Every Wachowskis Movie, Ranked

It’s shocking that the Wachowskis have only made seven features (and, it seems like they are out of the game completely – Lilly Wachowski’s Twitter bio reads “ex-filmmaker”). Every one of their films is so bursting with ideas and images and heady concepts, it feels like they’ve made at least twice that amount. On the 20th anniversary of their groundbreaking work on “The Matrix,” we look back on all of their films and how they quietly transformed cinema (while transforming themselves, both now identify as transgender). What a ride.

7. ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ (2003)

What film could possibly meet expectations after the conclusion of “The Matrix?” Well, as it turns out, neither one of the actual sequels. Supposedly the Wachowkis had originally envisioned their humankind-versus-robots saga as a trilogy and then, when they got the green light for “The Matrix,” crammed all the ideas for all three movies into a single film. After the first one was a hit, they had to reverse engineer the subsequent two films and … it kind of shows. This first sequel was widely talked about for its admittedly impressive car chase and the “Burly brawl” between Neo and a gazillion Agent Smiths. That sequence, like much of the film, has aged pretty poorly. For all its technological advances, it remains emotionally distant and very hard to love.

6. ‘The Matrix Revolutions’ (2003)

Incrementally better than the first sequel (mostly for the terrific opening sequence in Club Hell and the final showdown between Agent Smith and Neo), it was handed a lot of interesting ideas from the first sequel (Neo’s powers working in the real world, Agent Smith possessing a human body) and followed through on them, with varying levels of success. Part of the problem is that so much of the movie is set in the drab city Zion and surrounding environs (like Machine City) and so little of it set in the more dynamic Matrix. That was one of several choices that are either baffling or boneheaded depending on how harsh you want to be, right alongside turning Morpheus into the movie’s Chewbacca and separating our main characters for the entirety of the epic conclusion. By this point most had run out of interest in the movies, the Wachowskis included.

5. ‘Bound’ (1996)

The Wachowskis’ first film as writer-directors is a low-key, hard-boiled crime thriller. The twist (since, you know, there’s always a twist with these two) is that the femme fatale and the moll are lesbians and plot to do in the male bad guys and make a run for it. That’s a pretty good twist, right? Even today the film feels quietly revolutionary, from its nonbinary depiction of the two female leads (Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon) to its willingness to be kinky but never exploitative. And at the same time there’s something almost classical about their relationship and romance. Seeing what they were able to accomplish, the level of stylization and ability to color outside the lines, on such a small budget undoubtedly made Hollywood very curious about what the siblings would do next. What they delivered would rewire cinema for the next decade and beyond.

4. ‘Cloud Atlas’ (2012)

David Mitchell’s sprawling novel, with six distinct sections that mirror one another in all sorts of fascinating and occasionally frustrating ways, was such an undertaking that the Wachowskis brought on a third director to help out, “Run Lola Run” auteur Tom Tykwer. (They would work with him extensively on their influential but little-seen Netflix series “Sense8.”) The group worked together plotting out the entire movie and then reconvened during editing to finish it together, but the Wachowskis filmed the 19th century story and the two set in the future (“An Orison of Somni-451” section is the real dazzler). The movie probably wouldn’t have gotten the go-ahead in the 2019 climate, especially with the actors taking on different races at various points in the story. But it really is an overwhelming, singularly beautiful accomplishment, and the themes of resurrection and transformation are made even more fascinating given that both Wachowski siblings are now transgender. In a weird way, it makes this film their most autobiographical.

3. ‘Jupiter Ascending’ (2015)

Widely lampooned on its initial release (maybe surprise premiering it at the Sundance Film Festival wasn’t the best idea), this often-delayed, mega-budget original science fiction film can now rightfully be seen as a visionary, overstuffed delight. As someone on Twitter recently put it, they created an entire cinematic universe in one movie. And it’s true. The tale of Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), a lowly immigrant cleaning lady, who discovers she is the genetic match for a galactic ruler, is over-the-top and swoony in its romanticism. (The Wachowskis said they were inspired, in part, by Bollywood musicals.) It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, oftentimes the story becomes overwhelmingly complicated and whatever Eddie Redmayne is doing, it doesn’t really work. But it’s hard not to fall in love with a movie so full of ideas and creatures and ingenious, next-level designs. Also, the movie has at least two all-time classic Wachowski sequences: a spacecraft chase in downtown Chicago (Channing Tatum plays a wolf-man who wears flying rollerblades, that cannot be overstated enough) and a prolonged, Terry Gilliam-esque sequence of galactic bureaucracy that features a cameo by Gilliam himself. Inspired and inspiring, “Jupiter Ascending” is a cult classic in the making. Or maybe it’s just a classic.

2. ‘Speed Racer’ (2008)

Many have attempted to translate “Speed Racer,” the influential 1970s Japanese cartoon series, to live action, but it fell to the Wachowskis to really get the job done. Their approach was, as always, unique and very much theirs – they would shoot every element of the movie separately and then composite everything together in the computer later. Everything was in focus, giving the entire movie the flattened look of an animated film. The result is one of the most visually astonishing movies ever, with each race taking on an oversized grandeur that doesn’t betray the intricateness of its mechanics. (The cross country race is maybe my favorite.) But “Speed Racer” also wears its heart on its sleeve; it’s a movie about loss and love and, true to most of their work, transformation. There’s also a bunch of stuff about corporate interests and how fate is determined not by the cosmos but by the rich people in power, which gives it some subversive edge, especially since it was intended to be the first part of a multi-part franchise. It’s a shame we’ll never see further installments, but it is heartening knowing that they really left everything out on the field on the first go-around.

1. ‘The Matrix’ (1999)

When “The Matrix” was released 20 years ago, nobody thought that it would change the face of cinema. But it did. Tapping into the technological unease of the millennium, it made Luddite hackers the heroes in a story of free will versus destiny, of machine guns versus robots. At their best, the Wachowskis have an uncanny ability to synthesize their influences into a coherent whole that feels staggeringly new. They never did that as well as they did in “The Matrix,” combining their love of Kung Fu, anime, videogames, comic books (some accused them of straight-up plagiarism) and philosophical literature, into a rollicking adventure that kept audiences on the edge of their seat and coming back, again and again, to decode out every detail. Of course, it had its share of controversy. Along with the plagiarism claims leveled against them (by no less than comic book demigod Grant Morrison), they received additional heat after the Columbine massacre, since many pundits claimed that the shooters took inspiration from the film. But none of that could take away from what a tour de force “The Matrix” was (and still is), how visually stunning and intellectually audacious it was, how ambitious and complicated and character-driven it is. It raised the bar on visual effects by adding things we’d never seen before that actually helped the story along, nothing was ever showy for the sake of being showy. Everything in “The Matrix” meant something. And “The Matrix” meant something for everyone.