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LACHY HULME FIRES UP THE HYPE
Source: <Moviehole>

Lachy Hulme (Sparks) does an excellent job in hyping the sequels:

Were you required to do much in the way of physical work, action scenes etc...if so did u get hurt?
I think my previous response takes care of that one. Obviously, no. All the ship's operators are free-born in Zion, meaning they can't exist inside the Matrix. So basically, I'm in the rear with the beer, which in "Sparks's" case is the perfect place to be.

what were some of the hardest sequences in the film...was anyone hurt?
Every scene was the hardest scene to film. You have no idea the level of mental and physical endurance required to sustain yourself in a project like this. From my point of view, it was the mental challenge of keeping six-hundred pages of script in my head -- meaning all the videogame stuff, plus the scripts for the two movies, even the stuff I wasn't in. I became kind of like the "encyclopedia" for some of the other cast members, because I memorized all this stuff. Shows you what kind of life I have, right? Too much time on my hands. But the physical stuff, the fighting and the action, that wasn't my problem. For that, you're talking about guys like Keanu and Hugo, and Fish and Carrie-Anne. Those guys busted their collective asses for two-and-a-half years! I mean, I can remember days when we were shooting in San Francisco, and I'd be putting my feet up having a grand ol' time making the videogame, and then you'd see Keanu getting carried -- literally carried -- to a little kiddies wading pool that they'd filled with ice. He'd lie down in it and they'd smother him in more ice, the poor bastard was so wrecked from the fight scenes he was shooting. And believe me, Keanu Reeves is no wimp. He's a big guy, he was in great shape. But smashing the shit out of one hundred Agent Smith's day-in day-out can take its toll, I guess.

Who did the martial arts training on the film, and what did this involve?
All the training and choreography was handled by Master Wo Ping and all of his Hong Kong guys. I'd hang around on set and watch them work -- which is an experience in itself, believe me -- and shit, man, do they work the actors hard. These Hong Kong guys, they're not mucking around. They are there to work, and they will not stop until they get it right. Take after take after take. And then, of course, there's those pesky Wachowski brothers to deal with. They do have a "slight" reputation for wanting things to be perfect.

how does the new matrix differ from the first film?
Bigger, better, bolder. They've taken everything to the next step -- more action, more drama, more plot-twists, more mind-bending philosophy, more love story, more everything. I truly believe -- and I know that when people see the films I won't be shot down for this -- I truly believe that "The Matrix Reloaded" will go down as the greatest sequel since "The Godfather Part II." Completely different types of movies, of course, but in terms of surpassing the original "Matrix," Andy and Larry have delievered beyond what anyone could possibly imagine.

This is a huge role for you. are you nervous about it opening and the reception you'll get as sparks?
Well, "Sparks" isn't a huge role in the scheme of things. I mean, the bulk of my work is in "Enter The Matrix," the videogame, which was also written and directed by Andy and Larry. In "Reloaded," I'm just hanging in the background waving to mum -- but the plotline to "Enter The Matrix" runs parallel to "Reloaded," so it's kind of like a separate movie in itself, but a movie that you can play. Like the title says: "Enter The Matrix," with the emphasis on "Enter." So, aside from all of that, am I nervous? Are you kidding me? This is "The Matrix," for chrissakes! How could I be nervous, man? I'm just proud to be associated with it, even if it's in a very small way.

You did the video game. what did that involve?
Well, like I say, the game is like a whole other movie. When I first auditioned, I had no idea what I was getting into. I figured, I'd be happy with maybe one or two cool little moments in the films -- whatever they're offering, y'know? I mean, I'd carry a bucket of water on a "Matrix" film, I'm that big a fan of the first one. So I audition, and I get cast, and about three weeks later I'm there in San Francisco, and I still haven't read the scripts yet, right? Basically, I have no fucking idea what I'm supposed to be doing. So I meet Andy and Larry Wachowski, and we're having a chat about the character, and I'm gathering from the conversation that I'll maybe be working on the project for, like, a month, max. And then Andy says to me: "You know about the videogame, right?" And I'm like, "Well, yeah, I've heard about it, I know you're doing some sort of game thing, so what's the deal?" So they start telling me about this game -- and I shit you not, I was stunned. The scope of what they were talking about, I seriously thought that these guys were insane. In essence, every single moment of the game was going to be performed by the cast. Now, that might not sound like much to you at first, but this is the first time in history -- and possibly the last time -- that something like this has been attempted. I'm talking about that when you play the videogame, that is the actual cast -- every movement, every moment, every line of dialogue -- all done on a Motion Capture soundstage especially built for this project. And on top of that, Andy and Larry had written the whole thing, including over one hour of totally new footage shot especially for the game. So you play the game, and then you go into these new scenes which link in to the movie, and then you're back into the game play which is also all linked into the movie, so you end up with "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Enter The Matrix" as one giant production. So I turn to Andy and Larry and say, "Well, how big is my part in the game?", and Andy leans back in his chair and holds his hands about six feet apart and he just stares at me and goes: "Biiiiiggggg." So that night, I'm back in my hotel room, and I finally read the scripts for the two films, and just like I figured, I've got a few cool little moments. And then I open this monstrous package which has all the game scripts in it, and there's hundreds and hundreds of pages to be shot -- and I'm on just about every fucking page! So: Let me put it this way: In the two films, I shot maybe a handful of scenes. But I worked on this project for fourteen months. The rest of the time was on the videogame. Like Andy Wachowski said: "Biiiiiggggg!"

have you got just as big a role in "revolutions"?
I've got a bit more to do in "Revolutions" that I do in "Reloaded," but if you want all the "Sparks" action -- basically, if you want to see what an absolute mental case this guy is -- then get the videogame, my man!


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INFOGRAMES PUTS MONEY INTO ONE BASKET
Source: <Financial Times>

The future of the company could hinge on the performance of its Enter the Matrix game, due to be launched on May 15 to coincide with the release of the sequel to the blockbuster movie The Matrix.

Infogrames bought Shiny Entertainment, a US studio that owns the right to adapt games from Matrix movies, for $47m in cash last year. It is expected to spend a further $50m on developing and marketing Enter the Matrix.

Mr Bonnell says: "The Matrix will be a phenomenon that will allow us to generate a great deal of cash". He expects the game to sell 2.5m copies in its first six weeks.

But one analyst says Infogrames will need to sell about 5m to 6m copies before it starts earning a return on its investment and even then it will struggle to generate enough cashflow to pay off debt falling due over the next two years.


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JOEL SILVER ON MOVIE SERIES
Source: <Video Business>

Video Business had an interview with Producer Joel Silver:

VB: With these Matrixmovies, shorts and videogames and your Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series, you are the franchise and movie series king. Is that part of the whole mix of creative and commerce, to build franchises?

Silver: I've seen the sequel change so much over the years. When I first started doing them, people thought they were cool for a while and then they became very, you know, in many cases, silly. When you finish a movie, normally, the movie ends. And then the studio would make a sequel and you had to try to find a way to go back ... I remember when we made Die Hard 2, I remember in the trailer Bruce Willis said, "How can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?" You gotta deal with it.

This is unique in that these [Wachowski] boys had this whole story. I mean, they had worked it all out. We weren't trying to find a way to make this story continue. The story continues in an incredible fashion. It's a fantastic story. And they had a way to tell the story in all these other areas. The Wachowski brothers are coming from comic books. They are big fans of serial pictures; they understand serial pictures, when a story continues. Look what's happening on TV with shows like Alias and 24. It's all serial fiction.

If we're crafting material that is good and the creativity is good, then franchises can be fantastic. But if we fall into the same situation as before, where we're just making up stupid stories...I mean, Lethal Weapon 4--it was friends with guns. Just what was it? It just didn't have any place to go. You can only go so far with a piece of material; [then] you're inventing stuff.

[...]

VB: The DVD version of The Matrix was also groundbreaking with its extensive, innovative extra features. Is there pressure now to raise the bar there as well with the DVD versions of the next two movies?

Silver: We want to do a lot of special things with the DVD. We're talking about that now. It should come out probably around the time that Revolutions opens [this fall]. Then we'll probably do a box set of all three of the movies after Revolutions. It's an exciting time, because people are excited about this kind of entertainment.


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ENTER THE MATRIX TRAILER
Source: <TheMatrix.com>

Get ready to Enter the Matrix! This trailer is full of plot-line details for the Matrix Reloaded so if you don't want to know anything don't watch it. There's not too much game footage in it either, but still very cool to watch. It's available in three sizes.

Official Enter the Matrix trailer
2 minutes and 49 seconds

<Low resolution - 320 x 162 - 12,0 Mb>
<Medium resolution - 480 x 244 - 31,8 Mb>
<High resolution - 640 x 326 - 53,7 Mb>

To download: Right-click and "save target as..."


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RELOADED SOUNDTRACK TRACK LIST
Source: <MTV>
Thanks to: <TLFC>

WThe two-CD Matrix Reloaded: The Album will have plenty of the bangin' hard rock you would expect to hear on the soundtrack to one of the year's most anticipated action movies. But it will also feature a surprise left-field remix from a group you hardly associate with guns, grit and amped-up guitars: the Dave Matthews Band.

Paul Oakenfold does a remix of the Dave Matthews Band song "When the World Ends," which will run over the movie's end credits. The revamped version of the ballad from Matthews' 2001 Everyday album was slated for release almost two years ago, but it was pulled in light of the September 11 attacks because of the ominous edge of the song's title.

Along with new tracks from Rob Zombie ("Reload"), Marilyn Manson ("This Is the New Sh--"), P.O.D. ("Sleeping Awake") (see <"P.O.D. Record 'Matrix Reloaded' Single With Marcos' Replacement">) and Deftones ("Lucky You"), Matrix Reloaded: The Album (May 6) will feature a number of interactive materials tied to the movie and a second album with 40 minutes of the movie's score.

Among the acts offering previously unreleased tracks are Fluke, Juno Reactor, Paul Oakenfold and Team Sleep (the side band of Deftones leader Chino Moreno). "Session," from Linkin Park's Meteora, will also appear on the album, as will previously released songs from Rage Against the Machine and Unloco.

The set's first disc will also have some enhanced features, including access to an exclusive "Matrix Reloaded" trailer, an extended preview of the animated spinoff "Animatrix," and behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the "Enter the Matrix" video game (see <"Keanu Reeves, Marilyn Manson Show Up For 10-Minute 'Matrix'">). The movie will hit theaters on May 15.

Track list for Matrix Reloaded: The Album:

Disc 1

Linkin Park - "Session"
Marilyn Manson - "This Is the New Sh--"
Rob Zombie - "Reload"
Rob Dougan - "Furious Angels" (Instrumental)
Deftones - "Lucky You"
Team Sleep - "The Passportal"
P.O.D. - "Sleeping Awake"
Unloco - "Bruises"
Rage Against the Machine - "Calm Like a Bomb"
Oakenfold - "Dread Rock"
Fluke - "Zion"
Dave Matthews Band - "When the World Ends (Oakenfold Remix)"

Disc 2

Don Davis - "Main Title"
Don Davis - "Trinity Dream"
Juno Reactor - "Tea House"
Rob Dougan - "Chateau"
Juno Reactor - "Mona Lisa Overdrive"
Don Davis vs. Juno Reactor - "Burly Brawl"
Don Davis - "Reloaded Suite"

For more on "The Matrix Reloaded," check out <"Keanu Reeves: Behind The Scenes Of 'The Matrix Reloaded.'">.

—Gil Kaufman



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MARKETING CAMPAIGN KICK-OFF
Source: <Screen Daily>
Thanks to: <TLFC>

Warner Bros kicked off in earnest its international marketing campaign for The Matrix sequels this week, with a major London presentation – titled The Year Of The Matrix - to introduce the two films to the industry.

Warners invited over 300 press, exhibitors and retail partners to the presentation on Wednesday (March 27) at the Warner Village cinema in London’s Leicester Square. One senior Warners’ executive said it was the first event of its kind in the world.

As well as trailers for the films with screen commentary from stars such as Keanu Reeves and producer Joel Silver, the presentation also featured highlights from the Enter The Matrix video game and the DVD of The Animatrix, a collection of short films written and produced by Larry and Andy Wachowski, directors of The Matrix. Warners also screened Final Flight Of The Osiris, one of the short films making up The Animatrix.

The presentation was aimed at heightening anticipation for The Matrix sequels among the industry, as well as explaining how the many elements of the complex Matrix launch – including the DVD and video game – fit together.

The Matrix Reloaded opens in UK cinemas on May 23, while The Matrix Revolutions opens on November 7. The DVD of The Animatrix collection of short films will be released on June 2, and the Enter The Matrix game will be launched on May 15.


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MATRIX SEXUAL REVOLUTIONS
Source: <Empire Online>
Thanks to: Chris

World Exclusive: Matrix Sexual Revolutions
27/03/2003

As a blockbuster with as much navel gazing as gravity defying action, the Matrix trilogy invites a lot of questions about its inherent religious themes and social commentary. So given the opportunity to sit down with the key cast members and producer Joel Silver, Empire seized the chance to ask the question plaguing the minds of fans and critics alike: where is it better to bump uglies, in the Matrix or in the real world?

Despite Laurence Fishburne's claims that "People don't have sex in the Matrix." Joel Silver confirmed Empire's belief that getting jiggy is one of the few advantages of living in a world where anything is physically possible. But as one half of the trilogy's hottest couple, Carrie Anne Moss is the one to deliver the verdict. So who really floats her boat; Neo with his slick good looks, superhuman powers and expensive wardrobe or his alter ego Thomas Anderson with his distressed knitwear, pasty complexion and unsightly hole in the back of his skull?

'Oh my god you're killing me,' laughs a somewhat taken aback Moss. 'This relationship is about something so beautiful and deep and gorgeous, but I love your take. It never crossed my mind.

'Maybe I would have played it differently,' she added. 'Sex in the real world is the most beautiful thing in the world.' Even with the Matrix world's capacity to realise anything your filthy mind can conjure? Moss pauses briefly before answering, one eyebrow raised heavenward, 'I guess that depends on your taste.'


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

ENTER THE MATRIX GAME FOOTAGE
Source: <CapitalNews9>
Thanks to: <MatrixFans.net>

Some new game footage was shown on CapitalNews9.com. I must say the game material already looks more promissing than the footage which can be seen in the <projects> section on this site. View it for yourself by clicking <here>


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NEW RELOADED 3D POSTER
Source: <TLFC>

A new poster will be released in theaters which will probably look like the image below... This is yet another poster than the one that can be seen lower on this news page. It's doubtfull whether or not non-American countries will get a poster with a different release date on it, or that it's a poster for the American market only.



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UPDATE PHILOSOPHY SECTION
Source: <TheMatrix.com>

As promised, we are pleased to offer five new essays tackling philosophical themes that arise in The Matrix.

Starting things off is a piece by the epistemologist and philosopher of mind James Pryor. He's contributed a lively essay that will be of particular interest to those coming to philosophy for the first time. In "What's So Bad About Living in The Matrix?" he explores and criticizes two tempting but problematic philosophical positions: the view that there can't be facts which it's impossible for us to know about (sometimes called verificationism), and the view that everyone's motive for acting is always to have nicer experiences. Employing examples from both the film and imaginary thought-experiments, Pryor tries to show that these positions, which can often initially seem irresistible to students, are not as straightforward or as satisfying as they might first appear. He then goes on to argue (in sympathy with Vasiliou’s essay) that the worst thing about living in the Matrix would not be the metaphysical or epistemological limitations such a scenario would impose, it would instead be the political constraints: those trapped in the Matrix have constraints on their action that most of us deeply value not having.

David Chalmers is a philosopher from the University of Arizona and author of numerous books and articles on the philosophy of mind, including the influential volume The Conscious Mind. In his essay "The Matrix as Metaphysics," he suggests that while we cannot rule out the possibility that we are in a system like the Matrix, this possibility is not as bad as we might have thought. He argues against the intuitive view that if we are in a matrix, we are deluded about the external world. Instead, he suggests that if we are in a matrix, we should regard this as telling us about the nature of the external world: the physical world is ultimately made of bits, and was created by beings who ensured that our minds interact with this physical world. Chalmers's surprising conclusion is that even if we are living in a Matrix-like simulation, most of our beliefs about the world are still true.

Julia Driver, a moral philosopher from Dartmouth College and author of Uneasy Virtue, explores some of the distinctively ethical issues that arise in The Matrix in her essay "Artificial Ethics." Driver begins by using the film to consider the moral status of artificially created beings: she argues that, given certain assumptions regarding the nature of consciousness, rationality, and personhood, we ought to regard artificial intelligences such as Agent Smith as creatures that deserve genuine moral consideration. In the second part of her essay Driver tackles the thorny philosophical question of whether one can behave immorally when in “non-veridical” (illusory) circumstances. Noting the implausibility of attributing wrongdoing to those who perform seemingly immoral acts in a dream, she argues that, to the extent that the Matrix offers a similarly illusory world free of actual unpleasant effects on others, it also seems odd to attribute wrongdoing to agents acting in such a world. However, drawing on insights from the first part of her essay, Driver concludes that we have good reasons to think that actions in the Matrix would have genuine effects on both humans and some artificial creatures, and thus the world of the Matrix, like our world, has its own moral norms — its own ethics — that ought to be both acknowledged and respected.

Michael McKenna, a philosopher at Ithaca College who specializes in the philosophical problems of freedom and moral responsibility, offers up a comprehensive yet light-hearted exploration of the free will problem in his essay "Neo's Freedom ... Whoa!". Ingeniously utilizing aspects of The Matrix to describe and explore the traditional positions taken in debates over free will, McKenna manages to cover a lot of ground: determinism, fatalism, compatibilism, and incompatibilism are all canvassed and compared through the unique perspective afforded us by the film. He then goes on to explore the attractiveness of the radical freedom that Neo appears to have achieved by the end of The Matrix. Does such absolute freedom indeed “rock” the way we naturally think it would? McKenna convincingly argues that total freedom of this sort offers too much of a good thing: part of the joy we take in exercising our freedom is in pushing boundaries and testing limits — if all boundaries and limitations are removed, the possibility for such joy will disappear as well.

Finally, we have an essay from John Partridge, a professor of philosophy at Wheaton College whose work focuses on the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. In "Plato's Cave & The Matrix," Partridge considers the striking similarities between The Matrix and the "cave" scenario described in Plato’s Republic. In addition to pointing out the numerous surface parallels between the cave-dwellers Plato describes and the humans trapped in the Matrix, Partridge explores a deeper continuity between the film and Plato’s text: both narratives privilege the self-knowledge that follows from the right kind of self-examination. As Plato might put it, both Neo and the cave-dwellers must undertake a difficult journey from darkness to light if genuine knowledge (and consequently true "care of the soul") is to be attained.

Enjoy this new group of essays, and be sure and check back soon for further updates.

Chris Grau, Editor


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IMAGES SAMSUNG MOBILE MATRIX PHONE
Thanks to: <TLFC>

The Last Free City posted some new images of the Samsung mobile phone. They even created a movie poster for it...
Click on the thumbnails below to view larger images:




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STEVE SKROCE ON STORYBOARD
Source: <Countingdown.com>

Storyboard Artist Steve Skroce spoke to the National Post about working on the original Matrix and its' sequels:
For about 15 months of 2000 and 2001, Skroce worked as a storyboard artist on The Matrix Reloaded (due May 15th) as well as The Matrix Revolutions (due in November), following up on his similar work on the original film.

"It's a lot easier to change a pencil and art drawing than a visual effect," the 29-year-old artist explained.

Skroce jokes about his subservient role for the film. "I was the Wachowski brothers' instrument," quips Skroce. "I tried to the best of my ability to draw what they were asking me to draw. I tried to visualize their ideas. They are very descriptive. They have incredibly intense imaginations."

Pencil art is enough for most storyboards. But Skroce would ink over his Matrix work, giving it texture and detail. "It's very much finished comic-book artwork," he says. "They wanted it as close to what they had in their minds as possible."

But Skroce says they are down-to-earth. "They're very decent guys, extremely understanding and respectful of the people they are working with," he says. They were up for beers with staff. They were open to ideas from any members of the production team without being sticklers for hierarchy, he recalls. As well,they saw detailed storyboards as a guide for everyone down the production line.

They feel if earlier on they can get as much of their ideas as precise and clear in the storyboards everyone is doing, it helps the process, makes things easier."

With the new Matrix movies, things have changed. "Way more perks," jokes Skroce. "Everyone knew what The Matrix was. It was legit. It was a success. They had fancy offices built for the art department. The art department was three times as big as it was on the first movie. Everything on down a long line was tenfold what it was for the first movie."


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OFFICIAL ANIMATRIX TRAILER
Source: <TheMatrix.com>

Download the official Animatrix trailer for all nine episodes. This four-and-a-half minute long quicktime video gives a great preview to the episodes that will be released on DVD June 3.

Official Animatrix trailer
4 minutes and 30 seconds

<Low resolution - 320 x 213 - 15,1 Mb>
<Medium resolution - 480 x 320 - 48,1 Mb>
<High resolution - 720 x 480 - 102,0 Mb>

To download: Right-click and "save target as..."




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NEW RELOADED POSTER FOR SALE
Source: <Allposters.com>

This poster was found at <Allposters.com>. It's unclear whether or not this is the official Reloaded poster, but it's available for $8.99. The sieze is 22 x 35 inches, which is a little bit smaller than the usual size of a movie poster, which is more like 40 x 27.

"How far down does the Rabbit Hole go?"




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OAKENFOLD REMIX OF DAVE MATTHEWS
Source: LA Times
Thanks to: <MatrixFans.net>

The L.A. Time has an article about a Dave Matthews addition to Reloaded's Soundtrack, remixed by Paul Oakenfold:

The 1999 movie "The Matrix" explored notions of alternate realities. Now the sequel will give new life to a recording that was victim to grim real life.

A version of the Dave Matthews Band song "When the World Ends," as remixed by English DJ-producer Paul Oakenfold, will have key placement over the end credits and as a centerpiece of the soundtrack album for "The Matrix Reloaded," which is scheduled to premiere May 15. Maverick Records will release a soundtrack album a week or two earlier.

The original version of the song was on Matthews' "Everyday" album, released in February 2001. But the remix, giving the emotional ballad a dark electronic edge, was commissioned from Oakenfold with the idea of showing the usually folky, jazzy Matthews in a different light.The plan was to release this version to radio and as a commercial single in the fall of that year.

But after the Sept.11 terrorist attacks, Matthews and his team felt it would be inappropriate to push the song with its apocalyptic title and such lines as, "I'm gonna rock you like a baby when the cities fall/ We will rise as the buildings crumble."

Only a few copies of the remix had been sent out, one of them going to Jason Bentley, electronica-oriented L.A. radio personality and the music supervisor for "The Matrix."

Bentley was concentrating on hard rock and dark electronica selections for this project, similar to the music in the original film, which spawned a 1.5 million-selling soundtrack album. Among the choices for the new one are contributions from rockers Rob Zombie and Linkin Park, as well as electronica acts Oakenfold, Fluke and Juno Rector, with P.O.D., Marilyn Manson and Massive Attack tracks pending. Still, Bentley played the Matthews remix for Andy and Larry Wachowski, the films' directors, and they felt it would be a perfect fit.

"This jewel of a song gets new life," says Bruce Flohr, the RCA Records senior vice president who commissioned the remix in the first place. "When I approached Paul originally, he said he felt the song was very cinematic. It's an apocalyptic love song which evidently fits where 'The Matrix' is going."

This is just the first of two "Matrix " sequels set to premiere this year, with "The Matrix Revolutions" coming later. Bentley says that editing is just underway on the latter one, so the music process hasn't begun. But he has been busy with another spinoff: "Animatrix," a series of seven releated 10-minute shorts written by the Wachowskis and director by top anime' figures. Bentley has overseen the music selections for all of the shorts (the first two can be seen on the web site www.whatisthematrix.com) and an album that will be released in the summer.

"They're dark, not for kids," he says. "I made a decidedly electronic record for that. Basically used the fact that anime' is such an underground niche in this country and decided to put the electronic underground to connect as a parallel art form."

By Steve Hochman


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JOHN GAETA ON NEW SFX TECHNIQUE
Source: <Scotland on Sunday>
Thanks to: <Countingdown>

Scotland on Sunday spoke to SFX supervisor John Gaeta about a new SFX technique that has been developed for the sequels:
In fact, this time around Gaeta has come up with a new technique, 'virtual cinematography', that may well signal the beginning of the end for the conventional process of shooting a film 'live'. The process involves five digital cameras photographing the actors from various angles. The resulting images are then fed into a computer, which uses them to create 'virtual' actors who can be placed in any situation that the Wachowskis want them in.

"Once you have them in 3-D, you can compose shots and make directorial decisions just like you would with real actors in a real scene," explains Gaeta.

It sounds like another step towards the time when computer-generated 'actors' will take over from human ones, but Gaeta thinks that is still a while away yet.

"True performance will never be replaced," he insists. "Impromptu human performance is something you can't get from an animator. It's an incredible amount of work for a start and the result is so much better when it's an actor doing it."


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

ANIMATRIX DVD DETAILS
Source: <Test Pattern>

More great news from the animated side of the rabbit hole. In the wake of the new [butt]-kicking Animatrix short, "Program", debuting online, and the new commercial campaign making note of the fact that "Final Flight of the Osiris" will be showing prior to Dreamcatcher Warner Brothers has also posted the full and official list of specs for the DVD release of all 9 shorts on the official site. And believe me when I say, both Matrix and general anime fans alike should be VERY happy.

- "Scrolls to Screen: The History and Culture of Anime" documentary
- 7 featurettes, with director profiles, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of each of the films
- 4 audio commentaries
- "Enter the Matrix" videogame trailer
- Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio
- Widescreen Format [16x9 2.35:1]
- Languages: English, Japanese (Thank you God.)
- Subtitles: English, French, Spanish

June still can't get here soon enough. Hell, March 21st can't get here soon enough.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

FINANCIAL SITUATION VILLAGE ROADSHOW
Source: <The Daily Telegraph>
Thanks to: Sub7

MOVIE maker and theme park owner Village Roadshow has warned of tough times ahead because of the fallout from war.

But the company yesterday booked a $46.5 million net profit for the December 31 half year, up 2 per cent on the previous first half, boosted by improved trading across all divisions.

After the exclusion of specific items and discontinuing businesses, which included a gain on the sale of its Korean cinema interests, Village said its "normalised" half-year net profit was $43.76 million, a rise of 23.6 per cent.

Revenue from its ordinary activities rose 4 per cent to $425.5 million but a dividend was not declared. Village has endured a chequered trading history with its share price falling from a $6.40 high in 1996. The stock closed yesterday down 2¢ at $1.02.

Also yesterday Village said it had reached an in-principle agreement with the Greater Union Organisation to jointly acquire Warner Bros' one-third interest in their Australian multiplex joint venture for about $100 million.

Overall group earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose to $111.5 million in the half, from $97 million a year earlier.

The company's theme park division which operates three Gold Coast attractions contributed $13.3 million to EBITDA, up from $9.2 million.

Movie World posted an 11.4 increase in attendance figures while the neighbouring Wet 'n' Wild water park grew 1.5 per cent in popularity. Sea World fared worse with a 5.8 per cent drop in admissions.

But Village chairman Robert Kirby said despite the fall, a small revenue increase from the introduction of a "swimming with dolphins" feature helped profitability rise 2.1 per cent.

Despite the modest net profit increase, Mr Kirby said Village remained vulnerable to overseas war tensions and expected an income fall in coming months.

"We are in the entertainment business and greatly dependent on people spending money and continuing to try and find enjoyment," Mr Kirby said. "Entertainment is a necessity, even in times of Iraq. We expect a pull-back from Iraq. It could be quite severe but it's almost impossible to judge.

"If there is a war people won't be flying to visit our theme parks and will they be going to the movies? They might do to escape but they will most likely be glued to CNN."

Village's film making division earned $28.1 million, up from $16.49 million, following the recent popularity of movies Two Weeks Notice and Ghost Ship. The organisation has banked its hopes of further success on the May release of The Matrix Reloaded, a sequel to the incredibly popular The Matrix.

"The highlight of these results has been the film production division," Mr Kirby said.

Less impressive for Village, though, was its Australian radio division, Austereo, which booked EBITDA of $50.26 million, down from $56.63 million previously.
By Scott Murdoch
12mar03


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BIG INTERVIEW JOEL SILVER
Source: <CHUD>
Thanks to: <MatrixFans.net>

Okay, so yeah, we've talked to His Holiness, Lord Joel Silver, Genius of All Hollywood Filmmaking and Savior of the Action Genre before about the new Animatrix short film, Final Flight of the Osiris, but that was before I saw the film, so here we are BACK with Lord Silver and the director, Andy Jones (the animation director from Square who did the work on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) from the Dreamcatcher roundtables at the Park Hyatt today.

Question: Was there a bid out on doing The Animatrix? How did you come to work with the Wachowski Brothers on this?

Andy: Actually, the Wachowski Brothers sought us out. They looked for a lot of Japanese anime companies that were doing very creative animation work. They went to Japan and got all these great directors and they also liked what we had been doing as far as like Final Fantasy – the look of it – and thought it would be a good medium to tell the story in.

Question: Did you consciously do Final Flight of the Osiris in two parts? Was it ever going to be shorter or a two-part thing?

Andy: There's kind of a first and second act and it was planned out that way. The first act is setting up the feeling and emotion and a little bit of the characters and who they are. Then you get into the whole idea of what the story is about and what the Wachowskis wanted to tell, which is about the sentinel army and the existence of that and the fact that they need to get the information to Zion and that's the last thing they can possibly do. They can't possibly take out all these sentinels that are after him.

Question: Did they come to you specifically and say that they wanted to use you as the one working on the theatrical one?

Andy: Yeah. (to Lord Joel) You want to handle that?

Lord Joel: Yeah, when the whole thing started, we went to Japan in September of 1999 after the first movie opened for a promotional junket. The boys always had this scheme that they wanted to – being big fans of Japanese anime anyway – they wanted to find a way to incorporate their story in this process. Again, the key is to be clear that they wanted to tell the story in multiple mediums. So, the anime was one of the mediums which was available to them to tell the story. So, when the notion came up to do these and Warner Home Video got on board and we said, okay, we're going to do these stories, the plan was always to have this one story – Final Flight – which really sets up the entire saga, which really begins Reloaded. I say it's Matrix 1.5. It really starts the story from here on. The plan was always to do that in the most sophisticated and most spectacular animation fashion and that's what led them to Square and to Andy. At that time, we had other hopes and plans for Square. However, Square didn't last much longer after we finished this movie. They wrote this one and they wanted this one to be really incredible. It worked out that Dreamcatcher was coming out and it was coming out on March 21st and Larry Kasdan was a giant fan of The Matrix. We wanted to get it up on the screen. We felt that the fans should be able to watch this on the big screen. I mean, look, what is it? Is it a double-feature? It's not a trailer. It's not promotional. This is part of the story. We really felt that if we could get this out and up before the movie opened and give the people a chance to see it and understand it, it would lead them right into Reloaded.

Question: When looking at something like this with near photo-realistic actors, you wonder why spend $25 million on actors when you could just create the actors with computers and do a whole series.

Lord Joel: Nah, I don't know if it's so easy. Look, it's not easy. We are – and all the wonderful work that Andy has done in Final Flight, which is spectacular – we are far beyond it in the movie in Reloaded. We've gone far further than this. I just think that the notion of creating virtual actors is a fantasy of...

Question: Animation directors?

Lord Joel: (laughs) No. Look, I think you can use animation, in my opinion, as a tool to aid you to do things that you can't do with real actors. I mean, there are certain parts of this opening scene – the fight scene, the sparring program – which...the boys said, "What's sex like in the Matrix?" What can you do in the Matrix if you can have sex and that's just where the sparring program came from. There's things in that you just can't do with real actors and you can't pull something like that off or it would be extremely expensive. Even in the first Matrix, there was no Nebuchadnezzar ship – it was all done in computer animation. When it was over, me and the Wachowskis, we wanted the ship so we had to actually have it made after the movie was over because it didn't exist as a model. So, there are things that you can do with animation that you can't do. The notion of replacing the actor isn't a good idea.

Question: Will there be other Animatrix shorts appearing behind other Warner Brothers films?

Lord Joel: No. There's two that are already on the 'net. The first one – Second Renaissance – we had four million downloads in the first month and some of the hardware companies were pretty shocked that there was that much memory out there so that people were able to accept all this download. The second one went up which was called Program and we had 250,000 downloads in the first hour. That's the wonderful thing about AOL is that they do have this gigantic server.

Question: Is there any fear that people will come to watch the short film and not stay for Dreamcatcher?

Lord Joel: I hope that doesn't happen. I think that Larry made a wonderful movie and I think it's scary. I like those kinds of movies. I hope that they work together.

Question: They used to do that sort of thing all the time – with a cartoon before a feature – why do you think that doesn't happen anymore?

Lord Joel: I think Warners is doing it again with Looney Tunes. The problem is that exhibition is always so disturbed by it. I guess the theater owners think that the audiences won't want it. They just sat and watched 25 trailers! I remember there was a Mike Judge short a couple of years ago. Office Space was a short first that I saw in the theater that I thought was great. It works great for us.

Question: Do you think the exhibitors want to keep the time down and make sure they can show movies a certain number of times in a day?

Lord Joel: I just think...well, exhibition has their own problems now because of the proliferation of too many theaters. That's a whole 'nother conversation. The whole idea of The Matrix is about change. We maintain that change is inevitable, so maybe when we go to digital cinema it may be easier to just slam a short up. I don't know. Exhibition is concerned about it. One of the reasons we have it is because Larry Kasdan said, "Let's do it!" I mean, he's a filmmaker and said, "I love The Matrix – let's do it!" Other filmmakers may say, "I don't want a short on my movie. Fuck 'em! No way!" It all has to work together.

Question: With the first movie coming in May, what kind of business is this movie going to have to do to rival Star Wars and Lord of the Rings?

Lord Joel: I mean, look. It's an R-rated movie. I can't speak to that. I don't know what it's going to do. I'm telling you that the movie is sensational. It's going to blow people away. The ideas behind the visual effects are staggering. You're not going to believe what you're going to see.

Question: Can you tell us a couple of those things?

Lord Joel: Absolutely not.

Question: Is it over two hours?

Lord Joel: Just a little over two hours.

Question: With the sequels shrouded in secrecy, how do you decide what you can show?

Lord Joel: Well, look, the reason we ended up with this Newsweek cover in December was because we really haven't had that much out there. We have been careful. We don't want to bang our fans over the heads with it. We had one teaser that was out last May. We had a Super Bowl spot. We have a trailer coming out the beginning of April.

Question: With just how photo-realistic the ship-work is in Final Flight of the Osiris, was there ever a chance that Square was going to work on the Matrix sequels?

Andy: Yeah.

Lord Joel: Yeah.

Question: Because it looks very real – good enough to be in the feature.

Andy: Thank you.

Lord Joel: No, we wanted them to. I mean, that was one of the things we wanted. We loved the work Square did. The whole machine city – you don't see the machine city until...

Andy: We helped develop it and the Wachowskis liked what they saw.

Question: So, there's stuff that you did that's in Reloaded?

Andy: Well, the concepts of how [the sentinels] move and stuff like that. They liked it.

Question: So, the Wachowskis aren't going to be doing press for these movies? They're going to be reclusive?

Lord Joel: It's not reclusive. Look, I'm not trying to make a Kubrickian connection here, but I don't think Kubrick ever explained what the Monolith meant. He didn't want to and he didn't have to. The boys just don't feel that if they sit and make themselves available to discuss the elements of the story, it's a finite response. They really want the audience to take from the movie what you take from it. They don't want to say what they are. I'm going to help the process because I can speak 800 words in one breath according to Newsweek, but they don't want to talk about it and they also don't feel comfortable talking about it and it's the only part of the process that they are [like that about]. Believe me, they are involved in everything. They wrote four of these episodes. They wrote the two movies. They wrote 600 pages of game material. They write everything, but they don't want to be involved in this part of the process, so they don't have to be.

Question: Are they both finished – or at least the first one?

Lord Joel: The first one's not finished. We're finishing it as we speak. The second one is not as close as the first one. They're finished shooting, but they're not finished yet. They have a lot of work to do.

Question: With Square gone, what are you doing now?

Andy: Square closed. I'm actually at Digital Domain again. I'm an animation director there. Animation directing in live-action films.

Question: How hands-on are you with all your films?

Lord Joel: Look, it depends on the picture...

Question: How many movies will you have out this year?

Lord Joel: Four. I have...Cradle came out last weekend, I have Reloaded in May, then I have a picture I'm doing, my Dark Castle movie with Halle Berry and Penelope Cruz and Robert Downey called Gothika, which will come out next Halloween. And then that will be followed up a week or so later by Revolutions.

Question: Do you think we're burned out on comic book movies?

Lord Joel: I don't know. I loved last weekend. Cradle 2 The Grave was a fun movie. It made a lot of money. It was number one. It's nice to hear that. It's a very different kind of movie than The Matrix. It's a different experience.

Question: But you know how to make those and keep the budgets down...

Lord Joel: I try. That movie is far less than The Matrix and our Dark Castle are far less than that. So, it just allows us to have all these different genres of movies.

Question: Which is your next Bartkowiak movie?

Lord Joel: I'm not doing [his next]. He's doing a picture called Pathfinder for Paramount.

Question: So, which is the next mid-level [budget] one for you? (S.J.R. Note: Yeah, okay, so I get a little crazy looking for scoops – sue me)

Lord Joel: I don't know. I always was fascinated by an old movie called Superfly, which I kind of wanted to play with again. So, we have a plan of making a kind of different kind of version of that.

Question: Laurence Fishburne was saying the production had a real hard time with the death of Gloria Foster as she was so great, but was also a major part of the third Matrix movie – what was done about that?

Lord Joel: We had a terrible thing happen with Aaliyah, too. Well, the boys had always planned on the Oracle changing form, so this was a possibility they had talked about. But she is very well-featured in Reloaded. She has a really great, cool scene in Reloaded. We had not done the Revolutions sequence yet and it ended up being another actor.

Question: So, is Westworld for next summer?

Lord Joel: I don't even know. There's a lot of stuff we're working on.

Question: With the Oscars right around the corner, do you see the two Matrix movies competing against each other for Best Picture? (S.J.R. Note: For the record, no, this was not my question – though it sounds like me)

Lord Joel: Oh, please. I don't know. I never think about that.

And that's Lord Joel and Andy Jones. Final Flight of the Osiris opens in front of Dreamcatcher on March 21st everywhere.

Visit <CHUD.com>


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

ALIAS/WAVEFRONT WORKING ON RELOADED?
Source: <Globe Technology>
Thanks to: <MatrixFans.net>

[...] Alias/Wavefront got an Oscar last week because its Maya software has played a huge role in revolutionizing filmmaking. It helped Harry Potter nab the golden snitch, Peter Parker web-sling through the streets of New York as Spider-Man, George Clooney sink and swim in The Perfect Storm, and most recently, turned the slinking, hissing Gollum into such a misfit star that he was rumoured to be a contender for best supporting actor.

Indeed, the Maya-enhanced Gollum -- considered revolutionary in 3-D animated effects because the British actor Andy Serkis wore computer sensors to authenticate the character's movements and expressions -- has been trumpeted as one of the best things about Peter Jackson's The Two Towers.

In the end, Gollum didn't get an Oscar nomination. But the fact he was even considered for one means digital effects have reached a whole new level.

Back in Toronto, where a special case is now being constructed so the 20-year-old software company can place Oscar in its King Street lobby, Tureski agrees the technology has evolved to a point where it can match almost anything a Jackson or George Lucas dreams up.

"If you look at what Jackson and his team at Weta Digital did to bring Gollum to life, it's incredible. The performance had to be believable or the audience would have been taken out of the inner consistency of reality, that suspension of disbelief that [J.R.R.] Tolkien wrote about in an essay called Tree and Leaf, which was published in 1947," says Tureski. "Tolkien believed in order to get a believable fantasy you need consistency so that the reader can be swept away. The same is true for film, even more so. And we're close to there."

The stumbling block -- for these multi-million-dollar blockbusters -- is still price. The real challenge, agrees Tureski, "is getting that level of realism easier to generate, and cheaper."

For that reason, Tureski emphasizes that digital actors will never supplant the flesh-and-blood creative types who write stories, direct them or star in them.

[...] The company now has at least 70 major feature films under its belt, including Spider-Man, Black Hawk Down, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,both Lord of the Rings movies, all the Star Wars, Jurassic Park III, Stuart Little, Scooby-Doo and The Matrix. Its technology has also been used to conceptualize designs for a GM truck, Nike shoes and Oakley sunglasses. It's been deployed in most of the major video games (PlayStation 2's Gran Turismo 3), and even helped create Blockbuster Video's popular TV ads with the wisecracking guinea pig and rabbit.

Maya was also used in all three films nominated for this year's Oscar for special effects, including Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Spider-Man, and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

[...] Tureski is tightlipped on whether his firm is involved in the upcoming sci-fi thriller Matrix: Reloaded (to be followed in the fall by Matrix: Revolution). But the silence, surely, says it all.

But the software guy won't deviate from his script: "Computer-generated performance is not a replacement for human performance," says Tureski. "It's an extension of it."

Still, by the time the last instalment of The Lord of the Rings hits theatres, we may see Gollum scamper onstage for an Oscar after all.


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FUTURE COULD RESEMBLE THE MATRIX
Source: <Geek.com>
Thanks to: <TLFC>

Controversial futurist Ray Kurzweil is well known for making bold statements about the near future. In his latest website prediction, Kurzweil argues that our future could resemble the movie "The Matrix." The essence of Kurzweil's views is that exponentially increasing computer technology, combined with an increasing ability to understand (and reverse engineer) the human brain, will allow us to have "sentient ... programs, the ability to directly download capabilities into the human brain, and the creation of virtual realities indistinguishable from the real world." Kurzweil argues that, in the next several decades:

- The raw computing power of the brain (estimated at 20 quadrillion instructions per second) will be available and inexpensive.

- Moore's Law will continue indefinitely, as new computing paradigms (such as carbon nanotubes) replace silicon chips

- Virtual Reality will be pervasive, and human beings will spend most of their time living and interacting in simulated environments

- Nonbiological intelligence will begin to dominate.

It is easy to dismiss Kurzweil's predictions as fantasy. Unlike many prognosticators, however, Kurzweil has an impressive track record of predicting technological developments. He correctly predicted the rise of the Internet, as well as that a computer would beat a grandmaster in chess by 1998. He also predicted that LCD displays would soon surpass CRT displays, a trend which is now happening. At the very least his comments and insights merit careful analysis.


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MONICA BELLUCCI ON PERSEPHONE
Source: <Moviehole>

[...] We also asked Bellucci how it was to do an action film. "I have my way to do action. I don’t jump on the wall, I don’t fight, but I have another way to fight.", she responds.

And how does she feel joining an already established cast? "It’s great because those people, I mean, Carrie-Ann Moss, Laurence Fishburne and Keanu Reeves were so nice to me. I had a really great time and actually all my scenes are with them, so they really were so nice."

And does she know the mythology of Persephone? "Yeah, she was the daughter of Zeus and she was kidnapped by the kind of the underworld, in Hades and she was allowed to come back into the living world. This is very, it says a lot about my character, Persephone, but I can’t tell you about it [Laughs]. She’s very mysterious and sensual, more glamour, but dangerous, very dangerous."

Read more <here>


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REPRISING DVD INSTEAD OF SPECIAL EDITION
Source: <Coming Soon>

Warner Home Video will not be releasing the previously announced The Matrix Special Edition double-disc DVD. In a shift in strategy to broaden the 'Matrix' fan base prior to the May 15 theatrical release of the highly anticipated sequel The Matrix Reloaded, Warner Home Video will reprice The Matrix DVD to $19.99 on April 29.

Also on April 29, WHV will reprice the two-pack of The Matrix and The Matrix Revisited - the complete, behind-the-scenes two-hour companion to the Matrix phenomenon - to a new low price of $34.99 SRP.

The Matrix DVD will include a mail-in movie ticket offer for the sequel, which must be received by June 6, 2003. This offer will be included in the single DVD as well as the two-pack. Additionally, it will include a $5 mail-in rebate for "The Animatrix" DVD, releasing June 3 from Warner Home Video. A $3 mail-in rebate for The Matrix DVD will also be included inside the "Enter the Matrix" video game.

Winner of four Academy Awards®, The Matrix has sold more than 15 million DVDs worldwide since its release. Among its many milestones, the film was the first DVD to break the 1 million unit sales mark and has ranked as one of the top 100 selling DVDs for more than 170 weeks since its initial release date.


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TOUGHER AUSSIE ECONOMY LEADS TO LESS HOLLYWOOD
Source: <smh.com.au>

The prolific producer Andrew Mason talks about the realities of film-making with Garry Maddox.

It's a crucial question for the producer who has brought more Hollywood films to this country than anyone else - is Australia losing its shine as a location for international production?

Consider the evidence. Since the Brad Pitt film The Fountain collapsed before shooting in Sydney, the sci-fi films I, Robot and Gothika have been lost to Canada. The Canadians have also boosted their tax incentives to attract more foreign production and the value of the Australia dollar has continued to rise.

Producer Andrew Mason, who was the Australian connection for the three Matrix films, Red Planet, Scooby-Doo, Queen of the Damned and Kangaroo Jack, says another major film was also lost when the Canadians increased their incentives last month.

"Overnight the decision was made to go to Canada," he says. "That's indicative of how tough this game is being played. Governments all over the place are recognising the benefit of film production to local economies and are prepared to fight it out with incentives."

Mason says the rising value of the dollar has added 20 per cent to foreign filmmaking costs. But given the next Star Wars episode is moving into Fox Studios, he believes the loss of these films is a blip rather than a bust.

There is still plenty of production going on and Australia is still a great place to make films. The economic equation just got a little tougher. But I don't think we can ease up on the hard work of trying to attract production. It's pretty easy for it to slip away if the attention isn't kept on it."

For an Australian producer, Mason has been almost freakishly busy lately. The drama Swimming Upstream has just opened in cinemas and on the way are Kangaroo Jack in April, The Matrix Reloaded in May, Danny Deckchair in June and The Matrix Revolutions in November.

He is also planning to make two "digital films" this year. This initiative is intended to deliver up to four edgy films year - all made for about $1.2 million using digital filmmaking technology.

Once casting is finalised, director Daniel Krige will shoot West in western Sydney. Mason describes it as a "tough and very honest story" from a director with "astonishing levels of passion".

In July, Stuart McDonald is to shoot Power Surge. It's a thriller with three lead cast members in a confined environment - an isolated house.

"That's pretty much the best recipe for these sorts of projects. Bound, the Wachowskis' film, is pretty much that. [So is] Blood Simple. There's a reasonable history of these sorts of films."

While he has yet to see all the assembled footage of the Matrix sequels, Mason says the Wachowski brothers, Larry and Andy, are demonstrating the long-promised synergies within media empires for AOL Time Warner.

"Probably every one of the major media companies in the world had their chief executives standing up at board meetings touting the great advantages of the synergy between their various divisions," he says.

"It's fascinating that it ends up being a couple of creative people who show them how that's really going to work."

Along with the sequels, the Wachowskis have had Japanese animators make a series of nine films called The Animatrix that are being progressively released on the Matrix website and DVD. There is a also computer game that includes material from the film.

"There will be things in the game that you can't get to if you didn't find the bit on the website," says Mason. "When you've found the bit on the game, you'll understand that bit in the movie. And when you see that bit in the movie, you'll go back to The Animatrix on DVD and go 'now I understand'. That's sort of what all these chief executives were talking about but they didn't understand how it would happen."

So has all this activity given Mason that rarity in the industry - a profitable business making films in Australia?

"It's possible to have a comfortable lifestyle," he says. "But unless you have a mega-hit, it ain't a profitable business. And if the mega-hit is a studio picture, even if you have some sort of profit share, you're never going to see it. It's the studio system. It's adept at maintaining its unfortunate lack of profitability."

Most Australian producers are involved because they love films, he says. "If they make any money, they put it all back into developing movies. Every new project involves another pile of risk because the development process is so lengthy."


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ANIMATRIX EPISODE: 'PROGRAM' ONLINE
Source: <IntotheMatrix>

The second Animatrix Episode is online (or actually it's #3 in the series). The episode's title is 'Program' and it's about CIS, a soldier of Zion, who's forced to choose between love and her comrades in the real world, in the simulated world of a Samurai training program.

WRITTEN BY
Yoshiaki Kawajiri
DIRECTED BY
Yoshiaki Kawajiri
ANIMATION & PRODUCTION DESIGN BY
Madhouse Studios, Tokyo

Animatrix Episode #3: Program
<Low resolution - 320 x 136 - 27,5 Mb>
<Medium resolution - 480 x 204 - 93,5 Mb>
<High resolution - 640 x 272 - 157,1 Mb>

To download: Right-click and "save target as..."





Thanks to <IntotheMatrix.com>


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MATRIX WORLD WEIRDLY PRESCIENT
Source: <The Observer>

The Observer published this article on how the futuristic world of the Matrix is weirdly prescient of the world we live in now. There are a few errors in it, but it's still an interesting read.

As fans across the globe wait eagerly for the release of two sequels to The Matrix, Peter Conrad finds that the original film's futuristic world now seems weirdly prescient

Sunday March 2, 2003
The Observer

'What,' asked the teaser trailers, posters and website headlines four years ago, 'is the matrix?' The puzzled tone was disarmingly honest. The Matrix was a film of a crankily eclectic kind: a merger of cybernetics and kung fu, set in a world where robots engage in aerial fisticuffs with a few remaining members of the human race. No one had ever heard of the two obsessive brothers, Larry and Andy Wachowski, who wrote and directed it. Nevertheless, their nutty invention totted up $171 million in the United States alone, became the first DVD to sell a million copies, and generated lucrative video games.

Two cinematic sequels are to be released this year, and a Newsweek journalist, over-oxygenated after a brief preview, has pronounced them '2003's hottest flicks'. Today, The Matrix is a universally recognisable, globally franchised brand. But do we really know what the matrix itself is?

The answer lies in the word itself, which splits into a pun. There are two matrices in the film. A matrix, first of all, is a womb. The Wachowskis conjure up a future in which the planet is a parched, ravaged desert. Machines have assumed control, enslaving men and reducing them to a food source. Human beings doze in uterine vats of goo while a master race of artificially intelligent robots sucks life-giving heat from them. To keep their victims occupied while they feed on this vital warmth, they wire them to a main-frame of dreams, a cerebral cinema, whose illusory delights are known as 'the matrix'.

But there is another kind of matrix, less physical than the womb, a mathematical grid, with numbers arranged in rows and columns. The film begins by studying such a galaxy of digits, glimmering on a computer screen. The camera closes in on a zero and travels through its welcoming vacancy. The numerical matrix, like the maternal pods in which we see human beings drowsing while the machines graze on them, is a means of multiplying and reproducing. At the start of the film, we stare at the gaping O; we soon encounter the complementary 1 in the slim, upright personage of Keanu Reeves, a hacker who lives in Room 101 of an apartment block. His alias, during his nocturnal bouts of electronic mischief, is Neo, which turns to be an ana gram. 'You are the One, Neo,' remarks the guerrilla leader, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne).

Morpheus means that Neo is the Messiah, a Christ for the cybernetic age. This saviour has been born, somehow or other, from an immaculate union between Morpheus, who represents God the Father, and a nurturing mother called Trinity, an unholy spirit in PVC bondage gear, played by Carrie-Anne Moss. The One has a mission, which is to demolish the matrix. We are all, Morpheus tells him, slumbering inside 'a computer-generated dream world'.

The matrix fills us with intoxicating illusions through wires and electrodes, and this 'neural, interactive simulation' persuades us that we are alive; in fact, our existence is merely virtual, a brightly coloured fantasy of sex and shopping. 'We're inside a computer programme?' asks Neo when Morpheus gives him this desolating information: Keanu Reeves, as a bosomy oracle remarks, is cute but not too bright.

Anyone baffled by this heady blend of theology and electronics should not panic. The idea, projected into the future by the Wachowskis, is very old. The matrix is another name for Plato's cave, where men huddle in the half-light and turn their backs on the scorching, truthful sun. More recently, the notion was paraphrased by Albert Camus, who argued that our supposed reality is nothing more than crude, painted scenery on a flimsy stage.

The film's story is equally familiar. Neo, following a woman with a white rabbit tattooed on her shoulder, goes on the same journey as Lewis Carroll's Alice, who discovers a land of mad wonderment on the other side of a looking-glass. Morpheus invites his protégé to discover 'how deep the rabbit hole really is'.

The nerdy acolytes and besotted cultists who chat about The Matrix in cyberspace believe they are dealing with something dizzily profound. For them, the film resembles the grand unified theory that astrophysicists are straining to propound. On the internet, you can find learned essays by doctoral geeks who explicate the metaphysics of The Matrix, analyse its indebtedness to the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, or relate its religious allegory to Gnosticism or Zen. The Wachowskis, predictably, relish the reputation for cosmic wisdom that has been wished on to them. A viewer, ushered into their spectral presence during an online conference, once noted: 'Your movie has connections to Judaeo-Christian, Egyptian, Arthurian and Platonic myths, just to name those I've mentioned. How much of that was intentional?' The invisible Wachowskis replied from limbo: 'All of it.'

The brothers have cultivated their mystique with care, pretending to be absent, disinterested gods, creating a world for the rest of us to live in. Their biography states merely that they 'have been working together for 30 years' and then shrugs: 'Little else is known about them.' Glimpsed in a DVD featurette, they turn out to be scruffy slackers, more or less indistinguishable from each other because of their shared uniform of jeans, sneakers, sweatshirts and zip-up jackets; both wear baseball caps, though, to reassure you that you're not suffering from double vision, one of them will have the cap on back to front.

Positive identification is possible when you notice that Andy is bearded and chubby, while Larry wears specs and has a couple of earrings depending from his lobes. In their overlapping utterances, they babble abstrusely: Larry, for instance, remarks that when you take religion and maths 'to the infinity point, you wind up at the same place - these unanswerable mysteries really become about personal perception'. I especially love that 'really'. I suppose we get the magi we deserve, but can these be the inventors of a new heaven and earth?

Let me attempt my own decipherment of The Matrix, which is not quite as windily lofty or obscure as it might seem. Science fiction's futures are always modifications of the present. 1984 (from which the Wachowskis purloined Neo's Room 101) was Orwell's commentary on the regimented society of 1948. 'You believe it's 1999,' Morpheus says to Neo, 'when it's closer to 2199.' Actually, the reverse is the case. The Matrix is a parable of our own time, a period when, thanks to biotechnology, Homo sapiens may be evolving into a race of beings who are at once more and less than human.

Although Morpheus dismisses reality as 'electrical signals interpreted by the brain', the film is grounded in a real place. It was made on the streets and rooftops of Sydney, and anyone who knows the city will spot the towers of the financial district, the open-air food court of Australia Square, or the grimy alleys of Glebe. The Wachowskis mystified the location by superimposing street names from their own hometown, Chicago; the purpose was to suggest placelessness, that disoriented modern condition, inherent in a world where geographical distance and difference have imploded.

When the Wachowskis needed a warped and kinky setting for the scene in which Neo is recruited by Morpheus, they simply took over a Sydney S&M club and invited the members to come along in their fetishistic costumes. If you want to see the future, just look around you.

The predicament the film investigates - the showdown between organism and engineering, between a life based on carbon and one that derives, like the computer's intelligence, from silicon - catches the paradox of the way we live now. Take, for instance, the fashion accessories of the characters, so keenly imitated by fans. Dark glasses are compulsory in The Matrix. They block the sun, from which Plato's cave-dwellers recoil, but they also serve to occlude the eyes of the wearer. They prohibit engagement with the world beyond the lenses and frustrate any exchange of glances with another person; to put on shades is to solipsise yourself. Neo gazes at Morpheus, and sees only the dual reflection of his own face in those black, opaque windows.

The film merely mimics a contemporary habit: in a New York blizzard two weeks ago, I saw dozens of people - mutants? replicants? digitalised phantoms? - trudging through snowdrifts beneath a grey, woolly sky, all wearing sunglasses. Their eyes were turned back into their heads; our collective existence had become a private film screened in what Morpheus calls our 'primitive cerebrum'.

Telephones, which are lifelines for Neo and his companions, serve the same purpose. The hackers escape from the matrix by beaming themselves down the twisting, fibre-optic cables of a phone line; at the other end, they re-occupy the bodies they have temporarily quit. Once again, the fable dramatises the way we live now, conducting animated conversations with absent partners as we walk through the streets. And since the screens on mobile phones have learnt to transmit images, we can direct and perform in the films of our own lives, communicating across an aerial distance that never needs to be abridged by the contact of bodies.

If you want to do something as old-fashioned as having sex, that, too, can be arranged without the messy, infectious commingling of flesh. When Neo ogles a woman in a red dress, Morpheus explains that she, too, is nothing more than a neural projection. Still, acting as a 'digital pimp', another charcter offers to arrange a date. Why not talk yourself to a solitary climax on the phone, or have virtual intercourse on the internet? Plugs make contact more snugly than our concave and convex genitals ever could. Afterwards, the mouthpiece can be wiped clean, and the computer screen is tougher and more impenetrable than any condom.

As the scene in the S&M club intimates, the merger of bodies matters less than the approximation of fantasies. Death, presumably, is as phantasmal as sex, which is why in 1999 two teenagers at Columbine High School in Denver, addicted to the film and mimicking Neo's dark glasses, floor-length coat, and the armoury of weapons he straps to his body, opened fire in the library and canteen and massacred their friends before killing themselves. What harm could they be doing, if life was only a movie?

When not hacking, Neo sells illicit floppy disks to his clubbing friends. He programmes the clubbers with sensations: electronics are their designer drugs. He keeps the cash from these deals in a hollowed-out book, whose title is 'Simulacra and Simulation'. The volume opens at a chapter on nihilism, to remind us that the film itself is an exercise in annihilation. One of Neo's customers takes mescaline or, rather, connects his nervous system to a disk that delivers the appropriate hallucinations, and calls it 'the only way to fly'.

Flying comes easily to these people, who are yanked into the air by invisible wires. They skip across gulfs between skyscrapers, and kick-box while defying gravity. Such feats are made possible by the lightness of their being; because they live inside technological cocoons, nothing tethers them to the old, shared, solid earth.

This is a world of substitutes that must surely be more satisfactory than the authentic commodities they replace. A character called Cypher relishes a steak that he knows is just another illusion fed into his head by the matrix. Again, the film tells a contemporary truth. Meals, in a consumerist society, are about feelings, not nutrition, so we eat the sizzle, not the sirloin. Morpheus's crew subsist on snot-coloured gruel dished up in sardine cans. This foul porridge, someone tells Neo, contains 'a single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins and minerals'; the formula is chemical.

Have you read the labels on the cans or packets at the supermarket recently? If the artificial flavouring is unpersuasive, your own imagination does the rest. One hacker believes that the slop resembles a breakfast cereal called Tasty Wheat. He then concedes that he has no idea what wheat tastes like: his suggestible taste buds are simply following the instructions of that capitalised adjective.

The agents hunting Morpheus call him a 'terrorist' or 'the most dangerous man alive', though his only crime is to have exposed the fragility of the fiction that houses us. When, two years after the film's release, more brutally fanatical political terrorists did the same, our guardians responded by telling us to go back to sleep, to curl up contentedly in our matrix of commercialised dreams. Bush, immediately after 9/11, eloquently rallied Americans to continue shopping, and during the security alert in New York in mid-February, when rumours circulated about cyanide attacks and dirty bombs, and fighter jets screeched on patrol above the city, mayor Bloomberg urged Manhattanites to go the movies.

The Matrix analyses our malady, though, of course, it dare not prescribe a cure, since that would mean an end to the sale of cinema tickets, DVDs and video games. The terrorism of Morpheus is merely conceptual. The Wachowskis, in ways that might now embarrass them, behaved like the genuine article when making the film. They took fiendish aesthetic delight in organising a helicopter crash, showing how its propellers buckle as it lunges sideways and shatters the glass wall of a skyscraper.

Fussing over the apocalyptic spectacle, Larry Wachowski said: 'We wanted the glass to explode in a kinda ever-expanding circle. It took three months of heavy-duty planning to figure out how to do that.' 9/11, after all, was an action movie whose pyrotechnics were not faked. It is creepily appropriate that the special effects for this year's two sequels, Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, were filmed at a naval base in California, decommissioned during the presidency of Bush père. Here, a full-size freeway was built so that Cadillacs and 18-wheel trucks could burn up on it, bombarded by guided missiles. The lot resounded to playful blasts followed by storms of fractured glass, and the FX supervisor John Gaeta greeted visitors by saying: 'Welcome to the war zone.' Was America here rehearsing its own extinction?

Hyping The Matrix in 1999, the producer Joel Silver said: 'This is the first film of Y2K.' Back then, we were all nervous about New Year's Eve, though the worst scenario we could imagine was that our computers would lose their memories. Now that we are older, wiser and more scared, The Matrix looks truly prescient. Geneticists, cloning babies and tinkering with DNA, have begun to render humanity obsolete; Bush and his cronies hanker for a war so their machines can play lethal games.

No wonder that the two sequels are anticipated with such excitement. If there is a soporific, pacifying matrix, we all urgently need a connection to it.

Matrix Reloaded is set for release in May; Matrix Revolutions will follow in November.


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MATRIX RELOADED TRADING CARDS
Source: <Matrix Unloaded>

01.March.2003 - Matrix Reloaded Movie Trading Cards

The March 2003 issue of Previews, Diamond Comic distributor's catalog/magazine, has listed a series of Matrix Reloaded Movie trading cards:

This 81-card base set is loaded with cool graphics from the film, sub-sets and interactive features including: behind-the-scenes images from the making of the film featured on card backs; an 18-card puzzle set with imbedded code and contest; and 18-card parallel foil character set including Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, and more; an 18-card parallel foil puzzle set; a nine-card "Gold Series" numbered foil character set; four different versions of foil box toppers; nine different foil fim cell "Winner" cards; nine foil technology cards; and one foil case topper. 8 cards per pack. 24 packs per box. MSRP: $2.99 per pack.

The cards, which are made by RPG card giant Decipher, are scheduled to ship to stores in May.


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© 2003 Code 808