Matrix Reloaded Trailer Online

cheinonen writes "Trying to steal away the thunder from the opening of Star Wars, the trailer for The Matrix Reloaded is online now in Quicktime format. Must say I'm looking forward to this far more than I'm looking forward to Episode 3."

Comments

Streaming Video + Slashdot

[saveth]

A site with streaming geek-type video getting Slashdotted and still being able to hold its own, as far as bandwidth is concerned, is rather impressive. In about ten minutes, I'm sure it won't be doing as well, though. :)

Anyway, trailer is pretty neat. I don't particularly like the fact that it features a song from the previous The Matrix soundtrack, but the rest is good stuff.

Comparing it to the old The Matrix trailers, I'd have to say I'm not so thrilled with The Matrix: Reloaded. I may be jumping the gun when assuming things about it, but it looks like it's less "matrix theory" and more cultish action. I hope the movie doesn't turn out like that.

At any rate, I'll probably get suckered into standing in line for an hour, opening night, and loving the entire movie, so you'd probably be better off just ignoring me. :P

Re:Streaming Video + Slashdot

[foobar104]

And still, to this day, many action movie ads use the sound track from Aliens (during the part where the Terraforming Plant is exploding); and that song is nearly 16 years old!

Ah, yes. The infamous "Bishop's Countdown." Not only has this snippet (about 1:20 into the track, if you care) been used in tons of movie trailers and commercials, but Horner has even plagarized it himself. You'll find it woven through several of his scores.

Of course, that's Horner for you. He writes some great ones-- the Star Trek II and III scores are great, and I've been listening to A Beautiful Mind a lot lately, but the degree to which he "borrows" from himself is pretty startling. Listen to "A Kaleidoscope of Mathematics" from A Beautiful Mind and "The Machine Age" from Bicentennial Man to hear what I'm talking about.

Are there two sequels?

[g4dget]

Sorry for being so completely out of it, but are "Reloaded" and "Revolution" two separate sequels?

Star Wars ~ The Matrix

[zook]

I've come to think that Star Wars---all of them---and The Matrix are pretty similar: they're all big flashy movies that make the viewer feel like there's some deep meaning in them when they don't.

I have to say, I've enjoyed them all, but I think they're all overhyped.

Re:Star Wars ~ The Matrix

[namespan]

I had the reverse experience with The Matrix: I watched expecting a total action flick, no real meaning at all. In fact, I didn't watch it until well over a year and a half after it came out. I looked down on Matrix weenies. And the first time I watched it, I saw nothing but popcorn on screen.

Over time, tho', it's interesting... I started to see some of the Greek Philosophy and allusions come through. Now it's something I DO actually think about. Humans as Batteries? Don't make me laugh. Keanu Reeves as a Messiah? It does make me laugh. "There is no spoon?" OK, not deep. But the mythology of overcoming lack of confidence, making a choice to risk, choosing to risk for others, undertaking a quest for something bigger than yourself, looking for guidance from an oracle (and a fairly Delphic one at that!)... all good stuff.

Plus, I just love Agent Smith. "It's the smell!" I'll bet you two of my best baseball cards that Agent Smith could kick Darth Vader's butt.

Re:Star Wars ~ The Matrix

[ender81b]

Very true. The matrix has huge plot holes throughout.. if the goddam AI's have 'some type of fusion' they would have utterly no NEED for the human's as 'batteries.' Fusion, even in the simple form we are devolping today, gives them all the power they could ever need. Since they are obviously a technically advanced race giant solar mirrors in orbit beaming power to the surface would work alss. The power used to keep the humans alive, and maintain the matrix, would exceed what the humans would generate (Young Lady, in this house we OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!) It also never quite made sense to me why they even created "the matrix", simply putting russian sleep sets on the people (3 electrodes passing an electric current through your brain - puts you to sleep until it is shut off) would have worked.

The only thing I could think of, and maybe they will address it in these next 2 movies, is that the AI's still have some sort of vestigal programming to the sort of 'never harm humans' or like Asimov's 3 laws of robots and are literally unable to just swear off the human race. Or, they could feel some sort of obligation to their creators, and feel a need to 'take care of them.' Worse crimes in history have been justified by a need to 'protect the race.'

I still love the movie to death though... =)

I hope The Matrix goes evangelion

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'going evangelion' thing means to not butch the dramatic development in favor of mindless action. It is the opposite of Star Wars - Episode I. You know, it's nice to do things like character and story development.
In the interviews at site the guys say that the sequels are something 'much bigger' than the original. Much bigger like 'episode I', I fear. I pray for this not to be the case.

Of course, they need not exagerate! If the Matrix 3 is like the last TV episode of evangelion, bad things will happen!

Fishburne = Vader?

[Aash]

Is it just me or is Laurence Fishburne's delivery of the line "it is our destiny" awfully similar to Darth Vader's delivery of the line "it is your destiny" in ESB?

Yes, I've seen the trilogy way too many times.

Re:Candyman!

[namespan]

I don't know about that, but "Larry" Fishburne was in one of the best B-movies to ever come out of the 1980s. "Band of the Hand," brought to you by the people who made Miami vice, features a group of juvenille delinquents who are put through an experimental youth survival program in the Florida Everglades by a tough but caring ex-marine. When they move to a halfway house in Miami, "Larry" plays a pimp/dealer who resents them cleaning up the neighborhood. So the ex-marine trains the ex-delinquents in automatic weapons and paramilitary tactics and they clean up the streets. Fantastic stuff.

It's weird, you watch it, and you keep thinking "I should be unhappier with this film, but it's strangely satisfying!"

Re:Starring: GM

[GlenRaphael]

GM must have struck a deal with the producers. The majority of the cars shown are GM, including the new CTS (silver one, gets blown up unfortunately... I coulda gone for one of those) and the cops are Chevrolet Impalas.

All of the featured cars are GM. But there are also a lot of background cars that are pretty much whatever the people who worked as extras felt like bringing. (Me, I brought a silver civic, and I think you can actually see a tiny bit of my car at a long distance during one scene of the trailer.)

The boneyard was something to see -- they destroyed at least 40 cars making the film. They had two or three copies of every "significant" car so that if one got messed up they could just tow it away and do another take with the next one. They had about seven of the silver CTS, all with the same carefully duplicated bullet holes in each.

Car / overpass shots

[fahrvergnugen]

Many of the shots in the trailer are clearly identifiable as having been shot at the former airbase in Alameda, CA., an island off the coast of Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. The view of San Francisco is breathtaking from the airbase end of the island.

• 
  The shots are:
  
• Trinity stopping the shot up car at the 47-48 second time marker
  
• flipping car at 51 seconds
  
• Morpheus with sword at 52-53 seconds
  
• jump stunt followed by rolling SUV at 55 seconds (quick flashes)
  
• Morpheus with gun and explosion at 56 seconds
  

There's some large soundstages there, built from old airplane hangars, all owned by EON Productions, the Wachowski's company. During the Matrix 2 shoot they had the logo for Burlyman, the Matrix films' working title, emblazoned on them, and signs sprang up around town that simply said "BURLY" on them, followed by an arrow.

Near the hangar soundstages, a set was built on a vacant paved area next to the coast of the island. A mock freeway, sturdy enough to drive many cars on, pointed towards downtown San Francisco but ended hanging in space at an incline. (you can see the Bay Bridge in the background of some of the aforementioned shots) When standing on the freeway set, it would appear to lead straight into downtown San Francisco. To add the appearance of "realism," there was a highway sign proclaiming, "Palo Alto 7 miles." Palo Alto's about 30 miles from San Francisco. Whatever.

Anyway, the set was really amazing to see, and since it was right next to public property (the local skate park) you could walk out and take pictures of the set, and the various prop cars (including most of the ones in the trailer) parked in the lot around it. There were always a few guys out firing off cameras when I went by. The set was taken down very quickly, shortly after filming completed and all the "Burly" signs came down.

Also interesting to note is that some of the car chases were filmed in downtown Oakland and in the tunnel between Alameda & Oakland (causing a nasty traffic snarl one Saturday morning). The tunnel is notorious for being covered in grime, and is in fact so filthy that grafitti artists will come in with squeegies and start cleaning their tags into the walls. Even after the truck comes through and washes the walls off once every quarter, the tags are always just a little cleaner than the rest of the walls.

The most prolific of these taggers is apparently known as "wetso," and on Friday night before filming he had his name writ large toward one end of the (fairly recently cleaned) tunnel. I'm very curious to see if it survives into any of the final shots in the finished film. Go Wetso.

I'm the opposite way

[CAIMLAS]

After seeing Ep2 early this morning in the theatre (and being incredibly impressed for the most part - expectations far exceeded. Lucas may live another season!), I'm looking forward to Ep3 as I did Ep1 before I heard anything about it and saw the sucky trailers, etc. :)

As has already been said, The Matrix: Reloaded looks like it might just be another actionish movie w/o the philosophy that helped make The Matrix cool. In my mind, sure, the philosophy and weird scifi made The Matrix cool, but let's face it. It'd have been a pretty weak ending without the revolutionary action at the end. THAT is what made The Matrix totally haul ass. Now that everyone has seen The Matrix almost 100 times each, and there have been dozens of 'immitation' movies, employing the same stop action photography, the effect is somewhat passe, and not all that nifty. I suspect Reloaded will be nothing more than an additional chapter with more action and little real plot development. Like Star Wars Ep1 - 3, we already know basically what's going to happen. We don't need basic plot - we need indepth plot (which, I feel, Ep2 provided fairly well, overall), otherwise it'll be dull and not all that interesting.

I got enough purely action films from the 80's and early 90's, like Terminator. Give me a good solid plot, please, and make it stimulating.

But I s'pose that's asking too much. Episode 1, for instance, got cheers throughout. Episode 2 (being substantially longer - I clocked somewhere around 2 hours 15 minutes) didn't really get much enthusiasm in the theatre I went to at all. I don't understand people.

Re:The Matrix is one of the few films...

[meehawl]

It pushed the limits of technology and special effects going so far as to invent proprietary techniques to better show off the ideas of the filmmakers (yes, Bullet time was invented for the Matrix and is a trademarked and patented technique. It was first seen in a Gap commercial as a sort of technology test to see how audiences would react, but was created entirely for and because of the Matrix).

Oh right, then I guess that freeze-frame three-D stuff I saw in pop music videos from the Rolling Stones (Michael Gondry) and Orbital was just a figment of my imagination. Or the similar slow bullet dodge thing in Blade? Or the way the physical landscape in Dark CIty was psychically mutable?

The Matrix, like most great sci-fi movies, was an accomplished pastiche of several cutting edge style trends, but it borrowed heavily from less-successful or non-genre precursors. You can see it in Bladerunner, how it borrows heavily in mood, scenes, and dialogue from the earlier PI movie Klute with Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda.