Same As It Ever Was: MATRIX 4 Is The New GREMLINS 2

[Editor’s Note: this article contains spoilers for THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS (and GREMLINS 2, I guess). It’s a great film so you should go see it anyways.]

Yes, this article's serious. No, it's not saying that one is better than the other. Yes, the author thinks way too much about movies. No, he's not gonna stop.

In a 97-minute interview for DePaul's Visiting Artists Series in 2014, Lana Wachowski mentioned aesthetics in cinema. How some films are essentially the same but differentiated, particularly, by each movie’s aesthetic. Her example was SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN (2012) and MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012). The whole interview's fantastic, but jump to 27:53 if you wanna learn about why aesthetics are important and how Rupert Sanders and Wes Anderson made the same thing.

We're about to go on a journey that's both wonderful and strange, but I'm sure you'll understand at the end why 2021’s THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is the new GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (1990).

And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"

GREMLINS (1984) was a movie Warner Bros. didn't like, but it made them at least three or four truckloads of money. Which obviously meant they wanted a sequel. Obvious only to them since its director, Joe Dante, felt that the movie was a closed book. It was also, because of the puppets, a very exhausting experience. So he had absolutely no reason to make another one. Didn't stop Warner Bros. from trying, though, with or without Dante. However, they found during their many car wrecks over the years that they needed Dante. When Brian Yuzna was offered RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 (1993), the only rule was to use trioxin. Similarly, Warner's only rule for Dante was that he had to use gremlins. Complete creative control does wonders for a sequel.

The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003) (or tetralogy, if you count 2003’s ANIMATRIX, and I do) kept the truckloads of money running for Warner Bros. Which obviously meant they wanted a sequel. Obvious only to them since its directors, The Wachowskis, felt the tetralogy was a closed book. They were open to expanding the lore with Matrix Comics (1999-2003) and Matrix Online (2005), but they were done with cinematic entries. Didn't stop Warner Bros. from trying, though, with or without The Wachowskis. They seemingly got dangerously close with Zak Penn. Nothing against him but unless he's secretly Ronald D. Moore, Sam Esmail, or the ghost of Philip K. Dick, there's nothing in his filmography that suggested he'd be a great caretaker for the Matrix legacy.

His involvement quietly went away, then Lana was eventually struck by inspiration. Tragically, it was because of the deaths of her parents and a close friend. She needed to process her grief, and found that Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) were the only ones who could help.

In a way, Warner Bros. paid for her therapy.

And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"

The studio didn't know what they wanted from GREMLINS 2, but sequels tend to follow the template of their originator so they expected something along those lines. Only lighter because they got a lot of crap over how dark GREMLINS was for a family movie (the PG-13 rating didn't exist 'til after). Y'know, Gizmo goes to another small town and accidentally wrecks havoc on their values. Instead, Dante gave them another HELLZAPOPPIN' (1941), one of the most anarchic movies in cinematic history.

Warner hated a lot about GREMLINS 2—which is fitting since they hated a lot about GREMLINS. One of the many things were the fourth wall breaks. The studio hated reminding audiences they're watching a movie. Another thing was, even though cartoons were a big part of their fortune and glory, they hated the Bugs and Daffy opening (Chuck Jones came out of retirement to do them). They felt that the audience would be distracted. The onslaught of hatred was deflected in two ways: One was executive producer Steven Spielberg, while the other was Dante insisting he show his version to a preview audience before Warner could do anything—and that audience loved almost everything the executives complained about.

 THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS was much more blatant in its disdain for its corporate overlord. Or rather, as blatant as it could get without legal repercussions. It's a small, loaded moment early on between Neon and Smith (in his role as Neo’s business partner). A peek behind the curtain of why the movie exists (beyond Lana's catharsis). Smith tells Neo that Warner Bros. is hurting for money and will make a sequel with or without his help, and that they'll retaliate if he doesn't cooperate. I thought Christopher Nolan was too on-the-nose about his Warner feelings by making a film about the inventor of the atomic bomb, but Smith's bit was like a haymaker.

The situation that Neo/Lana was put in was an impossible one for any artist: forced to go back to a finished piece or watch someone else screw it up. The Warner movie library is full of standalone classics to which they wouldn't dare make a sequel—unless Stephen King made it first. There's no shame in rereleasing them in theaters and get those trucks loaded again. Or they can take the same chance on new as they did with THE MATRIX (1999) instead of forcing something “new” like THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS.

And you may ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?" 

Tim Burton could've made a sequel to BEETLEJUICE (1988) at any point, but he hasn't because he didn't see the point. We got a kick-ass cartoon from it, but the show's a lot different from the movie. Warner tried for a long time to get BEETLEJUICE GOES HAWAIIAN made, but you can see why that hasn't gone anywhere. Joe Dante had Burton's problem with GREMLINS, but his way into making GREMLINS 2 was showing why you shouldn't make GREMLINS 2. A reason why you shouldn't make it is for consumerism, and Dante spends most of the runtime decimating that. The late-'80s was the a peak time of American excess, which is represented in GREMLINS 2 by Daniel Clamp (John Glover).

He was modeled after two millionaires: the annoying orange with a very similar sound name and Ted Turner.

The annoying orange aspect is Clamp Tower and how it's one-part excessive indoor mall and one-part tourist attraction. The Ted Turner of it all is the absurd amount of channels Clamp's network has. Well... absurd at the time.

There are streaming channels that rival how niche some of Clamp's were. The gremlins' reaction to Clamp Tower rivals Romero's zombie commentary in DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978).

No one would blame you for not understanding what the fuck the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) was saying during the factory fight in MATRIX RESURRECTIONS. But you'd be crazy, too, if you didn't have Monica Bellucci in your life anymore. I hope you see the irony, though, of someone complaining while those he's complaining to are trying not to die. But amidst the frenetic action sequence and bombastic score by Jonny Klimek and Tom Tykwer, what was he ranting about? The state of modern consumerism. And how Facebook ruined things:

“You gave us Face-Zucker-suck and Cock-me-climatey-Wiki-piss-and-shit!”

The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) also had a few choice words about consumers during a pivotal scene. The bullet time scene's a bit of an info-dump, but within the exposition is an important point that shouldn’t be glazed over:

“Now, my predecessor loved precision. His Matrix was all fussy facts and equations. He hated the human mind. So he never bothered to realize that you don't give a shit about facts. It's all about fiction. The only world that matters is the one in here. And you people believe the craziest shit. Why? What validates and makes your fictions real? Feelings.

Here's the thing about feelings. They're so much easier to control than facts. Turns out, in my Matrix, the worse we treat you, the more we manipulate you, the more energy you produce. It's nuts. I've been setting productivity records every year since I took over. And, the best part, zero resistance. People stay in their pods, happier than pigs in shit. The key to it all? You. And her. Quietly yearning for what you don't have, while dreading losing what you do. For 99.9% of your race, that is the definition of reality. Desire and fear, baby.”

Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"

Nothing was sacred in GREMLINS 2. Not even GREMLINS. Off the top of your head, how many sequels give the spotlight to people who've bashed a previous entry? The only one I can think of that's come close is JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK (2001), but that instance was about Jay and Silent Bob getting angry at kids making fun of characters based off them. In GREMLINS 2, the people in the control room are making fun of GREMLINS. Like Jay and Silent Bob beating up the kids, Dante gets his revenge by having a gremlin do grievous harm to them.

But that wasn't the only time Dante dished out some comeuppance.

Leonard Maltin hated GREMLINS and made sure you knew in his review. So what did Joe Dante do? Joe Dante put him in GREMLINS 2, got him to share his GREMLINS review, and sicced the gremlins on him.

One of Maltin's few complaints about GREMLINS 2? One gratuitous cameo.

The moment in THE MATRIX that changed cinema forever was the “Dragula” needledrop. It sold so many copies of Hellbilly Deluxe that Rob Zombie was able to buy Universal Studios AND Disney for…of course, it was bullet time changed the world. It's also so wedded to the Matrix series that the only way to properly poke fun at the series would be to make it useless. Which the Analyst did while he told Neo about the world. I wonder how many physicists would be claimed trying to figure out the logistics of bullet time's bullet time. Another, clearer way RESURRECTIONS pokes fun at the series is when Christina Ricci and her think tank tell Lana, I mean Neo, what THE MATRIX/Binary means. Neo even takes it a step further at Simulatte when he tells Trinity after she talks about the impact Binary made, “We kept a few kids entertained.”

A more obscure way the movie deconstructs the previous entries is by making “The One” Neo AND Trinity.

'Til then, there were six Ones and they were all just Neo. None of this means that RESURRECTIONS should be seen as a cynical reaction to the tetralogy, but that reaction is definitely part of the movie's... matrix.

Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was...

GREMLINS 2 and MATRIX RESURRECTIONS are siblings. It's not a question of quality with them but a statement of intent. Joe Dante and Lana Wachowski set out to give us the meta-commentary we needed, not wanted, and they delivered on a grand scale. However you feel about the movies, you should applaud them for their Project Mayhem-level of anarchy within the studio system. Oh. I forgot to mention one other connecting strand they share. Both movies had daffy versions of characters from previous entries.