The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Anticipation was extremely high in 2003 for The Matrix Reloaded. After its successful cinema release in 1999, The Matrix had only become more popular as growing numbers of viewers caught up with the film on home video. Anticipation was met with hype from Warner Bros, who - with the addition of The Animatrix and the videogame Enter the Matrix - turned Reloaded into a media phenomenon. Everybody wanted to see this film. I accompanied many of my friends to a midnight screening, so keen were we to see what happened next.

Reloaded opens some undetermined time after The Matrix. The machines have located the human refuge of Zion, and massive engines are burrowing through four kilometres of rock to reach the city and kill everyone inside. In a last-ditch mission to stop the human-machine war, Morpheus, Trinity and Neo re-enter the Matrix to meet with the Oracle and find a way to shut down the system once and for all.

This is a fairly contentious movie. Critical reviews were mixed, although they tended towards the positive. Today Metacritic gives the film a weighted score of 62%, which is positive but unexceptional, and certainly isn't as strong as the 73% scored by the original Matrix. Rotten Tomatoes scores the film more generously, with a weighted average of 73% - although again, not as strong as the original's 87%. An awful lot of vocal science fiction fans actively loathed the film - and continue to express their disdain for it whenever it comes up in conversation. I loved the film at the time, and honestly couldn't understand some fans' hostility towards it. It's been quite a few years, however, so I was keen to see it with a fresh perspective.

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1972)

By the early 1970s the UK's horror movie stalwart Hammer Film Productions was struggling to retain its market share. Faced with increased competition from overseas and a growing sophistication among competiting horror movies, the company was forced to think out of the box and experiment with its long-tested formulas. One of these more experimental productions was Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter.

Hammer reached out to television writer/producer Brian Clemens, who had found enormous success writing and producing ITC's The Avengers. He wrote, produced and directed Captain Kronos as a new kind of Hammer film, less concerned with the horror elements and more with action and adventure.

It was intended to be the first film in a whole franchise of Captain Kronos movies, but poor box office and Hammer's continued financial struggles stopped those plans in its tracks. It now sits as a bit of an oddity, similar enough to Hammer's other films to form part of the overall range but still distinctive enough to stand out from the crowd.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: "The Most Toys"

It's 7 May 1990, and time for more Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The Enterprise has met with a rogue trader to collect a badly needed supply of hytritium, a volatile substance that can cure a deadly contamination on a nearby Federation colony. When Commander Data's shuttle containing the last of the hytritium explodes, the Enterprise crew are forced to proceed with their missing while mourning their dead colleague - not realising that the real Data has been kidnapped by the same trader, Kivas Fajo (Saul Rubinek) - who plans to make Data the centrepiece of his collection of rare treasures.

Saul Rubinek was a last-minute replacement for David Rappaport, who attempted to commit suicide a few days into the original shoot. Once the role of Fajo was re-cast, the relevant scenes were re-shot and production continued as normal. Sadly Rappaport's second suicide attempt was successful; he died on 2 May 1990, just before "The Most Toys" was broadcast. It's important to note the last-minute nature of Rubinek's casting - he was available, he was a Star Trek fan keen to appear in the series, and he was a personal friend of the episode's director Timothy Bond. It's important, because what happens next is arguably all just a horrible mistake: they make Fajo into a Jewish stereotype.

The Animatrix (2003)

When The Matrix became a global box office smash, and Warner Bros approached the Wachowskis about writing and directing a sequel, they didn't just make the one film. Instead they engaged in perhaps the most ridiculously ambitious plan for a sequel ever. It's not that they produced more than one sequel at once: Back to the Future did that in 1989, shooting Part II and Part III in one big protracted shoot. They also added a videogame and an anime: to get the story of what happened next Matrix fans weren't just required to watch a film, but rather watch three films and also play the game. It was a remarkable achievement in cross-media storytelling - and their story actually continued in another game a few years later. It wasn't necessarily the smoothest way to tell a sequel, though. After enjoying a rewatch of The Matrix after a couple of years, I figured I'd keep going and review the whole ensuing franchise - for better or for worse.

So The Animatrix is a portmanteau film, consisting of nine animated short films set in the fictional universe of The Matrix. Four of the shorts were released online in the lead-up to The Matrix Reloaded's release; all nine were shown in cinemas in Australia a week before Reloaded came out. It made for a rather effective teaser at the time, and helped to hype up the hardcore fans to an exceptional degree - myself included. 11 years later and it's actually a little hard for me to sit through in one sitting. In the end I had to take a break after the first six shorts, and come back a few days later to rewatch the final three.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Hollow Pursuits"

It's 30 April 1990, and time for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In "Hollow Pursuits", the Enterprise is beginning to suffer systemic failures across the ship. One of the engineers tasked with locating the cause of the problems is Lieutenant Reginald Barclay (Dwight Schultz), an introverted and awkward technician who is secretly meting out his frustrations with the command crew inside the ship's holodeck.

This is an unusual episode, because it breaks one of the key demands of television drama: it's not about the leads. Any given TV drama will generally have a regular cast, and it's a given that each episode will be focused on one or more of those characters. That isn't the case here. While several members of the regular cast get solid amounts of screen time - La Forge, Troi, Riker and Wesley, for example - the focus is distinctly on Lt Barclay. He's a guest character, played  by Dwight Schultz (The A Team). We've never seen him before, and he'll made sporadic appearances in The Next Generation and Voyager over the coming years.

The Matrix (1999)

I remember back in 1999 everybody was growing increasingly hyped by George Lucas' Star Wars Episode I - so hyped, in fact, that most science fiction enthusiasts didn't even seem that aware of The Matrix until it was suddenly out in front of them in cinemas. It has an intriguing but deliberately cagey trailer, a brilliant electronic/rock soundtrack CD and a slow-growing buzz that suggested it was going to be the film to watch.

Post-1999, of course, and we're all very aware of just how disappointing Episode I was and just how overwhelmingly popular The Matrix was. It might not have been the biggest hit of its year (that was, rather hilariously, Star Wars Episode I) but it was the film that most pushed the zeitgeist. Everyone talked about The Matrix in 1999. Filmmakers copied it. Audiences warmed to new filming and effects techniques - it's difficult to imagine American audiences accepting Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon so readily had they not been warmed up by The Matrix's wire-work kung-fu first. Warner Bros immediately commissioned two sequels to form a Matrix trilogy. In all the hype, the nostalgia (it's been 15 years, after all), and with the film's numerous visual iconic moments, it's actually quite difficult to take a step back and re-assess The Matrix on its own merits.

I figured I'd have a go.

PSX20 #3: Silent Hill

In 2014 Sony's PlayStation turns 20 years old. It was a revolutionary console, exploding the Nintendo vs. Sega paradigm that had dominated videogaming for a decade and its effects can still be felt today. PSX20 celebrates the 20th anniversary of Sony's Playstation videogames console by counting down my 20 favourite videogames for that platform. These aren't necessarily the best PSX games ever made, but they are the ones I liked and played the most. Today I take a look at #3: the 1999 horror game Silent Hill.

For most videogame enthusiasts it was Capcom's Resident Evil franchise that become the poster child for horror in console games. The PlayStation hosted three instalments, each of which sold millions of copies and collectively spawned their own multi-media empire of movies, comic books, toys and spin-offs. For my money, however, none of the Resident Evil games came close to Silent Hill. This was a genuinely scary game: not only peppered with 'jump' moments designed to startle the player, but soaked with a genuinely disturbing sense of unease throughout. Silent Hill generated a little empire of its own, with numerous sequels, two feature films and a string of comic books, and it all started with this first game in 1999.

Godzilla: 60 years on

Godzilla, the king of giant monsters, turns 60 years old today. It was on 3 November 1954 that Godzilla was released across Japan in all Toho cinemas. It was released, with some additional footage, in the USA two years later, and has since spawned numerous Japanese sequels and two American remakes.

The original Godzilla (or Gojira, to use its actual name) was inspired by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as well as the accidental irradiation of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru fishing boat during a US nuclear weapons test on Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954. The horror of the atomic bomb understandably carried much weight in Japanese culture, and writer/director Ishiro Honda personified that horror in the shape of a giant mutated lizard.