VROOM VROOM posted:

Morpheus' tie is aggressively green in the Construct, at least on film

Side note, somebody write an essay about why in Resurrections Trinity has the powers Neo was supposed to have at the end of Matrix 1, while Neo has Dark City powers

Shiroc posted:

SMG, you have not taken a single polite piece of feedback that you shouldn't keep trying to discuss what the trans experience should mean relative to the Matrix movies from multiple people in this thread.

I brought up the Denny's Placemat stuff because you are intimately familiar with online harassment given how you treated Jivjov, you just dress it up in more words.

I found the original bit that I had referenced, and the bit that had gotten this in my head

Which I'll accept the overall series of posts isn't as negative overall as I remembered, gets back to the point that you don't seem to understand trans experience at all.

ImpAtom posted:

Neo was never actually The One on his own merits. He might have had the powers but it's a critical point of the story that Trinity is the one responsible for bringing him back to life. The One was not actually something that truly exist but instead Trinity and Neo were both necessary for the godhead to exist because loving hell the Matrix is not a subtle movie. Resurrection just takes that to the next step and makes the subtext into literal text. Neo is not The One without Trinity and Trinity is exactly as much of The One as Neo.

A major theme in Resurrection is that Trinity is basically ignored by everyone despite being essential to the story. People glorify and worship Neo and to a lesser extent Morpheus but Trinity, who is just as important, gets treated as only an extension of Neo. (There's also some self-directed criticism here because at least some of that is the film's own fault.) Resurrections very loudly screams in your face "hey guys remember how Trinity was so important she brought Neo back to dead with the power of a kiss, well here it is being bluntly shoved into your face because Matrix Resurrections is not a subtle movie."

And this naturally extends to "People focus on the men in The Matrix to a tremendous degree but downplay the women" which is why Niobe is the only surviving cast member and the respected leader, Trinity's rescue is more important than Neo's, etc, etc. It's again not very subtle. It's basically a movie-length "hey motherfucker the movie had characters besides Neo and Morpheus."

checkplease posted:

Good points. There's a statue of Morpheus, and a whole team sent to get Neo. But Neo has to argue with his allies to get Trinity out. The greatest tribute Trinity gets is the game version of her doing the kick in the beginning.

The misogyny of the analyst is the negative extreme of this male character focus. He's ready to kill her at multiple points but just wants neo back.

Necrothatcher posted:

E:

checkplease posted:

If you want screenshots can just ask (or google). I assume you’ll concede the green for matrix at least. But here’s a few example of blue and gold.

Vitamin P posted:

The Woman in Red is explicitly not a character, even within the text she's a construct of Mouse and narratively it helps viewers understand what the Matrix is and how programs work. And the Oracle wearing green is just whatever, maybe it means that she's tied to the Matrix? Perhaps that she's it's mother and it's father



isn't green, he's white. There's no coherent colour imagery there, certainly nothing remotely comparable to the new crews coding.

Gold was only used for the machines after Neo was blinded and was never used for anything else. A blue tint to cinematically indicate cold/privation is not the same as characters having a unique, specific blue tint be actively put over their eye pieces in post-production.

Edit; I'm not even wedded to any 'new crew is blue pilled' theory but it clearly is a thing that the matrix 4 has done

PopZeus posted:

Interesting that Neo uses a pseudo-Trinity in his modal at the beginning rather than just use the real thing. Assuming he’s got the code for it lying around since he programmed the whole trilogy prior to the modal?

Ferrinus posted:

At this point I'm just going to take your implications that the machines don't A) drain energy from humans or B) serve as means of production as jokes.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The machines cannot be the means of production, because they are people. Do you mean they are slaves? Or are you shifting to saying that they are non-persons? This is why I've been stressing that you need to be able to describe the alien economy without recourse to analogy.

quote:

This is why things aren't progressing in this particular conversation. There's no way to respond to assertions that Niobe is a Leninist except with a "what? Huh?"

precision posted:

i don't think the script is very tight because neo's boss is like "rawr she's a total milf" when we first see Tiffany but like later on it tries to say that Tiffany looks like an actual old woman and not carrie anne moss

so like that just doesn't work on its face. it's a cinema sin1!!!!!

Martman posted:

Counterpoint: actual old women can still be total milfs

precision posted:

i don't think the script is very tight because neo's boss is like "rawr she's a total milf" when we first see Tiffany but like later on it tries to say that Tiffany looks like an actual old woman and not carrie anne moss

so like that just doesn't work on its face. it's a cinema sin1!!!!!

Nuts and Gum posted:

Dick Sucking Intent? She truly is the one.

Ferrinus posted:

This is like stridently insisting that a factory isn't a werewolf.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

This is where, before anything, we should go into a closer reading of Marx. Marx is not, like, saying that “the world is a vampire”. He’s not Billy Corgan. Here’s the context of the famous ‘vampire’ quote:

“What is a working-day? At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The capitalist has his own views of this [outer limit], the necessary limit of the working-day. As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.”

The vampire is specifically a vampiric ‘impulse’ in the soul of the capitalist which, in this case, pushes him to extend the proletarian work-day as long as possible. The vampire can be fought by reducing the hours in the work-day, and/or taking control of the means of production so that the sale of labour to the capitalist is no longer necessary. There’s nothing at all vague or mystical here.

(Marx is also fairly clear that the capitalist cannot directly ‘be’ capital. Capitalists, insofar as they are human, obviously have more than one impulse. The ‘vampiric impulse’ is both intimate and external to the capitalist himself - in the capital).

quote:

So we can express things in very clear terms: if we assume that the humans in the pods are working 24 hours a day, Tom Anderson does not work 24 hours a day at Metacortex. Even accounting for overtime, he’s still going to clubs and surfing the Web, or whatever. There’s an obvious gulf.

While the vampiric impulse might ‘want’ unlimited, ceaseless work, this can only happen in a mind-control fantasy scenario without sleep. If a matrix pod actually existed, and you put someone inside, they would very quickly starve and die. Put all of humanity inside, and the species is extinct within, like, a year? At most? But Tom believes and fears that this can somehow continue indefinitely.

quote:

This is where you’ll repeat that you’re only making an analogy. It’s just a metaphor, and so we don’t need to be very precise. Like with Terminator, right?

In Terminator, the logic of the future is immanent in the present. In Matrix, by contrast, there isn’t any immanence; there is only a blunt simultaneity. This is a very important distinction! Kyle Reese is a prophet with memories of the future, while Sarah Connor in T2 ‘merely’ has vivid nightmares of being burned alive. Her heart is in the right place, insofar as she is against the abstract concept of nuclear holocaust, but she is wrong about what’s going on. This leads to obvious mistakes, where she tries to kill Bob and so-on. That’s a good analogy for Matrix.

Ferrinus posted:

It's still really funny to me that poor Neo is surrounded by hostile NPCs and seething at the fact that the woman he knows is meant for him has been taken by Chad. Unfortunately, there's no way around the fact that NPCs - Chad included - are people, and have reasons for doing what they do. The good news is, icing normies is justifiable as far back as Matrix 1.

HorseLord posted:

Matrix 2 and 3 suck because they failed to live up to what we were given in the first movie's ending: a Neo who could alter the virtual reality so easily that the walls accidentally get warped from him doing a stretching exercise.

we should've got four hours of cyber man or padre bending skyscrapers into funny shapes and snapping his fingers like Q every time an agent shows up. instead his powerset was limited to flying like superman and... taking a punch good?

Ferrinus posted:

Ferrinus posted:

Neo really going nuts at the moment of his ascension is what resulted in the viral Smith, so I can see why he'd maybe settle for functional invincibility without directly dissolving the distinctions between himself and the code around him on the reg.

RVT posted:

To me, it's a factual distinction rather than any kind of philosophical debate. If someone said, here's evidence that they are real people being taken over, then either that's persuasive or not.

At 48:57, new they say "The bots are being activated." "It's a swarm." That reads to me like a machine/Matrix sleeper cell being activated to respond to a threat, then communicating that it's a big one. If they were taking over real humans like the first movie, why not just transform them into (the much more capable) agents?

They do go through the motions of all the gyrating and straining that we saw when people were being taken over by agents in other movies, though. Maybe that's a necessary part of activating their true purpose. Or maybe that means they are real people being taken over and I'm just wrong.

I'm mostly through my re-watch, and thinking about this - are there any agents in this movie other than inside the modal? Is this just the new way they perform the agent function? Have I just outed myself as a bad movie-watcher?

Edit--

The husband and the kids are way too calm walking into a room full of SWAT and FBI with guns drawn (oblivious to the situation in a way no real people would be), and the husband is way too forceful. More importantly, he does do an instant (no straining) transformation, when his cover is blown.

2:04:42 - "He's turning bots into bombs." If these were real people, would it not be likely for him to say, "he's turning people into bombs"?

Seems like the effect is used inconsistently. The husband transforms instantly and with no straining. There's a driver that transforms before ramming one of the crew's cars, and seems surprised but doesn't spasm around. The people on the Japanese train earlier on do the full screaming old-agent transformation deal. After re-watching, not really sure what to think.

RVT posted:

Not to re-litigate anything too much, but I didn't follow a lot of the points being made about Trinity's "family". My read on all the eventual zombies and Trinity's kids and husband were that they were just fabrications put in place to flesh out the world, and so the machines had nodes they could react with e.g. the zombie rush, and/or control/monitor key individuals e.g. Trinity's family. I didn't read them as individual programs like new Morpheus, Smith, frenchdude, and the exiles. It seemed like they were making a distinction from the 1999 Matrix where most if not all of the people you saw were actual people, and agents would take over their bodies as needed.

So, I didn't really feel like she was abandoning anything by going with Neo, more just finally seeing the Matrix for what it was (again). It would be like if you woke up and someone had given you a whole new family of Boston Dynamics robots, and somehow made your memory think that was your real family. Then one day you realize they are robots, so you leave. You'd definitely be mad that someone did that to you and how they did it, "That was for using (things that looked like) children," but you wouldn't feel any remorse for leaving after the fact.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

That is clearly, overwhelmingly, obviously what the movie was going for.

However, like the movie points out: a major system of control applied to women is expectations around family. Which is true, so no matter how clearly the movie explains it people will get mad at the sins against motherhood she committed.