In certain ways, the Wachowski siblings — formerly the Wachowski brothers, before the elder’s sex-change operation — resemble George Lucas and Peter Jackson, in the sense of being creators who were responsible for a signal work of pop fantasy, but whose subsequent filmmaking seems designed to poison our enjoyment of the thing that made them famous in the first place. With The Matrix, now more than 15 years old, the then-frères created an unsettling techno-gnostic fable encased in an action-movie shell, used their actors and special-effect innovations perfectly (and no, I’m not sure which category Keanu fell into), and deserved all the praise and box office that came pouring in. Since then, like Jackson with the never-ending Hobbit trilogy and Lucas with the Star Wars prequels and the Indiana Jones Sequel That Must Not Be Named, they’ve made a succession of bloated, self-indulgent epics that don’t even come within hailing distance of the standard they set.
And the Wachowskis, unlike Jackson and Lucas, have — while torching their own legacy — also been losing almost-unimaginable amounts of money. Their two Matrix sequels at least justified the investment, however artistically disappointing the results, but since then they have lost tens of millions of dollars, first on Speed Racer and then on Cloud Atlas — and now, depending on overseas grosses and promotion costs, they could lose the magic hundred million on the critically savaged Jupiter Ascending.
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