Despite drawing on Asia for material for so many aspects of the franchise, Asian people and Asian culture do not signify in meaningful ways and are often literally only superficially referenced. While The Matrix and references to it have entered our rhetoric and cultural consciousness at a mainstream level, knowledge of the film’s myriad allusions remains the domain of a very niche crowd. Preparing for a course I used to teach at Mount Holyoke College titled “Cyberpunk in Asia” led me down a research rabbit hole, uncovering the film's many Asian inspirations. And in The Matrix Resurrections, the new denomination of robots who are sympathetic to humans resemble the Ohmu from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Indeed, there are even shot-for-shot images in The Matrix that mirror moments in Ghost in the Shell. The Wachowskis have openly spoken about their fascination with cyberpunk, their love for John Woo action films, and the inspiration they drew from William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Japanese anime such as Ghost in the Shell. The original Matrix trilogy bears the fingerprints of major Asian cultural producers: the ubiquitous green “digital rain” and headjacks were first seen in Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 Ghost in the Shell, the eye-watering action sequences bear the fingerprints of Hong Kong action film director John Woo’s signature shootouts, and even the notorious “blue pill” is a reference to Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 Akira. Yet each of these images that have become visual synecdoches for the film and franchise is derived from earlier ’80s and ’90s cultural artefacts from Asia. These are some of the images that come to mind when The Matrix, that postmodern cultural touchstone of the late ’90s by the Wachowskis, is mentioned. A shoot-out: Flying glass and splintered shards. Considering all that, it's no wonder Tank didn’t return for The Matrix sequels.A human affixed to mechanical tubes in an incubation pod, rendered cephalopodic.Ī gravity-defying dominatrix, ninja-like. The low point is a slideshow of headlines about other people in the movie, such as Joel Silver getting kicked out of Warner Bros, the death of casting director Mali Finn, Laurence Fishburne’s daughter getting arrested, and headlines about Lana and Lilly Wachowski transitioning, followed by pictures of Chong laughing like he thinks this is all the funniest thing ever. The documentary also gets petty and vindictive about everyone else involved in The Matrix. One is that leading man Keanu Reeves stole money from animators, the stunt team, and other actors in The Matrix, and that Warner tried to force him to sign a fake Screen Actor’s Guild contract so that the union rules couldn’t help him. The 45-minute piece includes several more bizarre claims that aren’t backed up by anyone else who worked on The Matrix. The best evidence of this comes from Chong himself, in a short documentary he made called The Marcus Chong Story (via YouTube). Chong hasn’t been in many movies since The Matrix - which may hint that he is difficult to work with. He even went as far as claiming he was being blackballed in the industry by the producers. In October 2000, Chong was arrested for making threatening phone calls to Warner Bros and writer-directors the Wachowskis over him being written out of the movie. Warner offered him $400,000 for The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, and he wanted to get $1 million, and Chong wouldn’t budge (via entertainment.ie). The lawsuit included claims of defamation, stating that the producers tried to paint him as a terrorist. In 2003, Chong filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros/AOL Time Warner, claiming that there was a verbal agreement from 1998 and a contract signed in 2000 that guaranteed him a place in the sequel movies.
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