Fans of the series say bring on the final installment. All photos © 2003 Warner Bros. Ent. — U.S., Canada, Bahamas & Bermuda. © 2003 Village Roadshow Films (BVI) Ltd — all other territories (all rights reserved used by permission), unless otherwise noted.

How do you follow a movie whose stylish, ground-breaking visual effects and savvy jumbling of genre made it a milestone of cool, discussed with equal fervor in classrooms and chat rooms? Well, judging by The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, you don’t.

The final two movies in The Matrix trilogy couldn’t hope to have the impact of the first; the 1999 release redefined a genre. Still, despite their waning dramatic appeal, the two sequels continued to push the vfx envelope.

The people of Zion fight for their survival.

For John Gaeta, the Academy Award winning visual effects supervisor, Reloaded and Revolutions retain the pure pleasure of discovery. “When we worked on the first Matrix, we never considered ourselves as guys who worked on definitive moments in film history.” But the success of that film “created an approval for risk-taking behavior,” which was “basically liberating” for the entire Matrix team: “You can be rewarded for taking chances.” This gave the special effects team license to take even more risks, the results of which can be seen in Reloaded and Revolutions.

The undeniable cool of the original The Matrix gave the effects artists on the sequel free reign.

This meant improving on the “Bullet Time” effects of the first film, creating what Gaeta describes as “a virtual camera in a completely simulated world,” allowing for angles, shading and detail unheard of in previous films. But Gaeta says that the visual effects team didn’t start work on the two sequels with the attitude of “what can we do to top ourselves?” because as a visual effects artist you must “use the script as your blueprint.”

Anyone who saw the Wachowski brothers’ first feature, the elegantly designed thriller Bound, can attest to their visual panache; with The Matrix they were more than willing to spread their wings. While the brothers have insisted they always thought of The Matrix as a trilogy, Gaeta says that in the beginning “nobody thought of anything besides the first film.” Then again, he says, the brothers “hold their cards pretty close to their vest; they don’t really clearly reveal what inspires them.” Still, it was obvious to him that the brothers had ambitions for Neo beyond what was shown. The final image of the first Matrix, with Neo taking flight, represents for Gaeta, the character’s “self-actualization.” Going over the scripts for the two sequels, he understood that the visual effects needed to depict Neo as “a superhuman doing superhuman things.” If some have found the morphing of Neo into a stolid superhero as dramatically problematic, Gaeta sees it as justified. All three movies, he suggests, “take place inside the mind — they’re subconscious acts that are occurring. It’s a display of will.” That gave the effects team “full creative license to move the camera wherever we felt, move people and things at impossible speeds, have gravity and all aspects of physical life bend as we saw fit.” And he adds, “stylistically, we wanted it to look cool.”