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The first Matrix is legitimately a sci-fi classic, but the sequels are generally derided and I honestly don't know why. They've held up well. They are well shot, well paced, they were ahead of their time and frankly our time in terms of being inclusive, I haven't seen an American blockbuster since that presents people of colour, older people and disabled people so honestly or so heroically. Is it just that there was a weight of expectation they didn't achieve? Or do they actually suck?
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Sep 11, 2014 00:30
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Reloaded is certainly a fun film to watch. Sure the CGI is ropey in places but the main action sequence from the chateaux to the highway is amazing. Also I never really got the criticism of the architect, he was clearly meant to be incredibly verbose and condescending yet people criticised him for being just that?
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Sep 11, 2014 00:50
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Yeah the highway chase owns and I remember liking the multiple Agent Smith fight in Reloaded. Revolutions is pretty boring though.
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Sep 11, 2014 00:58
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Matrix was almost completely self contained, in my opinion. The sequels set the clock back. Instead of dude who rips programs apart on a whim, can fly, do whatever poo poo he wants: we have Mr. Matrix God downgraded to some dude who still needs to Kung-Fu people. I understand a movie has to make it action scenes- but these shouldn't be a hindrance to Neo at all. On top of setting the clock back, you have a defeated character brought back for some reason (Smith), which, really didn't make sense to be either. I thought he was gone. Then again, this is a part of the whole God demotion of Neo- Mr. Man who could come back from the dead and tear poo poo apart... really only made a program obsolete. Ok. This isn't to say a lot of the concepts in Reloaded/Revolutions were pretty neat, and had a lot of cool action scenes- it just shoehorned so much poo poo into the two movies. Too many concepts and characters thrown in at once make a bunch of boring :eyeroll: stuff that you have to sit through. I feel that both sequels could have been a lot leaner. A lot of side characters weren't necessary. Even some characters important to the plot should have been discarded and the plot tinkered with a bit. All of the Keymaker (or whatever the dude was) poo poo and the Trinity dying poo poo was bad. Some of the mystical stuff was kind of... ok at first but was just a poo poo sandwich after a while.
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Sep 11, 2014 01:10
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As someone who has seen the trilogy at least 30 times and has studied the philosophy of the films, the movies are amazing in that perspective. They cram so much into these movies you won't understand everything in the first sitting and a lot of what happens is dependent on viewing the trilogy as a whole. I can see from the average movie-goers' perspective why they would dislike the sequels, exactly because they cannot wrap their head around everything that is happening. It seems rather than taking an interest and learning more about the philosophy or symbolism, people ended up getting frustrated that they did not understand the movies. The Matrix by itself was actually fine and presented a complete story, but the Wachowski Bros gave us A LOT MORE which I imagine was too much for the public to take in.
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Sep 11, 2014 01:21
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That's the problem with it though. Too much poo poo is crammed into the sequels. It comes out forced and disjointed. It doesn't feel like a smooth plot and a bunch of poo poo shoehorned in so they can touch upon one concept.
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Sep 11, 2014 01:34
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The cinematography in Reloaded is really cool and boldly stylistic. Some people might think it's cheesy when it cuts to the lamp hitting the ground and shattering in that first fight scene for example, but I love the unrestrained artifice of it and its pacing. I sort of miss that whole atmosphere of style over verisimilitude you saw in movies from the early 00s, like Blade II.
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Sep 11, 2014 02:40
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What I remember about The Matrix 2 is that incredibly goofy underground rave/sex scene, the fight with a dozen Agent Smiths that has really awful CGI and bowling pin SFX, some albino dreadlocked ninjas, a bit about a French guy who codes digital brownies to make women cum, and a weird nonending where Keanu Reeves talks to Col. Sanders for 20 minutes. Mark me down for the "actually sucks" list. edit: oh man, and the key guy! some little old Japanese guy who carries around a million digital keys! man that movie was a load.
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Sep 11, 2014 02:42
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I will give you that the rave is just uncomfortable to watch but gently caress you the bowling pin sound effect rules 
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Sep 11, 2014 02:46
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The rave is terrible but orgasm cake is dooooope.
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Sep 11, 2014 02:51
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The albino ghost twins were so well used, to be fair. There were moments throughout the chateau to the end of the chase that didn't just build off their gimmick but built off the protagonists growing understanding of their gimmick. The CGI is weak now but it's a textbook example of how to do throwaway thugs surely.
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Sep 11, 2014 02:55
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There were some pretty cool fight scenes, Monica Bellucci, and some fight scenes. This is how I prefer to remember it.
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Sep 11, 2014 03:08
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I don't like the third one because it concentrates on the lovely boring robot suits and not on the Neo Anderson dbz battle.
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Sep 11, 2014 03:50
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My main memory of the Matrix sequels is the endless pseudo-philosophical chatting that uses unnecessary big words and on the surface sounds deep but never actually said anything. Maybe that's not accurate, it's been a while since I've seen them. I seem to remember there was one good movie spread out into 2, but they tried to do a bit too much, especially as to get the entire story you needed to play that lovely game and the anime shorts (which were pretty cool actually). I wonder if they'd do better now the 'cinematic universe' thing is more popular. The first is still an outstanding movie though.
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Sep 11, 2014 03:50
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IIRC they were goibg ti make A sequel about the fibal battle but then the first movie was so huge it had to become an ~~~epic trilogy~~~ and that's why there's so much filler in the two sequels. You can really feel it during Morpheus' speech in Reloaded before the rave scene, that was totally going to be a speech before the actual big battle at some point.
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Sep 11, 2014 04:19
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They highlight the importance of constraints during the creation of good art. See also: Peter Jackson, George Lucas etc
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Sep 11, 2014 04:34
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Oh the cake makes her orgasm? I thought she farted.
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Sep 11, 2014 04:43
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Uncle Wemus posted:Oh the cake makes her orgasm? I thought she farted. Essentially the same thing.
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Sep 11, 2014 04:47
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The second movie is amazing. It opens up so many questions, and all the theories between its release and the third were great. What if the Matrix is within a Matrix? Was the Merovingian really the first Neo? Etc. Then the third movie actually came out and it was a 2 hour fight between some robots and some other robots, and there was barely anything interesting at all. Even the computer god was boring.
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Sep 11, 2014 05:10
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precision posted:The second movie is amazing. It opens up so many questions, and all the theories between its release and the third were great. What if the Matrix is within a Matrix? Was the Merovingian really the first Neo? Etc. This was pretty much how I felt at the time. That cliffhanger where Neo seems to be able to "bend spoons" while outside the Matrix seemed so cool... like they might be teasing the idea that Neo was gonna realize that he still hadn't truly freed his mind, and that it didn't matter whether he was in the matrix, one could still warp reality like an awesome wizard. Like it was taking the lessons from the first movie and going even further. But then the third movie came out and they went for what I thought seemed like a much safer, less outside-the-box answer and I was very disappointed. I didn't mind the Architect like most people seemed to, and thought the ending was sorta cool, but I still found it disappointing overall. XboxPants fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 07:04
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Doctor Butts posted:The sequels set the clock back. Instead of dude who rips programs apart on a whim, can fly, do whatever poo poo he wants: we have Mr. Matrix God downgraded to some dude who still needs to Kung-Fu people. I understand a movie has to make it action scenes- but these shouldn't be a hindrance to Neo at all. "Upgrades" Instead of 'ultimate power and understanding' which seemed to be how it was heading, Neo really got the ability to 'stop bullets, fly and see in matrix vision'. If the Smiths have been upgraded to Neo's level, Morpheus and the rest of the crew should be getting slaughtered in a heartbeat. It's painfully inconsistent with the first movie's finale. It all seemed so pointless to be back running around in the matrix again, when he has the power to stop it at will.
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Sep 11, 2014 07:06
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XboxPants posted:This was pretty much how I felt at the time. That cliffhanger where Neo seems to be able to "bend spoons" while outside the Matrix seemed so cool... like they might be teasing the idea that Neo was gonna realize that he still hadn't truly freed his mind, and that it didn't matter whether he was in the matrix, one could still warp reality like an awesome wizard. Like it was taking the lessons from the first movie and going even further. But then the third movie came out and they went for what I thought seemed like a much safer, less outside-the-box answer and I was very disappointed. I thought the Merovingian was pretty great, not because the character is inherently cool but because Lambert Wilson loving nails the delivery on "you see he's just a man..."
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Sep 11, 2014 07:09
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What I always found odd: The first film was about our world- what if our world was actually a computer simulation? But then the second and third movies forgot about the perspective of you or I- the average person unaware they were living in a false reality. Instead the second film focused on all the wacky programs living within the simulation (the Keymaker, the Merovingian, the Twins, the Oracle, the Architect, and so on). They also made it seem like the Matrix environment was just one big, endless city instead of a simulation of the world as it is now. I also expected the last movie to reveal that the machines were keeping mankind alive and captive not for energy, but because without occupying themselves in an endless battle with human rebels led by successive "Ones" they would have no goals to carry out and nothing to do. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Sep 11, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 07:48
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Ya, the story just really really sucks in 2 and 3, that's your answer. In isolation, the free-way chase in 2 and the robot battle in 3 are both awesome, but the movies around them are just tedious and incomprehensible bullshit
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Sep 11, 2014 07:57
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There was no where for them to go after the first film in terms of plot really. Neo had already achieved enlightenment and become essentially a God or Bodhisattva. He got the girl and overcame death. A lot of the stuff in the sequels really should never have been shown. The on screen reality of Zion was far less interesting than the mere concept of the last remaining human city. The triumph of the humans at the end of the series also made the series less grounded in the "real world" and far more like Star Wars. This may have been one of the few franchises where a prequel would have been warranted, certainly the human/machine war in the Animatrix movie that lead to the creation of the Matrix was pretty cool.
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Sep 11, 2014 08:22
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When I learned that Will Smith was tapped to play Neo, these films made so much more sense. It becomes drat near Rastafarian.
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Sep 11, 2014 12:32
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A year or two ago I wanted to do a "I actually kind of appreciate the Matrix trilogy" style thread in the vein of Terry's Transformers thread, but it was a little more loaded than I anticipated and I'd have to refresh myself again.
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Sep 11, 2014 12:43
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Here's a nice refresher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8pB1zRguAg
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Sep 11, 2014 12:51
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I still haven't grokked what the matrix actually is and why, like, they need landlines within a simulated reality to enter and leave that simulated reality? I get the wired connection thing, but by no definition is it a real phone or a real wire, so wut??? In terms of an internally consistent cinematic universe, the actual nature of the matrix is remarkably muddled and unclear. Why is everything done inside of the simulated reality of inside the matrix? The entire premise is that it's not real and that realizing that allows you to do things that are supposed to be impossible in the context of that fake reality. But they're constantly moving stuff around in the totally fake and not real simulation, and then doing that stuff has real world effects. ??????? Does that mean it's not entirely fake? That kind of seems like super important information, and the closest explanation we get is "your mind makes it real". Oh? It makes sense when all they're doing is freeing people who are still immersed in the simulation, but, like, that's how come the chick in the red pants from the Osiris can jump into the matrix and drop a vhs tape in a mail box for us to pick up later, and Jada Pinkett had to blow up a nuclear power plant? The agents will never be as fast as Neo because they're limited by the rules of the system, Morpheus? Why though? The machines already know it's not real. Why do they even have a physical form in the simulated reality? What are they, Richard Garriot? Why can't they just flag his avatar or object instance or user node or whatever outside of the simulation? Is there no background OS to the matrix GUI? Aren't they, machines, by definition, not only the programmers and populations and regulators of the simulation, but also responsible for rendering the content for the end user? How is getting something passed them even a real possibility? It probably just sounds like I'm nit-picking, but really, if we don't know the limitations of the machines, the humans overcoming them based on those limitations isn't very impressive, and we can't really understand their limitations if the nature of the matrix itself isn't clear. The explanation that the architect gives is actually the closest thing to a handwave we get on this incredibly important information- if the resistance is all a necessary calculated part of the illusion, the matrix being a stupid loving video game that humans can win, instead of like a stable simulation with invisible and omnipotent sys admins to keep out troublemakers like it reasonably would be, makes a little more sense. In fact it also allows the human resistance element to proceed in a way that makes more sense than fighting a battle that ostensibly shouldn't even be possible and probably wouldn't if the machines decided to do anything to stop the resistance other than render themselves as boss monsters that can be avoided, beat up, and shot- the cycle of bullshit videogames fighting itself is actual enemy, and Neo breaks it by offering to remove malware from the system and broker peace. You know what gently caress it I like the Matrix sequels, video games are stupid.
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Sep 11, 2014 13:43
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The first Matrix film had some decent ideas and a creative enough concept that it drove people to write multiple books on the subject, change their wardrobe and kill themselves. It's a very memorable sci-fi/action flick. The problem is that it was so well regarded that it was sequel time. And, since it was the style at the time, producers turned it into a trilogy (Pirates did the exact same thing). Reloaded was a decent follow-up, but only for the well-crafted fight scenes. Revolutions was just series of predictable showdowns that lacked a lot of emotion and surprises. There were no more ideas left in Revolutions; just mechs, more Smiths, more magical messiah lore made up on the spot and more CGI robot octopi. The only good thing to come out of the sequels was The Animatrix because it gave some great anime directors a chance to play with the world and turn out some cool shorts.
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Sep 11, 2014 13:51
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I adore the overall plot of Reloaded, but like the Star Wars Prequels the execution fails it. It follows up perfectly on the theme of the first film, which is accepting one's destiny and purpose, signified by Neo's Christlike death and resurrection-- except it subverts that theme by showing how destiny and purpose are another means of control as complete as the Matrix itself. All of the individual parts are there, but the issue is that they don't gel together, and on the whole the world of the Matrix feels far less real than the one of the first film. It never seems like a living world, but just a series of set pieces for the various actors to fight in. The third one is another story altogether because it has about three pages of actual story carried out over two hours of tedious fight scenes.
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Sep 11, 2014 14:45
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The Matrix movies were my first exposure to that kind of fight choreography, up until that point I had really only seen Bruce Lee movies. So I give them movies credit for spurring me on to find other kung fu movies, but then when I did I found its hard to go back to Keanu Reeves fighting in slow-motion. Especially in Re-loaded, after you've seen the fight scenes in films like Iron Monkey, Fist of Legend, Crouching Tiger, Jackie Chan's early stuff, it looks like the actors are practicing the fight scenes at half speed. I know in most of the movies I just listed the action is sped up artificially but I guess I'm ok with that if it means the action is more impressive looking. The main nagging question I've always had about the story is about Agent Smith. The Architect says that Zion and the resistance is a normal part of the Matrix cycle, and that the One is always found each time because that's just part of the equation. But then at then end Neo makes a deal with the machines to kill/eradicate Smith, so clearly what happens to Smith over the course of the trilogy was never part of the cycle before, that's a new wrinkle that the machines don't know how to deal with. All of this was caused by Neo diving into Smith at the end of the first movie and ripping apart his program, but what exactly happened to Smith? What is he when he comes back exactly, and how did he survive? What exactly is it that Neo did to him and how did it happen? Bolded my actual question for clarity.
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Sep 11, 2014 16:17
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I completely forgot how unbelieveably verbiose the whole of Reloaded was until I caught it again a week or so back (repeated every other night on ITV2), and that's not including the Architect who feels appropriately wordy; it's probably due to how super long films were all the rage at the time, so instead of shorter summaries of impending threats and scene mirroring, we get lengthy sex discos and a myriad of fight scenes that lack the peril we're supposed to expect. The language is also weirdly delivered throughout, save for about two characters total (Link and the Oracle); it worked better in the first film because Neo was new to the resistance, with his language distinguishably different from battle-hardened members in Morpheus and Trinity, in a way similar to how real-world lefties talk to people new to left-leaning causes. Even then, it feels like at times the conversation has been awkwardly cut up during the editing, notable near the ending were Neo causes the Sentinals to explode in the "real" world, passes out, and when Trinity is asked about what happens she just says "I don't know"; obviously she's not going to tell the audience what we just saw, but it feels like a weird compromise that just makes it harder to understand how these people talk to each other off-camera. And this is all before the seemingly extraneous poo poo like the Merrovingian blabbering bollocks about "cause and effect" with his fart cake. That all said, I like the ending to Revolutions in a Zizek sort of way -- a lovely compromise that will inevitably fail at some point.
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Sep 11, 2014 16:18
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The problem I have with Matrix Reloaded is that it plays out like a video game where it seems that the movie is structured around set pieces and thats it. Then it feels like the movie forgot that it needs to advance the plot a bit and so it just dumps a bunch of story on you in the last 15 minutes. I never tend to notice it when I play video games, but its apparent in movies since you are stuck in the same spot.
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Sep 11, 2014 17:03
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Barlow posted:There was no where for them to go after the first film in terms of plot really. Neo had already achieved enlightenment and become essentially a God or Bodhisattva. He got the girl and overcame death. This, plus I just didn't really find any of the good guys likable after the first movie. I didn't particularly care whether they lived or died. And Zion was such an underwhelming shithole that humankind ensuring its survival for the near-to-medium-term future didn't seem like all that much of a victory...
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Sep 11, 2014 17:41
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Basebf555 posted:But then at then end Neo makes a deal with the machines to kill/eradicate Smith, so clearly what happens to Smith over the course of the trilogy was never part of the cycle before, that's a new wrinkle that the machines don't know how to deal with. All of this was caused by Neo diving into Smith at the end of the first movie and ripping apart his program, but what exactly happened to Smith? What is he when he comes back exactly, and how did he survive? What exactly is it that Neo did to him and how did it happen? This is the first thing Smith says/answers when he appears in Reloaded.
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Sep 11, 2014 17:42
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Basebf555 posted:what exactly happened to Smith? What is he when he comes back exactly, and how did he survive? What exactly is it that Neo did to him and how did it happen? Smith was killed/threatened with deletion, and like the Oracle says, when programs face deletion, they can lose their identity and rejoin the source in the real world or go rogue and become an exile in the Matrix. Smith was killed, but instead of submitting to deletion he went rogue and retained his body as an exile program (like the Merovingian and all his goons) but is no longer an Agent on the Machine's side who are networked into the Matrix with earplugs. It's pretty much all in the exchange before the Burly Brawl: quote:Smith:
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Sep 11, 2014 17:47
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So Smith is no different than any of the other rogue programs? How did he end up with the power to create copies of himself? Is that part of what he means when he says part of Neo was "imprinted" on him?
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Sep 11, 2014 17:52
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Basebf555 posted:So Smith is no different than any of the other rogue programs? How did he end up with the power to create copies of himself? Is that part of what he means when he says part of Neo was "imprinted" on him? EDIT: My ideal Matrix sequel would have been to use Kid's Story from the Animatrix as an opening sequence, then have Kid serve as the audience surrogate alongside Trinity and Morpheus while Neo explores what it really means to be outside the rules of the Matrix. Reloaded touched on this with stuff like the orgasm cake (creating code objects in the Matrix to exert control over programs and people) and the Backdoors (code that supercedes the physical laws of the Matrix), but as far as Neo being above the law it pretty much came down to making him into Goku instead of giving him the ability to influence the reality of the world itself, as the first film promised. Strange Matter fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Sep 11, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 18:12
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| # ? May 25, 2024 07:28 |
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I'm just still really disappointed that they didn't go with the twist that the "real world" was also a simulation to give humans a false sense of hope. And a tiny part of me thinks they didn't do that because so many people predicted it. It would also have been an acceptable third-movie twist to reveal that a small group of humans were behind everything, and were just pretending to be machines. Could have had a nice Wizard of Oz moment with the Machine God. Nope, too interesting! Basically almost literally anything would have been better than Revolutions, the script for which was: [ZION] There are ROBOT SUITS. They fight ROBOTS. [MATRIX] NEO and SMITH punch each other for 20 minutes. Also I agree that the Twins were great throwaway characters. "We are getting annoyed." "Yes we are..." And what was with the rumors that the Wachowski's themselves were characters in one of the movies? I seem to remember nobody knew what they looked like for a long time.
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Sep 11, 2014 18:38
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