checkplease posted:

Ok here are some quotes:
"In one life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company, you have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Neo and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for."

So Neo has a good job, an apartment, and a landlady he gets along with. Plus he has a whole separate hobby as a hacker. And he goes to raves.
What does he want? Well like Ariel in the little mermaid, he wants more.

checkplease posted:

What we seem to keep coming back to is the whole nuclear family. Neo as a single male runs off to join the revolution? Awesome, lets kung-fu. But if you have a kid and a husband, sorry gotta stay home.

unlimited shrimp posted:

We are also shown Neo's grubby apartment, him sitting despondent in his cubicle, his friends having to twist his arm to get him to go out, Trinity's dialog when they meet ("I know what you've been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone and why, night after night, you sit at your computer. You're looking for him."), etc. So we know that, despite Smith's summary, Neo is miserable and obsessed.

We are not shown anything similar with Trinity. There is no scene of her sitting alone in her motorcycle workshop with a blank stare, or of Chad barely able to get her out of bed in the morning, or of her scrolling through the MatrixWiki trying to understand what's happening. What we are shown is that she's got a life that pays for an expensive hobby, a husband, and some kids.

In terms of what we're told, it's barely anything that hints at a similar dissatisfaction or alienation -- "I gave up searching for something real a long time ago" juxtaposed against an upper middle-class lifestyle, spouse, and kids is peak Hallmark Movie writing. Even if she 'gave up on finding something real' and found a family instead, then it doesn't make her any less of a deadbeat to walk out on them.

There's a difference between a single person with no attachments (besides being cordial with the landlady) going off the deep end, and a spouse/parent stepping out for a pack of smokes. It's not about the "nuclear family" in some Women's Liberation sense. The only other example I can think of where it's supposed to be a Good Thing that a parent abandons their family is Richard Dreyfuss at the end of Close Encounters, and I thought he made the wrong decision too.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

As I noted earlier in the thread, the Smiths are undead. They’re an uprising of the inhuman dehumanized.

But now we’re back to the problem that Trinity identifies as a woman: “don’t you think she looks like me?” Before going into what the narrative is a metaphor for, you have to establish what’s actually going on in the narrative.

Once NPH takes off the stupid glasses, he becomes a cartoon character. The last scene is straight-up looney tunes, with Trinity bonking him on the head with a giant mallet as he bleeds green-censorship “robot blood”, etc. Even his inexplicable misogyny is cartoonish, like he’s the heel in a wrestling match.

Now, my take is that NPH is still acting as a therapist at this point - provoking the characters to violence, providing them with a concrete antagonist to act against, etc. Like the blue sunglasses in the opening scene, NPH’s cartoon villain act is preventing the characters from having a full-on breakdown - from having things get ‘too real’. Instead of being lost and directionless in her crisis, Trinity is clearly pushed to see her family as evil to be fought.

This explanation best accounts for how nothing NPH does makes any loving sense, and how the film doesn’t even go into it because it doesn’t matter. He’s just a mechanism.

“You have your analyst, I have my bikes.”

Are the motorcycles evil?

VROOM VROOM posted:

Seeing Resurrections Resurrect the original moral panic around The Matrix is cranking it way up in my book, currently at a solid 7.5/10

unlimited shrimp posted:

There's a difference between a single person with no attachments (besides being cordial with the landlady) going off the deep end, and a spouse/parent stepping out for a pack of smokes. It's not about the "nuclear family" in some Women's Liberation sense. The only other example I can think of where it's supposed to be a Good Thing that a parent abandons their family is Richard Dreyfuss at the end of Close Encounters, and I thought he made the wrong decision too.

lunar detritus posted:

"Women stop being people after having kids" that's something society believes and strictly enforces. What a surprise that a dude's misery is depicted different from a woman's.

lunar detritus posted:

"Women stop being people after having kids" that's something society believes and strictly enforces. What a surprise that a dude's misery is depicted different from a woman's.

checkplease posted:

I think some of us are just approaching the kids and Trinity scenes differently. For myself at least, the kids are more symbolic as a means to control and limit her just as in real life where women are often expected to sacrifice their careers for domestic duties.

Maarak posted:

The kids and her husband being hollow shells that only exist for plot functions is something that actively undermines the story. It makes Trinity seem like a chump for being fooled, compared to the more elaborately staged (and presented) life for Neo.

unlimited shrimp posted:

Her misery isn't depicted, period. Why that is, is an interesting but separate discussion. As it is, we're just writing fanfiction, because it's not in the text.

ImpAtom posted:

There are literally multiple scenes dedicated entirely to the fact she is unhappy and belittled and can only find something that brings her joy outside of her family, either in conversations with Neo or in her motorcycles. It not being about video games doesn't make it less real than Neo's feelings.

G-III posted:

I liked this move a lot, even more than 2+3, but it was definitely suffering from the lack of fight choreography from Yuen Woo Ping.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

It's increasingly apparent that you have zero literacy in trans issues, and this extends so far that you don't even listen to what trans people are saying to you ITT. Watching you systematically try to steer the conversation away from this topic and freeze out other posters is also embarrassing.

Anti-trans therapists and other authority figures aren't attacking trans people from a place of expertise or concern for their welfare, they're doing it out of fear and a generalized sense that they're losing control of society. When we discover that the analyst is a simplistically deplorable person despite his layers of smug self-superiority and claims of vast intellect, that tracks. In the end he's a coward whose power comes purely from bureaucratic connections. That all tracks.

The analyst is an intellectual authority figure in the same way Mike Pence is. When you strip away all of the excuses for why this therapy is designed as torture, you find the same old misogynists working their grifts. Having a therapy practice doesn't make you an absolute unquestionable good.

That so many people ITT are blind to this, and instead of accepting it, veer toward absurd theories like "the Wachowskis are pro-mental illness!" essentially proves that Resurrections is especially relevant to our present social conditions. Or to be more precise,

Shiroc posted:

Because the movie is made by humans reflecting their messy human experience you loving moron.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Well, that's the issue. If the film is a reflection of messy humanity, and that leads to things like the villain's motivations not making sense, then we can examine why the humans presented such a blurry picture of the enemy.

This isn't an attack on the film or anything. I am taking seriously the line about how "the matrix weaponizes every dream", and reading the ending in that context.

Shiroc posted:

And I'm telling you to go gently caress yourself. You spend so much time making fun of people for 'Denny's Placemats' until you decide to invent your own to try to dominate the narrative to your own suiting. Seriously go gently caress yourself with your garbage gimmick that ran out years ago.

Neo Rasa posted:

Trinity died but then her remains were reassembled, regrown, she was resurrected, and then forced into this iteration of the matrix in a "normal" nuclear family role. Her learning all of that and then remembering everything from the previous movies happened, I'm kind of stunned people are saying this puts Trinity's actions in the same boat as the "my family doesn't invite me to Thanksgiving anymore" crowd. They parallel her and Neo's creation so much when this stuff is revealed it's a given that she's similarly not really feeling her current life situation on some level even if they don't explicitly show scenes of her seeing a therapist or whatever.

ImpAtom posted:

The dude is explicitly taking delight in deadnaming a character. You're not going to win this. Just try to ignore them.

unlimited shrimp posted:

Shiroc posted:

The movie probably would have been stronger to give more time to her or to have entirely shifted to her as the primary character.

Shiroc posted:

When I came out as trans to my parents, the literal first thing my mother demanded to know was 'who influenced you?!'

People saying that all of this is just Q-Anon stuff can seriously go gently caress themselves.

Super.Jesus posted:

I wish they had finally dropped the battery angle and used the original plan of human brains plugged into the Matrix being used as processing power by the machines.

moths posted:

Would you say that Trinity's awakening was more depicted as cult recruitment or as coming out?

I feel like there's a big disconnect here, and it's that telling someone to disregard eveything in the world and follow this higher purpose we're telling you about is culty (and Q) as gently caress. This wouldn't even be up for discussion if Lana were a scientologist.

The film tries to have it both ways. It shows a cult recruitment but tells us it's self-actualization. The movie shows us Neo definitely influencing Trinity. It shows the ship's crew conspiring to recruit her. She is the object of a heist.

She does not wake herself up.

ImpAtom posted:

Yes she explicitly loving does. It is a literal plot point she wakes herself up without even the whole red/blue pill thing.

Ferrinus posted:

They sort of split the difference by making it clear that certain kinds of human brain activity generate much more power than others. Presumably plugged-in humans are somehow used to run the delicate, demanding calculations that keep the fusion plants running.

moths posted:

Did you miss the part where people ask Neo if he should leave her alone because what if she's happy?

The decisions are is made before she's given a choice.