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The hallway scene shocked me when I watched it because it wasn’t lost on me these were just regular human schmoes doing their jobs when superhuman S&M mercenaries showed up and murdered them. The film doesn’t really linger on it too much but it is horrifying The way this movie should handle Neo and Trinity living is the Mad Max option. gently caress the canon and how the last movie ended, this is justt another tale in the mythology of these two larger than life legends. Don’t even acknowledge the break in continuity
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Aug 26, 2019 06:24
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LesterGroans posted:It is just generally kinda funny that the only surviving member of the main three from the original movies is the only one not coming back. Morpheus is a character that has no purpose in 2 and 3 - he's like if Obi-Wan somehow survived A New Hope and just kinda stood around in the other Star Wars movies. I mean, the Matrix sequels have other faults, but it shows you how the Wachowskis never planned on making sequels to the Matrix because you have lots of strange hanging threads that don't make sense and were kinda shoehorned in. It was cool that he got to fight that Agent in the 2nd one though. I'm not expecting Matrix 4 to be good necessarily, but it will at least be interesting because most everything the Wachowskis do is interesting, even if a good percentage doesn't really land the execution.
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Sep 9, 2021 05:00
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I'm accepting the story will be utterly incoherent and try really hard to mesh with the mythology of the trilogy but it wont matter because its gonna look and feel awesome
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Sep 9, 2021 22:43
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Obviously, the allegory in the Matrix wont be literal - they wont have Neo says "I am trans" and then start taking hormones, but hitting on different themes that resonate generally with the trans experience. I'm cis so I'm not going to say authoritatively all of the aspects of the Matrix that resonate in that way but there's clearly aspects of how "choice" is presented as a liberatory experience, the stultifying conformity of society, the existence of an entire world that's hidden from view, the extremely somatic experience of waking up from the Matrix and the dichotomy between the irl and Matrix representations of self, the revolution against the oppressive present state of things, etc. I agree with SMG that the Matrix really missed the boat in having actors play both their Matrix and IRL selves - not only doesn't it make sense but its a huge missed opportunity. Obviously people would look different if they lived in a pod their entire lives, but also they'd have no idea what they look like at all, they've never seen a mirror! And it misses the possibility of taking on any sort of representation at all, which possibly opens more doors than the Wachowskis wanted to walk through. Of course, production wise, it would have been impossible to cast major actors like Keanu Reeves for half a role.
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Sep 24, 2021 16:05
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Sodomy Hussein posted:
It's funny because they seem to try to rectify this in the sequels by having maybe the least erotic orgy ever shown on screen. I don't blame the Matrix and its sequels for the gradual de-sexing of cinema, but it certainly was a harbinger of things to come. Mostly it was Disney to blame, I think.
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Sep 24, 2021 19:34
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I often wonder why the Wachowski's didn't go the route of justifying the Machine's relationship to the Matrix with them having to adhere, in some twisted way, to the three laws of robotics. No matter how much they may actually despise the humans, have them totally under their control, they're hardwired to continue Human existence as much as possible and their way around having to deal with our asses is to keep us in this dreamlike state. It's a different story but one that could have been more compelling than the hard to believe "humans are a power source" which basically gets ditched in the sequels anyway.
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Sep 29, 2021 05:40
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While the Machines most likely don't have economically feudal relations, there are aspects to their 'society' that are reminiscent of a feudal mode of production (ignoring for the second the human species as some sort of chattel/unconscious slave work force) - specifically how each individualized program has a purpose that is given to them upon 'birth' which they cannot transcend - static classes and roles which definitely has an air of feudalism. 'Divine Right' and all that. Of course, there is another mode of production that included anachronistic aspects of feudalism (even down to absurd concepts of chivalry) combined with industrial capitalism - the Slave Economy of the antebellum South. Of course the "labor" of the humans (done while they slumber, unknown to themselves, which is very close to the original Haitian myth of the Zombie) doesn't produce any commodity. There is no circulation of capital. While in many ways the anxiety of the Matrix reflects the anxiety of an increasingly rationalized, automated world of the late 90s, it omits the why of that rationalization (which was and is capital accumulation). So the Machines have some sort of collectivized command economy featuring forced labor by a permanent underclass in the context of permanent privation - maybe the closest we can think of it is what Ferrinus mentioned - War Communism a la the early years of the USSR. However there, the working class/underclass had agency and political power, but was forced into that situation by civil war, famine, invasion and of course, political decisions by the Bolsheviks. The communism of the early USSR was one formed out of necessity and lacking all the luxuries imagined by Marxists thinkers of the time, and of course that was a crucial element as to why Russian communism was so grey, staid, and ultimately doomed. It's interesting to think what kind of revolution and modes of production are even possible for the humans and machines in their situation. With mutual ecological ruin and overwhelming scarcity. I don't think its right to call Morpheus a libertarian, the only kinds of revolution left to him and the Zionites are ones that redistribute the shrunken pie, and maybe lay down the basis for a society of abundance in the far off future. His revolution is a slave revolution or a war of national liberation - which is a prerequisite to any other ambition Mike N Eich fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 22:42
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The Matrix, obviously, stands alone. It's really a self-contained film that needs no further elaboration. Some aspects of the sequels, like showing Zion or the Machine City, while sometimes cool (the Machine's insectile-hive-mind thing is pretty cool), are diminished by being shown on screen. They can't match up to what your imagination can conjure. Still, Reloaded is a pretty fun, interesting movie that presaged endless hype MCU movies before its time. It's really weakened by just how much of a mess Revolutions is. I remember scouring message boards in the six months between Reloaded and Revolutions - what was the Architect talking about? Why can Neo suddenly use powers in the "real world"? Is there a "Matrix within a Matrix"?? Is it Matrices all the way down??? (It was a mistake, IMO, that the Wachowskis didn't go down that route) The problem is there is a very weak resolution to all these questions, and much of the action, while aesthetically pleasing (the human mechs firing up at the ceiling as the sentinels flow into the breach is, also IMO, cool as hell) it lacks weight and heft. Why are Neo and Agent Smith even bothering to have a 10 minute fight scene when we know Neo is only there to give himself up? Whats up with the Merovingian and all the rogue AIs? Oh nothing, actually, they're there for 2 seconds to point to another plot device and disappear for the rest of the film. There are gestures in Reloaded to things that could be elaborated on for endless plot threads, and that makes it a fascinating film, but its packaged with Revolutions which just feels bloated, to me.
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Dec 20, 2021 19:46
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If I remember correctly there was some sort of dispute between Tank's actor and the Wachowksis and thats why he didn't return? That was a real weird shift, they just replaced him with basically no comment with a guy nobody knew of and we were expected care about him
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Dec 20, 2021 19:49
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I liked it. The Wachowskis can be some of the most self-indulgent tv/movie makers around, but they're also the ones I'm most forgiving of being self-indulgent. There's a lot that works and there's a lot that doesn't work, but the emotional highs worked for me. Neil Patrick Harris was fantastic, he really stole the show for me. The Smith stuff...didn't work as much, though I did like him interrupting NPHs villain monologue. Both Keanu and Carrie Anne-Moss were great and I was genuinely moved to see them reunited in the "real world" at the end, and just to see two 50-somethings embrace without being digitally de-aged or anything. Something very nice about seeing two (admittedly insanely gorgeous) people embrace their age. Everything around the beginning is great (although the very first scene is clunky as hell and it really should have started with just Neo and Trinity in the Matrix, IMO. Don't give me 5 minutes of expository technobabble, but, thats very Wachowski). There's a lot of flabbiness in the rest of the film. The Bugs character never clicked with me and the Morpheus stuff is conceptually promising but doesn't really go anywhere interesting. The character basically disappears in the second half. Didn't care for any of the Zion/Io/Niobe stuff. Possible interesting threads about a Machine civil war, but mostly glossed over. Of course Lana Wachowski casts like half of Sense8 in the film. Of course there are collaborator machines including a floating stingray/seahorse of some kind. Wachowski creativity that half works, half doesn't. Of course the Merovingian shows up as a deranged anti-tech terrorist, and everything he says is completely true. Loved that. Get a good editor to cut some of the threads that don't go anywhere and you have a brilliant film. As it is, still lots of fun.
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Dec 24, 2021 05:12
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To comment on the action, I don't think what hurt the action had anything to do with direction or choreography, but a floatiness and a lack of stakes for most of the fight scenes. Compare the action in the first Matrix - halfway through there's a fight scene were a good chunk of the humans just straight up get murdered easily by Agents. I'm not sure any human dies throughout the entire length of Matrix Resurrections. The action is thus fairly perfunctory - you never feel like the characters are in any serious danger. There's a lack of gravitas with the non-legacy characters - they just talk too drat much. They're constantly espousing expository dialogue and technobabble and you just tune it out at a certain point. At least the new Morpheus kinda jokes about it, he mostly worked for me. But the new crew members? Extremely interchangeable, even if I had some affection for many of them because they're Sense8 cast-offs
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Dec 24, 2021 05:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Time stop seemed so half hearted, like conceptually it’s a cool power that they did nothing with. He never used it for anything interesting and only did it once and it looked really bad. It would have worked a lot better if they just used the same effects the Xmen movies used with Quicksilver, which is inevitably always the best part of those movies
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Dec 24, 2021 05:50
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Am I wrong or was there really no reason to make 60 years pass instead of 20 years for Morpheus and Trinity? They mention it and it really seems to hold no purpose other than make them come up with another explanation for why they ONLY aged 20 years. I guess to allow for a longer passage of time so they could develop the Io/Synthetics/Machine civil war stuff, but I could buy all that could happen in 20 years. I just don't get the motivation behind that.
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Dec 24, 2021 06:24
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ImpAtom posted:There were two reasons. This reminds me I was confused as to the status of the peace - at the end of Revolutions the impression I got was that the Machines agreed to not gently caress with humans in Zion and would allow anyone who wanted to 'wake up' to wake up and join Zion. But it appears that the humans are still on the run from the Machines in Io, why else do they need to have a cloaking system for their city? Or is that only one faction of the Machine civil war who wants to hunt them down? I didn't make sense of that very well
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Dec 24, 2021 07:08
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I don’t think the movie is in any way anti-psychiatric and in fact the Analyst’s plan for controlling people by paying attention to people’s emotional realities and personal narratives and keeping them in repetition compulsions that can never be satisfied coheres extremely well with Classical Psychoanalysis.
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Dec 24, 2021 18:38
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I wanna give a quick shout out to the dude who played the conventional boring Chicago Cop in Sense8 showing up in fetish gear in this movie. I think at one point he was literally wearing a dog collar while fighting Agents. Props.
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Dec 24, 2021 20:00
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Seedge posted:This is not a thing that happens in the first movie. The only person an Agent kills in the first movie is Neo, briefly. Wrong - Mouse pulls out two guns and is immediately murdered by a bunch of soldiers/cops/Agents - the rest of them high tail it the gently caress out of there, there’s a brutal fight where Morpheus gets easily manhandled There’s lots of ways the first movie makes the Agents (or even just regular soldiers!) a distinctly dangerous threat
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Dec 25, 2021 19:30
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I enjoyed the film but count me as a definite “no” on any other sequels. Half of the film is a meditation on how this movie doesn’t need to exist, that to bring it back meant painfully imprisoning it’s beloved characters for years. And on a more basic level, we’re far past the limits of what the premise can offer : a movie about how the whole world is a simulation only has one place to go (revealing that to everyone) and everything else is wheel spinning
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Dec 26, 2021 18:19
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Alchenar posted:This is twice now that Wachowski has used a Matrix film to say "you must perform a suicidally impossible heist" and then in the next scene the heist has happened and the film just moves on. Yes…there’s the bizarre “let’s overlay Trinity on Bugs” thing when they’re unjacking her and it’s set up as this bug dangerous problem and…goes off without a hitch and has no lasting consequences for either character. I understand that it’s simply narrative convention for plans to have to go wrong in some way in movies, but it’s also not compelling to watch something happen exactly as described for no overall purpose.
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Dec 26, 2021 22:00
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Bold of Lana Wachowski to double down on the "humans are energy resources" with "Neo and Trinity produce more power together through love" metaphor when they had the extremely more reasonable "Neo is unwittingly utilized to help code/run the Matrix" when they had him literally writing code for a Matrix game You have to respect the Wachowskis commitment to never go the obvious and uh, more elegant route, even when it makes little sense
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Dec 27, 2021 22:45
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Took a plane and they were doing playing the first Matrix. What a tight rear end loving movie that is, I don’t think there’s a single wasted scene in the movie. Pretty amazing, it does everything it needs to in as elegant a way as possible. Dunno why all the sequels feel bloated in comparison
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Jan 1, 2022 22:16
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It's legitimately interesting to wonder to what extent 'bots' are 'people.' Obviously, a great many constructs in the Matrix are definitely persons - the Agents, the Oracle, the Merovingian, etc. etc. - they all are just as much 'persons' as the human characters are. We don't know much about the bots, we only see them usually right before they are 'activated' and then killed - how long do people maintain relationships with them? Did Trinity spend actual years cultivating a relationship with her bot husband and bot child? Or is every day exactly the same - she's always been married to this guy, she always has the same age kids, etc. - it's possible the bots are Very Botlike, they only have to maintain a total facade, or they are much more multifaceted. Even if they have a killswitch in them that the Analyst can activate, that doesn't necessarily make them any less of a person than any of the other constructs. I don't really know what the line is - how much independent thinking is needed for Bot constructs to be persons than regular old constructs? I have no idea, I'm not saying I know one way or the other, but the Analyst (and to a certain extent, the film) handwaves their existence away, when maybe we shouldn't.
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Jan 20, 2022 01:51
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mutantIke posted:Just coming in here to say that I have been in full on Matrix Mania hype mode over the rerelease last week, ended up dragging along a bunch of my friends including my GF who hasn't seen it, and got to experience the sheer bliss of watching someone's face light up as Trinity shoots the agent in the head and they finally realize that they're watching the coolest film of all time (and then seeing them realize that over and over again throughout the third act). I remember fondly the cultural atmosphere around the Matrix sequels - there was a ton of anticipation, I remember routinely browsing Matrix forums for speculation and theories, it was a lot of fun. Even after Reloaded came out, folks were super jazzed to talk about what everything meant, what every possible theory hole went down. Were there Matrices within Matrices? I think the feeling really dissipated after Revolutions because the film, while fine, didn't care to go down many of those open doors that Reloaded threw open at the end of the film. Maybe it was too messy, maybe it would have entailed a ton more from the Wachowskis to really deliver, and maybe it was impossible to deliver on people's expectations (probably mostly the latter). I kinda feel like ultimately, the Matrix is a perfect action movie that has a fun science fiction and philosophical gloss on top and the sequels just can't deliver that elegant balance of pop philosophy plus action, it's actually an impossible goal because so much of that thrill comes from the reveal of the universe of the Matrix and that can't be duplicated really.
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Mar 25, 2024 16:48
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