How The Matrix Series Could Have Redeemed Itself

By Akela Talamasca on August 7th, 2009

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“The Matrix” is one of the greatest movies of all time. Everyone knows this. Even people who hate it can’t deny its massive influence on modern culture. Just think of how many amazing things came out of that first movie: “I know kung fu”; “Bullet Time”; crazy Platonic Allegory of the Cave-style metaphysics; the resurgence of kung fu into American moviemaking, etc. Those of us awake enough to really get into it left that movie with our heads blown right off our necks.

But, I think I speak for most of us when I say that the second and third movies let us down hard. What started out as a classic Hero’s Journey turned into something so horribly and needlessly convoluted and talky that it very quickly became a parody of itself, and left the fans wondering what the hell happened between the first and second movies to cause this trainwreck. I’ll tell you what happened: success.

The Wachowski Brothers had their brilliant idea, managed to convince a studio against all odds to bankroll it, and got their pure vision on-screen. And when the box office went crazy, the studio gave them whatever they wanted for the 2nd and 3rd movies. This meant that they had carte blanche, and so no one told them that what they were doing was insane, or even made any sense. Probably nobody understood it in the first place, so no one could tell when it went off the rails.

Instead of continuing to bemoan what could have been this generation’s Star Wars original trilogy, let’s figure out what it could have done to redeem itself.

The second movie should have concerned itself with Neo continuing to learn about his new abilities. He had that one epiphany at the end of the first movie, and he started to become The One — but he wasn’t quite there yet. In Reloaded, the focus should have been on that: the pressure of being the savior of all mankind, and what that would do to anybody, much less a dyed-in-the-wool doubter like Thomas Anderson (yes, “Doubting Thomas”, remember him?). He should have gotten his ass kicked more often by much tougher dudes than he was. The first movie talks about other failed messiahs — maybe there are still some around, bitter from failure, and thirsty for revenge against a system that tried to use them, then cast them aside when they were unable to deliver.

So the second movie is about tempering the blade against the backdrop of the rise of the machine intelligences, who recognize the true threat Neo embodies, and begin to move against him in earnest. We should have seen much more realityshaping from the machines — they can make reality do whatever they want, remember? It was understood that they were afraid to do too much of that, given mankind’s propensity for going catatonic when faced with too much stimuli outside of its understanding, but with the threat of extinction looming in Neo, it should have been an easy equation for them to figure: destroy Neo now, or face oblivion.

So how do you fight Superman and win? By taking away everything he loves. Threaten his friends, his loved ones, his compatriots, and do it in as many places in the world at the same time as possible. Neo can’t be everywhere, and he’s still trying to figure out how to do what he does. The machines give him an ultimatum: leave the Matrix, or witness first-hand the destruction of all life. Faced with this choice, Neo gives in and jacks out for the last time. The second movie should have ended on this cliffhanger: Neo down and out, exiled from The Matrix forever.

So how do you make a third and climactic film from that? With Neo discovering that his powers aren’t confined to the Matrix. He needs to learn that his awakening applies to all levels of his existence, including the Desert of the Real, the devastated actual Earth. What’s more, by coming to this realization, Neo awakens fully, becoming an actualized human with the ability to teach what he’s learned to the rest of surviving mankind. Imagine it: a civilization of superpowered refugees with only one goal: wipe out the machine society and return the Earth to its rightful owners.

You thought the Neo vs. multiple Agent Smiths fight was crazy? Multiply that by a hundred, as we get grand sweeping vistas of thousands upon thousands of humans swarming into the machine city, going insane and fighting giant mechs with their bare hands in the last great war for dominance of the planet. Forget kung fu — this would be as vicious and bloody as any battle between animals has ever been, primal and brutal.

This last movie should have been epic on the scale of “Braveheart” plus “Lord of the Rings”, a vast panorama of struggling figures and whirring technology, until the last robot has been broken, cast down among its brethren amid a smoldering pile of rent and twisted metal miles wide. The humans victorious at last.

The denouement would consist of scenes of rebuilding, as the humans finally move back onto the scorched and wasted surface. Neo has brought mankind back to primacy, but at what cost? Throughout the third movie, we should have scenes of Neo watching his army grow in both size and power, yet unable to shake a feeling of dissatisfaction — he knows the real work is to be done after the battle, when humans realize that this world is no longer fit to sustain life.

We now have two choices from which to select an outcome: either Neo realizes that the Earth isn’t dead, just in a coma after the beating it took during the first great war between the humans and the machines, and that he can bring fertility back to the soil, thus ensuring a future for mankind; or they need to leave Earth and venture into space. If we choose the latter, then we can make a callback to the final scene of the first movie, where Neo zooms up into the sky, but using the same kind of shot, pulling back from the ground, only this time to see what’s left of humanity, flying up into the outer atmosphere, leaving their homeworld behind in search of a new world to colonize.

Boom. Done. Over, decisively and definitively. No ridiculous philosophical posturing, no loose ends, no “but but but”. That’s how you make “The Matrix” Series work. It has to be about the journey, from innocence to gnosis, from powerlessness to puissance … and it has to involve all mankind, and a choice that is clear-cut and explicable. The trilogy as it stands makes very little sense, and culminates in nothing more than intellectual posturing. And Agent Smith, one of the greatest antagonists of all time, turned into a joke at the end, no more threatening than any moustache-twirling villain out of an old serial. The series needed to end with true change, and the evolution of all mankind, because those were the stakes set out from the beginning. Instead, what we got was muzzy-headed thinking, and a return to the status quo. Hardly befitting one of the greatest mindfucks of all time, was it? Maybe someday we’ll get another chance at this story, and hopefully the people who grew up dissatisfied with how “The Matrix” trilogy worked out will make sure they get it right the next time around.