fter his Phantom Menace debuted to mixed reviews, Star Wars creator George Lucas pegged the disappointment quite succinctly. "They (sci-fi fans) wanted Star Wars to be The Matrix," Lucas said.
It took one generation's groundbreaker to recognize another's. At the turn of the 21st century (1999 to be exact), The Matrix - the defining work by the filmmaking brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski - set the standard for how FX, sci-fi, fantasy and sheer cool were expressed on film.   The Matrix, about a computer hacker (Keanu Reeves) who is let in on the ultimate secret - that his world and everyone else's is a computer generated illusion - took elements of several contemporary genres and molded them into a coherent whole. Cyberpunk, martial arts movies, sci-fi and existentialism were blended with a deft soupcon of imaginitively rendered FX (two words: "bullet-time").   The result was a film that did more than gross $459 million worldwide. Its jargon became lingua franca on the Internet, the source material of countless chatroom debates, and even the template for some strenuously overheated analogizing (was The Matrix really Christ's resurrection retold for the wired generation?)   Probably wisely, the Wachowski brothers let all of this sink in on the pop culture front before letting not one, but two shoes drop. They would produce two sequels back to back and release them likewise. The result: In 2003 we are gifted with the latter two parts of a trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded in May, and The Matrix Revolutions in November. "Our fans would be angry at us if we made them wait any longer," producer Joel Silver told Newsweek.   This was particularly good news for Keanu Reeves, a.k.a. Neo, a.k.a. "The One", the individual who was foretold to lead a revolution that would break the human race out of its computerized slumber and into what is left of the real world. Reeves effectively wiped the words "Bill and Ted" from his resume with the role of a cyber-sponge who absorbs all the world's martial arts in a day, and he attained the action stardom he could never quite pull off before (remember Chain Reaction?). "I really missed Neo," he said of the two years that passed before he reprised the role.   Ditto, fellow Canadian Carrie-Anne Moss, a.k.a. Trinity, Neo's love interest and a lethal thorn in the Matrix's paw in her own right. The Vancouver-born former model became a hardbody during the Australian shoot of the original, and says her friends didn't recognize her after her training. "When I got back home all my girlfriends were going, 'Who are you?'" remembers Moss. "All my girlie girl was gone, and I was pretty much, like, 'Yeah.'" she told The Toronto Sun.   But like Texas, the sequels were meant to be bigger in every way. "They want more intense fighting, more complicated moves," Moss said by way of mild protest when the two sequels returned to Australia to film in late 2001. "I get up, train, eat dinner, go to bed and start over the next day," she said.   On just about every level, it's larger in scale. Including a $100 million-plus budget, and at least three times the special effects. There's even a hundred more of Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), the evil computer-generated agent who fought a death-battle with Neo the last time around. "Last time all the fights for Neo were one-on-one. Now it's one-on-five," Reeves said. That would be an average. In fact, in one highly-touted fight scene, Neo fights one hundred virtual Agent Smiths.   Good thing Neo is near invincible now. As we saw in the denouement of The Matrix, "the One" had evolved into a near superman in the computer world, capable of flight and control over physical laws (such as they exist in virtual reality).   In Reloaded, the Machine world - which keeps humans in a virtual stupor in order to live off their bio-energy - launches a counterattack against Zion, the last human city in the scorched post-Apocalyptic real world. Neo, Trinity and Neo's Yoda, a Zenlike virtual martial artist named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) take up the challenge. As for Revolutions, all we can tell is you is it's said to take place almost entirely in this Terminator-like future reality.   "The first movie was about birth. The second is life, the third is death," Keanu said, typically cryptic.   That ought to keep the Internet buzzing for a while. - Jim Slotek