Chapter 290: Booming Sign-Ups

"Your men are already dead," the agent in sunglasses coldly informed the commanding officer at the base of the building.

The shot instantly cut back to Trinity's room.

The burly police officer approached Trinity with handcuffs drawn while she held her hands behind her head. Framed past the officer's bulk, her lithe figure in a skintight leather suit looked extraordinarily alluring—her long legs, slender waist, and shapely rear enough to effortlessly stir a man's hormones.

Huggins swallowed hard on instinct, only to hear plenty of people around him making the exact same sound.

What happened next, however, left the audience with wide eyes and slack jaws, nearly choking on the saliva they had just swallowed.

The fight sequence that followed was simply beyond words!

Just as the officer reached out to cuff Trinity, she suddenly spun and leaped into the air. The footage shifted into high-speed slow motion, the camera sweeping in a 360-degree arc to showcase the maneuver from every angle while putting the leading lady's long legs and slender waist on full, breathtaking display.

Trinity's long leg lashed out, sending the officer flying backward to slam heavily against the wall behind him. The remaining dozen or so officers immediately drew their handguns and aimed at Trinity, ready to open fire.

"That can't be real, right?"

Amanda stared at the leading lady moving across the screen as agilely as a panther, barely able to believe her eyes.

"Cool!" Miley gave a fierce pump of her little fist.

On screen, Trinity lunged at lightning speed toward the nearest officer. Before he could fire, she snatched his handgun and drove a high kick into his head. The officer crumpled to the floor instantly, but the others already had their muzzles trained on her, and the audience could clearly see the fastest few pulling their triggers.

The police were fast, but Trinity was faster. Taking a single running step, she launched herself into the air again, flipping upside down to dodge the incoming bullets while simultaneously returning fire.

An inverted cross in midair!

It was already a visually stunning maneuver, and paired with Charlize Theron's height and long legs, it was impossibly cool!

The guns in her hands barked repeatedly, gunning down several officers. Just when everyone assumed the leading lady would finish off the rest with pinpoint marksmanship, Trinity moved again. She closed the distance to the surviving officers at top speed. Hands, elbows, legs, feet, knees, gun butts, and bullets all became weapons to take down her opponents, dropping one officer after another with a seamless blend of gunplay and close-quarters combat.

The police, by contrast, could never bring their muzzles to bear before Trinity effortlessly slipped out of their line of fire.

It was a complete, one-sided slaughter!

"So cool!"

Most of the audience were teenagers, and seeing this play out, many couldn't help but gasp and cheer.

"What... what kind of fighting style is this? Why have I never seen anything like it?"

Spielberg furrowed his brow tightly. Even though the film's tone wasn't to his taste, the leading lady's string of moves was utterly dazzling and breathtakingly slick.

Even if the sequence bordered on showing off technical wizardry, Spielberg heard the chorus of "cool" coming from the rows behind him and knew it hit the bull's-eye for teenage viewers!

Teenagers were the core consumer demographic of the movie market; winning their approval and support meant a film could easily dominate the commercial box office.

With those thoughts flashing through his mind, Spielberg still asked curiously, "Just what kind of fighting style is this?"

He was asking George Lucas. Everyone knew of Lucas's deep ties to the Rosenberg Family, and Lucas didn't disappoint him. "I heard Duke mention it, Steven. According to him, it's Gun Kata—a fusion of firearms and the human body!"

"But how could a human being possibly pull that off?" Spielberg found it inconceivable.

George Lucas pointed toward the leading lady leaping and twisting across the screen. "Keep watching and you'll understand."

Across the rooftops beneath the night sky, Trinity sprinted and leaped to shake off the pursuing Agents. Her movements were agile and her long legs packed with explosive power. With the high-heeled leather boots on her feet, the skintight leather suit clung even more tautly to her tall, sexy frame, and every leap drew a low murmur from the theater.

"Her name is Charlize Theron, right?"

After asking Hiller beside him and getting a nod in reply, Huggins said infatuatedly, "She's my goddess! Even if it's just to watch her, I'm coming back to the theater a few more times!"

Yet someone as formidable as Trinity was being chased all over the place by the Agents, easily leaving everyone with a single question—just how powerful were these Agents?

At last, Trinity shook off the Agents behind her, burst out of the building, and sprinted toward the wide street ahead. Her target was the phone booth across the way, but another Agent, Agent Smith, was already waiting in front of it behind the wheel of a truck.

Trinity hesitated; the Agent was clearly waiting for her to step inside the booth before ramming it with the truck.

"Why does she have to get into the phone booth?"

A Black viewer muttered to himself, unable to figure it out. With no one else cutting her off nearby, Trinity could easily have fled in another direction.

"Anthony, don't ask such an idiotic question."

His companion beside him gave him an annoyed shove. "If Duke set the plot up this way, he definitely has his reasons."

The phone inside the booth began to ring. After a brief hesitation, Trinity set her astonishingly long legs in motion, dashed into the booth without looking back, and picked up the receiver.

At the exact same moment, Agent Smith gunned the truck forward and smashed the phone booth to pieces—yet there was no sign of Trinity's body in the wreckage.

"Where did she go?"

Every viewer knew the female lead wouldn't be killed off in the opening scene, but her disappearance was altogether too strange.

"She got out." Another Agent appearing on the screen answered the question for the audience, while also letting slip another crucial piece of information: "The informant's tip was spot-on."

An informant? A traitor? And it looked like Trinity wasn't working alone?

The ten-minute opening sequence ended with the three Agents standing coolly in a row, before the camera zoomed into the telephone receiver and transitioned to Neo's storyline.

How had Trinity escaped? That question lingered in the minds of many viewers.

"She didn't crawl into the phone line and run away, did she?"

In the front row, Aerin Lauder asked Duke with keen curiosity, "This world seems really strange, doesn't it?"

Duke lowered his voice and replied, "If I told you the female lead really did escape by transmitting through the phone line, would you believe me?"

"I would!" Aerin nodded without hesitation. "The Duke I know has always had plenty of wild ideas."

She suddenly glanced over toward Charlize Theron. "The leading lady's figure is incredible. Even I'm a little tempted."

Duke shot her a sideways glance and motioned toward the screen with his chin. "Let's just watch the movie."

What followed was a stretch of dialogue-driven scenes that served as a crucial part of establishing the world's framework. Perhaps out of sheer instinct, Duke had taken a scalpel to this section, trimming away a great deal of the overly mystical, preachy material. By shortening shots where appropriate, he briskly picked up the pace and used concise visual storytelling to convey that something was off about this world.

As for the film's visuals and set dressing, Duke still used dark, somewhat worn-down environments, and Neo's computer wasn't futuristic either—it was a standard best-selling model from a sponsor.

The Matrix had pulled in over 20 million dollars from sponsors, and taking their money meant delivering the goods. Countless manufacturers paid for placements in commercial films specifically to promote products that were either currently on the market or about to launch.

The distant future was simply too far off for commercial sponsorship.

In that respect, Duke was a director with solid credibility; otherwise, a great film alone wouldn't have been enough to convince so many sponsors to shell out huge sums of money.

Certain elements could be worked into the film where appropriate, but the overall cyberpunk aesthetic had to remain intact. If a movie's style kept flipping back and forth, the result would be unthinkable...

Beyond that, Duke knew full well why The Matrix had been such a massive hit. All that cryptic dialogue and philosophical musing might win praise from film critics, but ordinary moviegoers didn't care about philosophical reflection or the meaning of life—they were drawn into theaters by the trailers for The Matrix mainly for the sheer coolness and thrill of it!

The film clearly established Neo's identity as a hacker, as well as the fact that both the Matrix and Morpheus were looking for him. Right after the male and female leads met for the first time, the plot hurtled straight into the Agents' pursuit of Neo, where the Nokia Slider Phone once again drew a chorus of "cool" from the audience.

Fifteen minutes into the film, everything from the cast to the props to the sets exuded a cyberpunk vibe and an edge that was cool to the core.

At the same time, the movie planted plenty of suspense: How had Trinity escaped? What was the Matrix? Who was that mystic charlatan Morpheus? Why was the seemingly ordinary Neo regarded as the One? And why were the Agents after Neo—was it really just because he was a hacker?

Failing to follow Morpheus's instructions to escape, Neo was ultimately captured by the Agents, and during his interrogation, another unbelievable scene unfolded.

"If you can't speak," Agent Smith said coldly to Neo on the screen, "what good is calling a lawyer?"

Neo didn't understand what he meant, but the very next instant, his lips suddenly fused together and vanished bit by bit right before the audience's eyes, leaving him completely mouthless!

The audience was stunned. What on earth was going on? Did Agent Smith have superpowers?

Thinking back to Trinity's earlier string of superhuman maneuvers and combat, viewers suddenly began to wonder if this wasn't the real world after all.

A world of the future?

Yet it didn't look like that either. From the start of the film up to now, aside from the characters' uncanny abilities, both the surroundings and the everyday objects were indistinguishable from the modern world.

Right on the heels of that came an even more horrifying sight: Neo was pinned down on the interrogation table while Agent Smith produced an electronic bug that quickly burrowed straight into Neo's belly.

Anthony and his companion exchanged a look. Everything about the world inside the film radiated an eerie strangeness.

The scene abruptly cut away as Neo jolted awake in bed, as though everything that had just happened were nothing more than a nightmare.

But was it really just a dream?