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

[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.