Was Matrix a 'remix'?

[Tamahome]

There's actually a whole remix video series:

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/10/the-...

[Michael]

It looks like they did their homework, at least.

[Nick]

That is a great mash-up and comparison.

Like one of the people in the comments on boingboing pointed out, its no surprise the fight scenes are similar to other movies since most of the non-Matrix movies shown are choreographed by the same choreographer that the Matrix films used "Woo-ping Yuen"

Also the Wachowski Brothers have said they were heavily influence by anime which explains the other scene elements they borrowed.

As far as some of the plot points, the DBA I work with has a major in philosophy ( yeh, I'm confused as to how he became DBA too ) and he says there are several parts of the Matrix movies meant to demonstrate different ideas in philosophy. The Merovingian directly names one of the ideas when he talks about Causality.

[Michael]

Everything is a remake.

[Stan]

It's all a rip off of Plato's Allegory of the Cave

[Trike]

I strongly recommend Kirby Ferguson's series "Everything Is A Remix" that starts here: http://vimeo.com/14912890

Ferguson produced The Matrix one as well as the Kill Bill one, but the overarching series is really brilliant. I've been anticipating the next installment to the series, due any time now.

[Neil]

It would be nice if he started with all the movies that The Matrix 'remixed' from. The whole story is The Dark City story just done better. I loved the movie but when I saw it all I thought was Dark City.

[Trike]

Since the productions of Dark City (1998) and The Matrix (1999) overlapped, I rather doubt Matrix swiped anything from DC. DC reminds me of classic science fiction from 1940s while Matrix really does belong to Philip K. Dick's brand of 1960s SF.

There was something in the air in the mid- to late-90s, because The Matrix was merely the most successful of the virtual reality/reality warping films that came out then.

We had Cube (1997), Existenz (1999), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Fight Club (1999), The Cell (2000), and etc. While some movies like Avalon (2001) and Vanilla Sky (2001) could be seen as reactions to The Matrix, they were both being kicked around before Matrix was released.

It's just one of those things where something in the culture sparks similar thoughts among a lot of people at the same time. Like in the early 2000s we had movies about memory-editing, such as Paycheck (2003) The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Forgotten (2004) and The Final Cut (2004).

[Doug]

The fact that the fight scenes were very similar to a dozen different films doesn't surprise me at all. Martial arts tend to be very choreographed by default and, as such, things are bound to be similar.

Given what the Wachowski brothers have said and who worked on the film, it's not a surprise at all.

The one that gets me is how badly it rips off Ghost In The Shell. Not just in fighting style but in a large part of the root concept, style and even visual elements (code waterfall).

[Phillip]

I think they left off an important book series that The Matrix appeared to borrow from quite heavily. That books series being The Wonderland Gambit by Jack L. Chalker. The Cybernetic Walrus

Scenes in the Matrix appear to be lifted directly from the pages of the books, including, but not limited to: Being physically plugged into a computer via a cable to the back of the neck, a computer program copying itself many times during a fight scene, illusions to Alice in Wonderland. There are more specific scenes, but it's been 10 years since I've read the books and can't draw them to mind right now.

Chalker himself was troubled by the similarities, but did not have the resources or the energy toward the end of his life to make much of the issue.

Perhaps other people could find the same overlapping plot points in even older books or movies. Regardless, these are fantastic books that I highly recommend. If you like the whole, "what is reality" genre that is.

[Doug]

Maybe it's because the idea of connecting to a computer via neck-inputs was actually in Ghost In The Shell a few years before his book was even published.

Though, I'm not even sure that was the first time someone thought of it.

[Trike]

I don't think Chalker would've had a leg to stand on, since it's clear The Matrix borrowed from a number of sources. Bad writers plagiarize from one person, great writers steal from many. (I stole that from T.S. Eliot, of course: "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal." Everything IS a remix!)

Besides, "jacking in" and "plugging in" as shown in The Matrix goes back at least 30 years before Chalker's novel, to Vernor Vinge's short story "Bookworm, Run!" Of course, William Gibson's work popularized it in the early 1980s, a good 14 years before Chalker's book.

Oh, and Pete Townshend's notion of "The Grid" from the early '70s had some sort of virtual reality component, didn't it? It's really too bad he made Tommy instead of Lifehouse, because the latter was really ahead-of-its-time sci-fi.