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ocean_song
Nov. 8th, 2003 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynto see Matrix: Revolutions last night.
It wasn't a bad movie, not the way the second one was; it was just meh. I actively resented the second movie. This one was just... well, I've seen worse, but I've seen way better. They didn't over-explain things as horribly as they did in the second movie. I didn't get the feeling that someone had heard Yuen Wo Ping threatening to eat a baby if he didn't get to run a longer fight scene, either. But the characters I was interested in hardly had any screen time - not a big surprise since they were secondaries to start with - and the dialogue was kind of clunky all around. We did get to see one or two flashes of Neo talking like an Actual Human Being, which was something I missed from the first movie. For all that he was supposed to be the One, he's still a human being, and casting aside a lifetime of ordinary person speech habits isn't easily done.
I'm led to understand that quite a lot of the things in Reloaded that made little sense on their own, or were tossed off as background references, made a hell of a lot more sense if you'd watched The Animatrix and played the Enter the Matrix video game. I'm actually moderately tempted to see if I can find a way to play the game somewhere, just to see if there were any interesting bits I missed. Only moderately, though.
Frankly, I thought the most fascinating prospect for the whole thing was Smith getting himself a flesh body. Can anyone tell me if they dubbed Hugo Weaving's voice in when the other guy spoke, or if that was the actor himself? Because if it was the actor actually reciting those lines he had the Smith inflections absolutely nailed... Unfortunately, the implications of Smith overwriting a physical human were never properly explored, and that lost a lot of interest for me.
Was it just me or did Trinity get shinier with each movie?
What the hell was up with the design of those mecha? APC, whatever. I don't remember the official name. They were baby mecha. Why in the name of Ralph Nader did they not have windshields, or bubbles, or SOMETHING? Even if they were designed to be maintenance machines, you'd think the Zion Worker's Safety Division would have mandated a reasonably shatterproof transparent material between the pilot and the rest of the world. As war machines there's no excuse at all for not having something between the pilot and the rest of the world; I mean, sure, the airplanes of World War I had open cockpits, but look how fast they put bubbles on planes after that!
The scene in the dock was the most incredibly Freudian rape imagery I think I've ever seen in a movie. Gigeresque, to be sure, but the Sentinels didn't look like calamari; they looked like sperm. And the drillbots - well, aside from one flash where they reminded me of that giant spacegoing planet-eating thingy in the original Star Trek, they were fulfilling the role of all long pointy penetrating dangerous objects Freud ever wrote about. Sorry, but it's true.
On the other hand, the crawly-buggy critters in the City of the Machines looked like the direct descendants of the spybots in Minority Report. (The movie, not the Phillip K. Dick writing. Never actually read the original story.) That led to the fascinating prospect of constructing a linkage of events between John Anderton's time and the world dominated by the machines; I expect the first foundation bricks for THAT were laid down as someone began attempting to work out an AI capable of doing what the Precogs did, only by sussing out probable human action based on massive knowledge of human decisionmaking patterns.
I do not think the Oracle was leaving room open for a sequel when she made her comment about Neo at the end. I think the Oracle was very clumsily bashing the Christ imagery home with a baseball bat. 'Real soon'? Try 'in three days'.
I do not think this was a sequel to the first movie. In fact, I do not think Reloaded was a sequel to the first movie. The feel is too different. The first movie was an essentially Buddhist movie, despite the hyper-violence; Smith gave it away with his comment about the first Matrix being a perfect world. Suffering, desire, liberation, and the consequences thereof were the major themes in the first movie. Neo was not so much a Messiah in the Western tradition as he was the First Awakened One. The second... well, I've only watched it once and I don't much care to watch it again, but the things I remember from the second mostly involve people following half-understood orders and prophecies because they were afraid to think on their own and believed that they were being told things For Their Own Good. It was that kind of thinking that got your ancestors locked into the Matrix, people... The third movie put me in mind of the siege at Masada, actually. The last stronghold, tightly walled up, its entrances hidden... the only thing was that the people in Zion had more hope than the people at Masada, and so there was not the mass suicide at the fear of capture that one got at Masada. Basically, the first movie was the philosophical one, and the second two were adventure/war movies. For all that it's supposedly the same characters and the same setting, it's not the same genre at all. The first movie stands alone; the other two make an interesting prospect, but are not, in my mind, connected to the first by any more than the most superficial of strands.
And I still think Seraph is hot.
It wasn't a bad movie, not the way the second one was; it was just meh. I actively resented the second movie. This one was just... well, I've seen worse, but I've seen way better. They didn't over-explain things as horribly as they did in the second movie. I didn't get the feeling that someone had heard Yuen Wo Ping threatening to eat a baby if he didn't get to run a longer fight scene, either. But the characters I was interested in hardly had any screen time - not a big surprise since they were secondaries to start with - and the dialogue was kind of clunky all around. We did get to see one or two flashes of Neo talking like an Actual Human Being, which was something I missed from the first movie. For all that he was supposed to be the One, he's still a human being, and casting aside a lifetime of ordinary person speech habits isn't easily done.
I'm led to understand that quite a lot of the things in Reloaded that made little sense on their own, or were tossed off as background references, made a hell of a lot more sense if you'd watched The Animatrix and played the Enter the Matrix video game. I'm actually moderately tempted to see if I can find a way to play the game somewhere, just to see if there were any interesting bits I missed. Only moderately, though.
Frankly, I thought the most fascinating prospect for the whole thing was Smith getting himself a flesh body. Can anyone tell me if they dubbed Hugo Weaving's voice in when the other guy spoke, or if that was the actor himself? Because if it was the actor actually reciting those lines he had the Smith inflections absolutely nailed... Unfortunately, the implications of Smith overwriting a physical human were never properly explored, and that lost a lot of interest for me.
Was it just me or did Trinity get shinier with each movie?
What the hell was up with the design of those mecha? APC, whatever. I don't remember the official name. They were baby mecha. Why in the name of Ralph Nader did they not have windshields, or bubbles, or SOMETHING? Even if they were designed to be maintenance machines, you'd think the Zion Worker's Safety Division would have mandated a reasonably shatterproof transparent material between the pilot and the rest of the world. As war machines there's no excuse at all for not having something between the pilot and the rest of the world; I mean, sure, the airplanes of World War I had open cockpits, but look how fast they put bubbles on planes after that!
The scene in the dock was the most incredibly Freudian rape imagery I think I've ever seen in a movie. Gigeresque, to be sure, but the Sentinels didn't look like calamari; they looked like sperm. And the drillbots - well, aside from one flash where they reminded me of that giant spacegoing planet-eating thingy in the original Star Trek, they were fulfilling the role of all long pointy penetrating dangerous objects Freud ever wrote about. Sorry, but it's true.
On the other hand, the crawly-buggy critters in the City of the Machines looked like the direct descendants of the spybots in Minority Report. (The movie, not the Phillip K. Dick writing. Never actually read the original story.) That led to the fascinating prospect of constructing a linkage of events between John Anderton's time and the world dominated by the machines; I expect the first foundation bricks for THAT were laid down as someone began attempting to work out an AI capable of doing what the Precogs did, only by sussing out probable human action based on massive knowledge of human decisionmaking patterns.
I do not think the Oracle was leaving room open for a sequel when she made her comment about Neo at the end. I think the Oracle was very clumsily bashing the Christ imagery home with a baseball bat. 'Real soon'? Try 'in three days'.
I do not think this was a sequel to the first movie. In fact, I do not think Reloaded was a sequel to the first movie. The feel is too different. The first movie was an essentially Buddhist movie, despite the hyper-violence; Smith gave it away with his comment about the first Matrix being a perfect world. Suffering, desire, liberation, and the consequences thereof were the major themes in the first movie. Neo was not so much a Messiah in the Western tradition as he was the First Awakened One. The second... well, I've only watched it once and I don't much care to watch it again, but the things I remember from the second mostly involve people following half-understood orders and prophecies because they were afraid to think on their own and believed that they were being told things For Their Own Good. It was that kind of thinking that got your ancestors locked into the Matrix, people... The third movie put me in mind of the siege at Masada, actually. The last stronghold, tightly walled up, its entrances hidden... the only thing was that the people in Zion had more hope than the people at Masada, and so there was not the mass suicide at the fear of capture that one got at Masada. Basically, the first movie was the philosophical one, and the second two were adventure/war movies. For all that it's supposedly the same characters and the same setting, it's not the same genre at all. The first movie stands alone; the other two make an interesting prospect, but are not, in my mind, connected to the first by any more than the most superficial of strands.
And I still think Seraph is hot.
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-08 12:10 pm (UTC)P.S. - nice to meet ya!
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Date: 2003-11-08 12:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-09 08:09 am (UTC)i always attempt to explain it as the first movie was organic, and the second was inorganic. the last movie is like something in between, i think. not as great as the first, but significantly better than the second.
i enjoyed the mecha, though i didn't think at all about the screens. and, we decided that the worst job ever would be reloading them. and, they shot way more bullets than the actual suitcases carried. but, it was a nice effect that after the mecha needed reloaded and the poor boy only got one case of bullets back in, only one gun was firing. nice attention to detail. like the gun turrets on the ship coming into zion were flaming hot with the number of bullets going out.
we wondered why the city didn't have their own EMP pulses.