CinemaDome: The Matrix vs Terminator 2

This may seem similar to the last pairing, but was selected for a few reasons. One, unintentionally, we had a little feature here of James Cameron's greatest hits. Two, these films continue the man/machine struggle from Monday's 'Dome and were arguably the biggest sci-fi action hits of the 90s. Three....these were also the last time these franchises were any good...

Anyway, Terminator 2 opened the 90s and ushered in the era of CGI as a featured component to film making. The Matrix closed out the decade with a new spin on action cinematography.

The challenge I see is that Terminator 2 isn't as original as 1 and The Matrix, due to the close proximity of release dates, is often tainted by its sequels. So, can T2 and The Matrix stand on their own and go head-to-head? Which is the king of the 90s? Can Cameron get out of this week over .500?



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Anyone else feel like wearing black leather and shades?

(Next week's pairings will be more 'thinky'...)

You need to find a contest that Terminator can win, because this is NOT it.

The Matrix

I recall T2 my senior year as enjoyable, but was mostly seen because of 'nostalgia'. Nowadays I think it's fairly shoddy.

The matrix on the other hand performed much better as entertainment, and is still good to watch to this day.

Vote: the Matrix

The Matrix

T2 does look kind of shoddy and isn't as good as it was when it came out. On the other hand, The Matrix is still as bad as it was when it came out.

I still enjoy this review:
www.bigempire.com/filthy/thematrix.html

Vote: T2.

I loved Terminator as a kid. A horror film, a sci-if film, an action flick all rolled into one. Entertaining and original and I watched that damned thing many times. T2 started out ok, despite the similar plot, but then part way through turned into a one liner delivery machine and outside of They Live I'm just into that. I really, really don't care for T2. I liked it well enough when it came out because I was a teenager but it has aged poorly and I won't even sit through it now.

With the Matrix I had almost the opposite experience. I was in theology class and a student had chosen The Matrix as part of a school project so we all had to go watch it together. Taken as an intellectual film that espoused certain thrological ideas it failed miserably and I hated it. It seemed pretentious because it's reach exceeded its grasp by miles. Then I watched it again like two or three years later. I rolled a big joint (single man, no kids), laid down on the couch and let it wash over me. This was a much more appropriate way to see the Matrix and as a fun stoner sci-fi flick with some minor theological trappings if faired much better. When it was finished I put it immediately back on and watched it again (I was high after all, what else was I to do?). I love hong king cinema and while I'm not as keen on the rope work and fantastical elements it still spoke to me, action and choreography wise, in a way that no American film had before. I still don't love the Matrix, but I like it a hell of a lot more than T2.

Vote: The Matrix

I may write more on this pairing later (or I may not), but so far most of you are crazy.

T2 by a mile.

Terminator 2: The only good sequel for the Terminator franchise, and possibly a rare case where a sequel improved upon the original. There were some bold choices in this movie, making the original Terminator the hero and putting Sarah Connor in a mental institution. The more advanced terminator was interesting, and a nice showcase for CGI of the day. But more importantly, this Terminator movie had some deeper aspirations. That scene with two little boys shouting and wrestling and brandishing toy guns may have seemed like a throwaway moment to some viewers, but the dialogue surrounding that moment made it a commentary on the violent tendencies of the human race. The story works well despite the potential issues with any time travel story. This movie also had some good lines and a few funny moments. Big cultural impact at the time.

The Matrix: At the time this movie came out, it was a big deal, but the ideas didn't quite add up and audiences were really just dazzled by the cool visuals. After the third movie in the trilogy, the Internet retroactively declared that The Matrix movies all sucked. I respect that the Matrix movies tried to do something interesting and intellectual along with all the action, but really only the action worked. Bullet-time effects were neat, but have lost their impact after use in so many subsequent movies and even tv shows.

Vote: Terminator 2

Both movies suffer from the declining quality of their sequels, with the Matrix especially becoming a poster child of why studios shouldn't blindly throw piles of money at directors ( not that they ever seem to learn ) . That said, judging the two on their own merit, I still think T2 holds up well, all things considered and makes an effort to be more about the story and plot vs the special effects . I find the three main characters of T2 more interesting and less stereotyped than Neo/Morpheus/Trinity. Sarah Connor especially, as she is a descendant in some ways from the Ripley character, but with deeper flaws . And Robert Patrick as a villain is more compelling than anonymous machines/Elrond ( who in the first sequel had Colonel Sanders as their spokesperson in that convoluted scene at the end ) . At times the Matrix seemed to be trying too hard to look cool - which admittedly it does.

Vote: T2

Everything Shellhead said, plus: I'll take T2's inventive actions scenes (the T-1000 sprouting a third arm while flying the chopper, the T-1000 morph-judoing out of a head punching, etc.) over The Matrix's reliance on slow-mo and interminable fight scenes (especially the Neo vs. Smith fight).

Vote: Terminator 2

Edit: Also, go to this site to read someone's successful attempt to reconcile the time travel paradoxes in the first two Terminator films. He also analyzes the logical consistencies (or lack thereof) in several other time travel films including the Back to the Future series, Star Trek Films, X-Men: Days of Future Past, etc.

T2 is the quintessential big, loud, expensive 1990s era action movie. It's great. I saw it seven times in the theater. It's actually hard to believe that it is just eight years between it and The Matrix. WOW. That kind of blows my mind because they seem like movies made 20 years apart. Which really kind of shows why The Matrix is the winner of this contest. T2 was great fun. The Matrix was a cultural moment.

For all of the hullaballoo about the "philosophical" themes of The Matrix, what tends to be forgotten is how THAT was the moment when 20+ years of Asian cinema and comics infiltrating the West finally hit the mainstream in a major, completely integrated way. It was also a big, loud, expensive 1990s era action movie, but it seamlessly integrated John Woo, Akira, Evangelion, Yuen-Wo Ping, Ghost in the Shell and so on into that framework. I remember seeing the film opening night (with this girl that I had this tremendous unrequited love for) and we went in expecting Johnny Mnemonic. But I was already deep into Japanese stuff, Hong Kong stuff and all so virtually none of those elements were new to me. But what was new was seeing Western directors do all of that stuff RIGHT. There were little visual things, like the repetition of an image in motion that were literally straight from a manga page. It was also borrowing heavily from Gibson and other Cyberpunk authors, none of whom had ever really had a film capture so much of that "mirrorshades" style.

"Bullet time" was a tremendous innovation because it enabled that kind of very fine, micro-detail in a moving image that totally transformed action sequences. You could have a moving image that had what was essentially a live edit to a comic book panel-like detail. Like when Morpheus gets shot in the office building- you get those cutaway views that direct the eye in the same way a comic panel does but in real-time. It's unfortunate that bullet time was abused and over-used so much, because I think that was the most significant concept in action movie photography since the parallel editing in films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch.

The Matrix was also so hugely stylish and smartly designed. It looked incredible, like nothing else before it. There again, the style wound up being used and abused too much and now it looks sort of quaint.

As for the sequels, I am always the guy that defends them. But I also really like the Wachowskis. I think they are absolutely fearless and they don't give a shit about what audiences and studios expect. Speed Racer was brilliant. Cloud Atlas was brilliant. Jupiter Ascending was...strange, but kind of brilliant too. But the Matrix sequels went in completely different directions and some of it is scattershot, sure, but when they were on target they were as good as the first film to me. Where I think they went wrong with them was in doing them so close together and not making people wait for them. There are other missteps- mostly things that should have been left ambiguous or unexplained. And the "burly man" brawl still looks horrible. But there's plenty of great stuff in the sequels. The Merovingian was freaking great, it's a shame they shunted off the whole story there to the comics and video games...there was all of this stuff about how his henchmen were all vampires and werewolves because they can do that in the Matrix...and the white guys were like ghosts. The battle at Zion was awesome, I loved how it was basically Space Invaders with aliens coming down, people shooting up.

So there's no contest here, The Matrix is the better, more important movie regardless of what you think of the sequels. T2 has had what, three completely horrible sequels at this point?

Matrix.

Not a huge fan of either, but will go with The Matrix.

I agree with Michael. The Matrix has you.

The problem with this comparison is that one of them is an attempt at something original and the other is a cookie cutter replay.

T2 is the same film as The Terminator. It's the Same. Film. The plot proceeds in almost identical fashion, differing only in locales and methods of destruction. They even replay the "cyborg drives big truck with liquid to explosion." Sure, it looks cool and, yes, Linda Hamilton has one of the best action moments in all of cinema when she beats the crap out of a couple orderlies with a nightstick. But Hamilton also can't act for shit and no one else gives really sterling performances with material that's being rehashed seven years later. It's not a bad film. It's just not particularly interesting once you got past the novelty of the CGI.

The Matrix, OTOH, was an earnest attempt to do something different, even if so many equate that attempt with the theft of multiple other genres and directors' efforts within those genres before them. ("Good artists imitate. Great artists steal." - Picasso (maybe)) MB is right in that this was the first good depiction of the Gibson style of cyberpunk ("The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.") and that alone made it interesting. I think the Wachowskis' willingness to overtly engage ideas like Cartesian meditations or the cave story was a step above most other science fiction films of the time. Even as a modern political allegory, it was far more interesting than another killer cyborg and a doomsday scenario. The doomsday had already happened. Now it was just about how people dealt with that reality, if it was real and if they could accept it. In that way, it kind of opened the door for a lot of the post-apoc stuff that is prevalent today, like The Walking Dead.

The Matrix.