14. The Matrix Trilogy
And then there’s The Matrix, a trilogy with one amazing movie and two miscalculations. A lot of trilogies fit that description, including the original runs of the Beverly Hills Cop and Rambo franchises. However, The Matrix secures its spot just because that first film revolutionized the genre. Directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski took all of their favorite things, from anime to video games to Continental philosophy, into a movie that felt completely new. For better or worse, The Matrix changed the face of cinema.
By the time everyone caught up with The Matrix on VHS and the nascent DVD format, audiences clamored for more about the conflict between the machines and the human resistance. And then in 2003 The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions happened. Over the years, fans have put together thoughtful and well-observed arguments in defense of the two The Matrix sequels. As smart as these takes may be, they can’t get around the fact that Reloaded and Revolutions are deadly dull.
13. The Dollars Trilogy
The Dollars Trilogy, sometimes also called The Man With No Name Trilogy, is a loose combination of films. All directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, all starring Clint Eastwood, and all scored by Ennio Morricone, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) perfected the Spaghetti Western. No characters or plot lines carry over between the three movies; Eastwood’s protagonist gets called different names in the movies, going by “Joe,” “Manco,” and “Blondie.”
And yet, the three films feel very much of a piece. All three revise the myth of American exceptionalism offered by classic Westerns. In its place, Leone presents the American West as at once beautiful and savage, a gorgeous (Spanish) landscape in which desperate men scratch out a precarious living. They replace the simple dichotomy between handsome white hats and scruffy black hats with barbarians in ten-gallon hats, perfecting the revisionist Westerns of its era.
12. The Jason Bourne Trilogy
Like The Matrix before it, the three original Bourne movies must bear the sins of the movies that ripped it off. When Paul Greengrass took over from The Bourne Identity (2002) director Doug Liman, he brought a kinetic, shaky cam style to The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). For years afterward, lesser directors confounded illegible chaos for immediacy. But when rewatching those later two films, the pretenders only underscore the power of Greengrass’ approach, which stripped away the slick veneer of most spy thrillers and replaced it with an unmistakable brutality.
More than a stylistic exercise, Greengrass’ visual approach continues the unique take on espionage that Liman began when he and writers Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron adapted the Robert Ludlum novel, The Bourne Identity. A veteran of ’90s indies and Hollywood dramas, Matt Damon made for an unlikely superspy, but his “aw shucks” demeanor and a sharp conspiracy script reinvented the genre for the post-9/11 world. When Greengrass took over and dialed up the action, Bourne became something that audiences had never seen before and couldn’t wait to see again, even if it came in the countless knock-off films of the 2000s.
Discover more from Today Headline
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.