simultaneously." Ugh, just hit stop and go outside.
Back on topic, Tron: Legacy to me feels like a highly technological father/son movie, in the same way that Google is a highly technological advertising company. So it seems we're already living in the future. "The Matrix has you..."
Suppose you use the same freeway set for exactly two films: (1) the big expensive sequel _Matrix Reloaded_ (2) some cheap indie zombie film (being on an entirely empty freeway in the middle of the day is kind of creepy all by itself) ...and then the set has to be destroyed - a storm knocks it down or the land owners decide they want the space back for some other use.
One rational accounting method would be to split the cost evenly between films (or perhaps you could divide it based on how many hours/days of filming was done in that location.) But film #1 (a) made a profit, (b) owes percentages of the profit to people who made the first film. Film #2 lost money and was made by people with less negotiating power than Keanu Reeves, so having it lose more money doesn't benefit the studio. Given this simple case, you'd want to allocate as much of the expense as possible to the first film, leading to court battles over exactly how the cost should be allocated. Was this set used for more hours for film #1? Was it more crucial to the plot for that film?
And okay, that might still be manageable. But what doesn't work is to leave the number of films to be shot there open-ended. If the freeway set stays up, the lawyers representing Keanu Reeves can reasonably argue that you intend to make one hundred films there, so the _Matrix Reloaded_ production should only get dinged for 1% of the cost rather than all of it or half of it.
> 6. Tricky Hollywood Accounting
To film _Matrix Reloaded_, they built a fake freeway on the Alameda naval base in San Francisco. I drove on it (as an extra in the movie); it was really really cool. The company originally thought of keeping this set around for a while to use in driving scenes for other film projects, but they ended up destroying it instead. Why? Because the film was likely to be profitable! A film set that's only used for one movie and then destroyed can obviously be deducted (as a necessary expense) from the profits of that movie, whereas a film set that's reused for several films can't. So this "tricky accounting" can have the effect of artificially inflating production costs (as well as distribution costs).
Well give the Matrix (Reloaded) some credit, in the scene with trinity hacking the power grid, she used nmap to attack a known ssh exploit: http://nmap.org/movies.html
First off I have to admit that I actually like Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions.
I appreciate those two essays and highly enjoyed reading them. But when interpreting such works I'm always cautious not to read too much into small details. I found the overview about philosophy refreshing but when the author begins to claim the movie got it wrong in some place but insists on some special philosophical trait I become suspicious.
I still recall a guy 2 rows in front of me in the cinema stood up and shouted, somewhat uncontrollable, "YEAH!" when he saw the Trinity (actual) hack in the Matrix reloaded (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_hacker_cred/). LOL.
Okay, I'll say this much in defense of the Matrices: (a) the first Matrix movie is emphatically not a stinker; (b) I appreciated the second two a lot better after reading these links [1]:
http://corporatemofo.com/media_and_mediocrity/the_matrix_reloaded_the_corpor.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20071005000019/http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/031109matrix.htm
I mean, I still don't think the sequels worked very well, particularly #3, but I admire the audacity of the experiment.
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[1] (Alas, the second link now appears to be Wayback Machine material. Essayists, defend your archives!)
He was the lead animator on Matrix Reloaded. And, of course, he has this film to show.