Bulletproof Monk
Out of context: Reply #26
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- chinglish0
ripoff? how about the Matrix itself!
this is my friend's rant about Matrix:
"Well here it is, the Matrix: I watched the movie and I found it fun, it's
entertaining but for many reasons I don't find it half as original as many
people. Honestly, once one sees enough movies they will begin to recognize all the various sources of inspiration that comprise the movie. First of all the martial arts wirework, clearly all the setpieces can be seen in Jet Li's Wong Fei Hong movies/Once Upon a Time in China 1-3 (1991-2), Yuen Wo Ping's
choreographed or directed films as well as Tsui Hark's other movies, the
Matrix has just added the wirework in the context of a sci-fi setting and
applied a major Hollywood budget and extended filming and post production work. All of us who have seen chinese movies have seen it before, it's not new, only now it's with Keanu.What's more, the concept of "jacking in", as Roger Ebert points out has already been explored in movies such as Strange Days(1995) and the idea of humans existing in an artificial world echoes the premise of Dark City(1998), Moreover he points out that the morphing the agents do when they assume someone's body borrows from Terminator 2's T-1000. I can add some more myslef, "jacking in"...also done in Keanu's Johnny Mnemonic(1995), Ghost in the Shell(1995) and Disney's
Tron(1982).The idea of existing in an artificial world or carrying on an existence that is unreal was put forth earlier in Blade Runner (people are cyborgs and don't know it), eXistenZ(1999) (they were in an interactive computer game) and Total Recall (what is a dream and what isn't?). Also, the idea of "The One" (say in a low voice for added effect) or mankind's last hope....Luke Skywalker anyone? also, aside from Star Wars(1977), the theme
has been done to death as exemplified by: Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man(1971), oh yeah Terminator 1 & 2(1984 & '91) again, Highlander(1986) and yes even Waterworld (1995)!! And the scenes of Zion from the trailer look a
lot like Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome(1985). Hey, maybe Tina Turner will be in Matrix: Reloaded also. Further, my friend Stella informed me that the idea of "the matrix", travelling through an artificial or computer-based landscape was conceptualized in William Gibson's book the
Neuromancer(1984!), and Roger Ebert makes similar mention of Gibson too:
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/eb…Oh, and slow motion has been done to death.....Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch from 1969!!), and John Woo most notably. The Bullet-time camera is their own innovation, but it serves no purpose really, and has been done to death by other movies, mostly through parody, since the original Matrix in 1999, so much so that it has lost much of its impact. *[just an aside: how come those dead swat officers on the roof disappear when Keanu does his bullet-time "surf"?] I'm not saying all of this to bash The Matrix, rather I'm just trying to make you or whoever else aware that there were movies that came out before Matrix who conceived of these themes and ideas as well as techniques first and should be credited as such. Example: Asian martial arts movies ie. Crouching Tiger aren't Matrix-style, in fact it is the other way around, instead The Matrix's martial arts scenes are Hong Kong-style.
What The Matrix did was to not really popularize these themes/techniques - because a lot of the movies I stated above are well-known and even famous films - rather they familiarized our generation (and younger) of movie goers with these concepts. End of rant. "