Oh man, can’t they just leave one thing as the perfect thing it is now instead of ruining it? The odds of this being anything other than recycled jokes from the first one are vanishingly close to zero.
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I don’t know, Mel Brook’s statement seems to directly acknowledge your concern. Maybe it will be mostly recycled jokes about Hollywood’s obsession with bleeding every intellectual property dry.
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Well, I thought History of the World 2 was rather weak, so I’m not optimistic about yet another sequel to a lesser Brooks film.
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TIL, I thought Part 2 only existed as a fake trailer! I won’t be rushing to watch the series.
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Sadly this isn’t the first time Mel Brooks has done a follow up of sorts to Spaceballs. I remember when this first came out aaaages ago, i watched the first episode and hated it
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That announcement lied to us!
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The animated series was so bad i am still angry about it all these years later 
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Aww… 
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She’s so great. I’ve missed the show since cancelling Paramount+, watching in clips on youtube never appealed to me. Gonna have to watch this one, though.
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Way back in the dark ages of the 1990s, there was a tabletop role-playing game called Shadowrun, a cyberpunk future with megacorporations and cyber implants, where magic had returned to the world and there were elves and orcs and so on. There were wizards who’d learned the ways of magic, one way or another, some were burnt-out mages. Fighting dragons in the megalopolis cities and stuff.
Deckers were also present, the hackers of the future, who could break in and through the virtual reality of the new VR internet, called “The Matrix”.
The usenet forums were super-excited because somebody had bought the rights to make a Shadowrun movie! That was exciting. We’d been playing in this world for years. There was so much lore and backstory, and we couldn’t wait to see how it would come out in a movie.
I guess you can see where this is going. “The Matrix” came out and was not at all a Shadowrun movie. They had to buy the rights in order to use that name relating to virtual reality or whatever. But they didn’t have to bring any of the Shadowrun universe into it. And they didn’t. So we boycotted it.
I finally watched it this week, and well meh, it’s ok. Worth watching. Good enough, but nothing special. The ending was really cheesy. A kiss brings the dead hero back to life with superpowers he didn’t have before? Ok. Whatever.
Now I just feel kinda miffed because I boycotted this movie for three decades while people told me it was so great, and it just isn’t really that great. It’s ok. But not all it’s cracked up to be.
Gonna watch Bright, which seems like a much more Shadowrun-style movie.
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I never got the hype either, though I watched it much earlier than you did (I tried a sequel later and gave up halfway through, seemed awful).
I wonder, though, if it’s one of those movies that really was great, or much better at least, when it first came out. I mean, you’re sort of seeing it now in retrospect, when so much has changed about movies and entertainment, and some of those changes were influenced by that movie. You know what I mean? Something like say, Kubrick’s 2001 seems clunky in some ways now, and slow too, but it was justifiably seen as astounding at the time. (There’s probably a name for the phenomenon I’m trying to describe.)
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@DaakSyde can confirm what @Millie_Fink ia suggesting: it was in my experience a buzz movie. Of its time.
Mind you I think that of a lot of beloved movies (like say Star Wars). I agree the kiss is, and always was, fromage fort: leftover scraps of cheese mixed together and served as if it’s a delicacy. It was all presentation but it looked great at the time. I was always pretty clear I preferred Bound.
As an aside one of my daughters got us to watch Inception recently and we all hated it. Long, boring, and with a couple of visual tricks that were now old hat. Bonus: nobody gave a fuck about whether it was real or a dream or whatever. It was just a movie and never had any of us got past that.
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I saw The Matrix when it was relatively new and thought it very good, although not as great as the hype. I just enjoyed the action and ignored the not very special ideas though.
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Without this movie, the album cover of “Goodnight Vienna” by Ringo Starr would’ve had a completely different look.
They just don’t do the Military vs. Science in the movies they way they used to; the remake of this was so unnecessary and had none of the visual punch of the original.
I consider this and “Forbidden Planet” and “The Thing from Another World” are the three best examples of Cold-War era Military vs. Science movies. And if that phrase isn’t clear, what I mean is:
Science: We gotta study it and make friends and learn from (fill in alien creature name, if any)!
Military: We gotta kill it, then we can make friends with it and study (fill in alien creature name)!
(is it obv. that this movie had quite an effect on me as a youngster? and they don’t make 'em like Micheal Rennie any more, no sir. who’s this Keanu dude?)
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And the Beatles would have never been inspired to reform!
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Oooh, keen article here!
https://brightlightsfilm.com/klaatus-police-action-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-1951-remembered/
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When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capitol, we don’t meet them with tea and cookies!
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That seems really unlikely. That’s not how copyright works. Hell, there are films with the exact same titles that are unrelated. This sounds like a rumor that got started that then just got repeated. The Wachowskis have been pretty clear that the Matrix was intended as an allegory for gender dysphoria. An early draft even had people being a different gender inside the Matrix. But nothing in copyright law would prevent them from using that word in that context just because it had been used in a similar context in a tabletop rpg. Maybe if the Shadowrun people had trademarked the word Matrix. Then the Wachowskis might have had to work out a deal to be able to use that word as a title, but that wouldn’t involve acquiring film rights. Do you have a source for any of this?
As far as the movie goes, in its time, it felt pretty groundbreaking. And some of the film techniques, like bullet time, were. From today’s perspective, I can see it feeling pretty meh.
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The Matrix is good in the “Don’t think too deeply about it” kind of action movie. I like it but i wouldn’t rank it as favorite of mine, and there are ideas in it that i do genuinely like. Sadly the sequels are dogshit in my opinion, however The Animatrix, which is a compilation of animated shorts, is really good and might be worth your time. It gives more context to the setting and i think some of the shorts are exceptional, others are just fine.
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I went into Inception with the mindset that it was going to be visual candy. In that aspect the movie is enjoyable, but it does fall into the problems that i have with Nolan movies in that it takes itself too seriously to the point of feeling kind of pretentious. Its not as egregiously pretentious as his movies afterwards but its there. Anyway i saw it in theaters and had a blast, but i have no desire to ever go back to it again.
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