The Matrix Redundant

[khaosworks]

Just came back from the Matrix Reloaded.

I was actually bored. I swear, I was nodding off during the fight scenes.

For the Singaporeans who understand this wail of despair, I came out of the cinema shaking my head and going, "Wah lau... wah lau eh..." over and over again.


This wasn't a movie. It was a badly written computer game.

A few days previous, I played the first couple of levels of the Enter the Matrix game. I got bored pretty fast, too. It was basically running around hitting and shooting people and doing kewl moves with Bullet Time for no apparent reason. I thought a scary thought: what if the movie was like this?

It was.

There. Is. No. Plot. There are only excuses for kung foo mixed with rhythmic music. I say this again, I actually fell asleep during the Burly Brawl - you know, the 3,001 Smiths attacking. Characters also did things for no fucking reason. Why is the Merovingian interested in sex if he's a computer program? What was the point of Seraph fighting Neo - why couldn't he just open the goddamn door? How did Smith gain access to the back door portals? Were the programs and the Agents working together? Why is Persephone such a cheap date? Why did the Agents want to kill - uh, delete - the Keymaster? And the Demiurge - uh Architect. Who uses "assiduously" in a sentence anymore? Where do the Gatekeeper, Gozer and Zuul factor into this? Okay, maybe not the last one.

What, indeed, was the whole fucking point? Make up your mind, guys. Are you doing the Gnostic Tango, or do you want Greek myth symbology as well? So if Persephone is the Greek Persephone, the Merovingian must be Hades. So what? Where did all that go? Nowhere.

So Zion is created to give the 1 percent of people who don't accept the Matrix something to do. Why? Why not just kill that 1 percent? Why go through all the trouble? You got batteries who don't want to cooperate? Throw. The. Batteries. Away.

I. Hate. It. When. Characters. Talk. Like. This. To. Emphasise. That. They. Are. Saying. Something. Very. Important.

Maybe the programs' complete lack of motivation for their inane actions was a subtle way of talking about determinism - you know, their purpose being solely to guide Neo to his encounter with the Architect. Maybe. It's still inane. And boring.

Good Lord, Morpheus. I know why Niobe broke up with you. You can't stop fucking talking. You don't even make sense anymore. I was actually rooting for the Agent to kill you just to stop you talking. I was hoping Niobe was going to kick you in the balls or shoot you in the head during that interminable speech about the cause being worth dying for. Yeah, but it's not worth listening to you explode my brain with boredom for, asshole.

The local Board of Film Censors cut the orgy/sex scene down to half its reported length. I have never been so grateful for the censors before. I can't imagine how boring it would have been if I had seen the full-length version. I'd have probably slit my wrists.

Don't tell me it's a middle movie. I've seen middle movies. Even middle movies have to have a plot. Empire Strikes Back had a plot. Two Towers had a plot. X2, hallelujah, had a plot. Even Back to the Future II, as flimsy as it was, had a plot. You advance the plot, you raise questions, tie up those questions, and leave a couple of loose ends for the sequel. This is permitted. This movie answered nothing. At least nothing coherent.This ended with a Star Trek season cliffhanger. It pissed me off.

I think I lost interest after Trinity got shot in the first five minutes and Neo woke up. It was downhill from there.

Is it just me, or does the guy who plays Link look like Chris Rock? I know it isn't him, but it looks like they could be brothers.

I came, I saw, I snored. Don't tell me it's deep. It's not deep. It's a bunch of mismatched pieces of cod philosophy and theology mixed together and name dropped in an attempt to make it sound deep. It's bollocks. It's psuedo-intellectual wankery. And I gave that up a long time ago for the sake of my sight.

I can't believe it was two and a half hours of my life I'll never get back again. I demand my money back. Okay, logam paid for it - I demand it back on his behalf.

In short, it stinks. Thank you and good-night.

Comments

[allisona.livejournal.com]

Wow, and I thought I disliked this movie :).

(though I agree with you across the board- I knew the last line of the film was "to be concluded" and by the halfway mark I was waiting for it)

[katyhh.livejournal.com]

Gad. Couldn't agree more ... I just got home from the cinema. Still a bit undecided whether to puke or to just laugh hysterically. "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nooo, it's SUPERNEO ... ". Okay ... puke.

[owlrigh.livejournal.com]

Mmm. I'm glad to see that I was justified in my dislike of the movie -- most of those around me are all apologetic for it; "who knows, maybe they tell us all the things we need to know in the third movie". Doesn't excuse this piece of crap, in my opinion! I was bored enough to want to leave, but no, I was made to stay to watch (through the interminable credits!) the trailer for the third movie.

Argh! I guess, looking at things, those people I know who liked it were all gaming sorts. Explains a fair bit.

[dietbubba.livejournal.com]

The only parts I really found interesting were the Burly Brawl and the freeway scene. Everything else was blah. Honestly how many times do we have to see the same damn fights over and over again? Punch, block. Kick, block. Punch, block. BORING. In the first movie there seemed to be oomph and reason behind the fights. Now there is just fighting so we can have kung fu porn.

And I agree with you on Morpheus. Everyone else? I could tolerate their speeches and blah blah. Morpheus needed to shut up. Uggh.

[swisscheesed.livejournal.com]

Morpheus also needs a facial.

[batyatoon]

Will you people lose all respect for me if I tell you I actually enjoyed it?

[quadrivium.livejournal.com]

I won't. I liked it too. :-)

[branna.livejournal.com]

Well, I won't, because so did I :) So we can be disrespected
together.

For me, my enjoyment hinged on the idea that every piece of information we are given is to some extent suspect, and that we can only get some idea of the truth by seeing which pieces of information make sense in the larger context.

So Zion being a construct---that made sense. Where would the Zionese have gotten the technical no-how or raw materials to build the city? It never made sense to me in the first movie---but now it does.

Likewise, I'd never really bought the whole "humans as batteries" thing, or the idea that humanity did what it did to the planet as a last-ditch effort in the war against the machines. Since it is part of the mythology of Zion, which we now know is a construct---consider the possibilities if those two statements are lies.

My personal theory? (One of them, anyway). Imagine what happens if the machines obeyed at least some of the four laws of robotics, or some approximation thereof (yes, four, with the zeroth law taking precedence over the first). Now imagine what would happen with these machines if humanity came with in a hairsbreadth of destroying itself and the planet. What would they do? What would their solution be, if their original primary imperative was to preserve the human race at all costs? And wouldn't it drive the machines more than a little insane?

As a solution to the preservation of the species and some approximation of human civilization, on a planet which can only marginally support human life, the Matrix is ingenious. It is one which also allows for the survival of the machines (a lower imperative, but still an imperative).

It may also be fundamentally unstable for reasons which involve not only the psychology of humans, but the psychology of the machines. In which case, the backdoors and in and outs and elaborate schemes, including Zion, make a kind of sense. I think at some level the machines keep recreating Zion, rather than just terminating the deviants, because they are hoping that some iteration will provide them with a more stable solution to the problem, or just some kind of out from the whole mess.

Under the zeroth law, they can't let humanity commit suicide. They can't even stand idly by while it happens. They can't let the Zionese win unless they are viable on their own, because to do so destabilizes the Matrix, which at least preserves the human species and some memory of human existence. But they can't, themselves, choose to stop trying to find a better solution---a solution that they believe it would take a free human mind to formulate.

Yes, I realize that the Architect told Neo that the second choice
involved not only the destruction of Zion but the annihlation of
humanity. But I think much of what the Architect said, again, is open to question. Everything we have seen so far is at least partially a lie.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I don't give the Warchowskis that much credit and believe they have a zeroth law explanation in the works. There's no evidence in the first or second movie for such a thing, nor is there any indication in any of they hype materials that such a thing was intended - if they have to depend on the audience to come up with a plausible explanation for an anomaly without having an overall theory themselves, that's just bad writing.

I judged The Matrix Reloaded as a movie - and as a movie it was just not compellling. The fight scenes were gratuitous, the intercutting back and forth at best distracting, at worst confusing, the ideas shallow and rammed down the audience's throat. You could have removed all or most of them and the movie could have been just shorter and lacking nothing. The characters also left me cold, with absolutely no sympathy or empathy for them. The set pieces - the Zion orgy, the Burly Brawl, the Freeway Chase, were boring precisely because I didn't care about what was happening and nothing in it gave me a reason to care. That's a very bad mistake when it comes to making any creative piece of work. It has to involve the audience on an emotional level. This movie did not. Hence, it bored me.

There was no sense of jeopardy. We get a couple of shots of boring down to Zion (no pun intened) and short pieces of expository dialogue about a counter attack and that was it. Don't just tell us about it - show us! Same thing with the breaking into the nuclear power plant. They might have done better to integrate the Enter the Matrix game into the movie rather than "force" people to have to go there to see the rest of the story. Bad storytelling. No biscuit.

Also, a movie cannot be just about a message, an idea, or ideas. It has to tell a story that suggests those ideas. In other words, it has to be able to be enjoyed on levels. The Matrix may or may not have a deep philosophical underpinning (I say no), but that's irrelevant if the story level above it bores the pants out of me. If the themes are more important than the story they might as well have written a philosophical thesis. If the story itself is incomprehensible or bland on face value then there's no incentive to dig deeper.

The Animatrix was much more satisfying, because the stories were about something and made their points subtly. Perhaps the Warchowskis are better suited to shorts.

[eviltofu.livejournal.com]

The problem with the Smiths vs Neo fight was that it didn't GO anywhere. It was a cool concept but the fight was bland. There was no acceleration, just a constant velocity.

Pointless...

[osj.livejournal.com]

Nor did the Burly Brawl serve any purpose.

In fact, Agent Smith's ability to replicate served no purpose, except to give an excuse for cool effects. It wasn't necessary for him to be able to replicate himself in order to 'possess' a human being. It would've have worked just as well if he had simply zapped that one guy with the liquid metal effect.

[(Anonymous)]

OK, this is the superhero comics reading for decades geek in me coming out, but the other thing that struck me was how lame Neo's imagination is. He's got the power to affect reality to at least a personal degree in the Matrix. So what does he do? He gives himself super-fu and supersonic flight powers (but no speed other than when flying or fu-ing)...and that's it.

I mean, that burly brawl would've ended a lot quicker if Neo had senisbly given himself Cyclops like (but with complete control) disentegration/program deletion vision. Or, my personal cute bit; 100 Agent Smiths come at Neo. Neo gives a little smile...and suddenly there are 200 Neos.

On the geek front, here's my alternative reading to the Christ imagery; Agent Smith has many many many copies of himself, tries to create more copies of himself, and says "Me too"; clearly he represents AOL (or else Warner Bros. insisted on some cute product placement with the Me Too line). And the Architect says this is the 6th version of the Matrix. Lessee. v1 was the alpha test, v2 the beta test, v3-v5 didn't work, so it's only any good on the 4th released version...It's Microsoft! The Matrix is Windows! :-)

Tom Galloway

Amen, brother, amen!

[osj.livejournal.com]

I see you agree with me.

I'd admit to some curiousity as to how Matrix : Revolutions will wrap everything up, although it is fairly predictable already.

But as far as I'm concerned, we were better off if Matrix had simply been the only film in the trilogy.