The Matrix: Inverted

“Matrix” held out incredible promise. I just watched the first movie again. The premise, the writing, the execution were all acts of genius—which is, unsurprisingly, why the movie was so successful.

The Wachowski brothers then set about squandering the franchise. Essentially nothing happened in Reloaded. They insulted movie-goers and Matrix-lovers around the world with a vacuous, poorly-executed story. They completed the travesty in Revolutions. There were some good effects, but the story lacked any imagination. At the end of the third installment, the series stands at the brink: they need a sequel to complete the story (if they could figure it out), but they had pissed away the market receptivity to any such sequel.

Even a beginning screenwriter like me knows what the right conclusion should be the Matrix story. Keanu will eliminate the matrix, but first he has to free all the humans in the farms to keep them from dying. He does this in an incredible guerilla raid (together with Bruce Willis, of course) on the farm, with hundreds of thousands, or millions, of humans detached from their connection to the matrix and sliding down those great slides they had in the first movie into the river or whatever it was.

Then Keanu goes into the Matrix, which by now is populated only by bad guys, and does the kung fu thing to kill them all. Keanu cannot really act but that’s not that important since all he needs to do now is to find the computer where the matrix is running and finally shut it down for good.

Keanu and the newly freed humans all return to Zion, and have a fabulous party lasting for days and weeks. This part of the movie should contain lots of sex.

But then Keanu notices a black cat walking by a doorway. A few seconds later, he notices the same black cat walking by the same doorway. If’s deja vu all over again. That’s right. Zion is just another matrix. All the people there, including Morpheus, are just creatures in the larger matrix. Now we see what Keanu’s real purpose in life is—to break through this greater matrix. His first surprise comes when he finds that Trinity is nothing more than a creature from the new Matrix, one of the bad guys/girls sent in to prevent Keanu from figuring out what’s really going on and trying to kill him if it looks like he is going to.

That’s a sequel that I would have given my left arm to see.

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