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Matrix: Reloaded (PLEASE DO NOT OPEN UNLESS U SAW THE MOVIE) (pg. 7)
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| bomberMAN |
| It was so borring, especially that scene where Neo talks to that old white dude that talk a lot of which noone can understand. Damn. I mean the fighting scenes were good. But the movie overall was way too borring. |
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| Alccode |
The more I reflect on the movie, the more it dawns on me just how pointless and overdone M2 was. There is no consistency and coherency, just tacked-on action sequences and prattling philosophical one-liners.
Before I get flamed let me explain. The kung-fu factor of M1 was amazing precisely because it was unexpected. The philosophy of the first movie was amazing precisely because it was unexpected. Both of these, however, would have lost their effect if they were taken outside the context of the first movie. This is exactly what happens in M2. There is no more emphasis on the duality of worlds between the Matrix and the real world. It's just a sloshfest of various scenes. Characters come and go. The "philosophy" is totally empty as it serves no purpose. The philosophy in the 1st movie bolstered the overall theme. Here, it does not do that.
Most of all, however, I detest the fact that the Wachowski brothers have succumbed to both corporate America/Hollywood and to their own cultist followers. The former because of all the senseless advertising. The second because they apparently seem to believe themselves that they're prophets or something, when in fact they should just be moviemakers telling a cool story.
I'll focus on the advertising. What the hell is up with that?? First let's get the Heineken and other little trivia like that out of the way.
Then, we have those two cars that are driven by the evil ghost twins. First of all I have no clue what make they are, but damn are they ugly and blocky. Second, it is painfully obvious that they both drive the same brand of car, and why did one have to be a sedan and the other an SUV?? It's like that company is parading its stock on the screen of the Matrix, which is exactly what it is doing!! And let's not mention that horrible, horrible little take when they start the car chase. If you recall, while still in the city, the SUV plows through a car or two and totally rips off the rear end. Then, the camera zooms on the decimated car and we see it's a -surprise surprise- BMW. Then the camera goes back to one of the evil twins who gives an evil smirk. You can almost hear the marketing phrase: "Buy our SUV. It will smash the competition away. Literally." So utterly disgusting. What a waste of my precious time. Instead of contributing to a potentially great movie, they waste time with senseless car commercials.
Second, the Niobe character. She was utterly pointless in terms of the story. The only reason why she even existed was to justify that new Matrix videogame, "Enter the Matrix" or whatever, which is based on her. I read in a review that some of the written previews for M2 stated that you will not understand the movie without having played the game, and vice versa. I'm sorry, but I'm here simply to see a movie and be entertained. I do not wish to be bogged down with a stupid "prerequisite" such as playing a videogame, wasting so many more hours just so I can understand the movie. What bull!
It's really too bad Hollywood got to Wachowski and co. and totally subverted them almost beyond recognition. I still definitely want to see Revolutions, if only for the hope that there might be something good waiting at the end of all this. |
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| bomberMAN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Alccode
The more I reflect on the movie, the more it dawns on me just how pointless and overdone M2 was. There is no consistency and coherency, just tacked-on action sequences and prattling philosophical one-liners.
Before I get flamed let me explain. The kung-fu factor of M1 was amazing precisely because it was unexpected. The philosophy of the first movie was amazing precisely because it was unexpected. Both of these, however, would have lost their effect if they were taken outside the context of the first movie. This is exactly what happens in M2. There is no more emphasis on the duality of worlds between the Matrix and the real world. It's just a sloshfest of various scenes. Characters come and go. The "philosophy" is totally empty as it serves no purpose. The philosophy in the 1st movie bolstered the overall theme. Here, it does not do that.
Most of all, however, I detest the fact that the Wachowski brothers have succumbed to both corporate America/Hollywood and to their own cultist followers. The former because of all the senseless advertising. The second because they apparently seem to believe themselves that they're prophets or something, when in fact they should just be moviemakers telling a cool story.
I'll focus on the advertising. What the hell is up with that?? First let's get the Heineken and other little trivia like that out of the way.
Then, we have those two cars that are driven by the evil ghost twins. First of all I have no clue what make they are, but damn are they ugly and blocky. Second, it is painfully obvious that they both drive the same brand of car, and why did one have to be a sedan and the other an SUV?? It's like that company is parading its stock on the screen of the Matrix, which is exactly what it is doing!! And let's not mention that horrible, horrible little take when they start the car chase. If you recall, while still in the city, the SUV plows through a car or two and totally rips off the rear end. Then, the camera zooms on the decimated car and we see it's a -surprise surprise- BMW. Then the camera goes back to one of the evil twins who gives an evil smirk. You can almost hear the marketing phrase: "Buy our SUV. It will smash the competition away. Literally." So utterly disgusting. What a waste of my precious time. Instead of contributing to a potentially great movie, they waste time with senseless car commercials.
Second, the Niobe character. She was utterly pointless in terms of the story. The only reason why she even existed was to justify that new Matrix videogame, "Enter the Matrix" or whatever, which is based on her. I read in a review that some of the written previews for M2 stated that you will not understand the movie without having played the game, and vice versa. I'm sorry, but I'm here simply to see a movie and be entertained. I do not wish to be bogged down with a stupid "prerequisite" such as playing a videogame, wasting so many more hours just so I can understand the movie. What bull!
It's really too bad Hollywood got to Wachowski and co. and totally subverted them almost beyond recognition. I still definitely want to see Revolutions, if only for the hope that there might be something good waiting at the end of all this. |
After u say all that , you still give up in the last paragraph, that is so sad. Thisway they still win cuz they'll get u to go buy another ticket from which they'll profit. |
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| Michael Russo |
Well articulated, Alccode.
This movie is really driving me insane...
The problem I have is that, given the present information we have now, Neo is absolutely pointless. He serves no purpose, and neither does Zion.
Now, obviously, both have a purpose for being there... they are central to the story! But, from the watcher's perspective, or at least the people who went to watch it that have the ability to comprehend things other than fight scenes (ie. people very much unlike bomberMAN), they're still pointless.
If we are to assume that the story is exactly how it was revealed (ie. there is only one matrix, the machines harvest humans for energy, Neo is a human, the architect did not lie to Neo, etc. etc.), then things just don't work... the story doesn't make sense. Now, there has to be something critical that the audience is purposely unaware of.
If Neo is a machine, this still doesn't cut it as far as explanations go... there is still some other critical piece of information missing.
Things would perhaps make more sense if there really were two matrices... but still, there's something else missing.
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| DJ El Kay Dee |
| quote: | Originally posted by Alccode
Then, we have those two cars that are driven by the evil ghost twins. First of all I have no clue what make they are, but damn are they ugly and blocky. Second, it is painfully obvious that they both drive the same brand of car, and why did one have to be a sedan and the other an SUV?? It's like that company is parading its stock on the screen of the Matrix, which is exactly what it is doing!! And let's not mention that horrible, horrible little take when they start the car chase. If you recall, while still in the city, the SUV plows through a car or two and totally rips off the rear end. Then, the camera zooms on the decimated car and we see it's a -surprise surprise- BMW. Then the camera goes back to one of the evil twins who gives an evil smirk. You can almost hear the marketing phrase: "Buy our SUV. It will smash the competition away. Literally." So utterly disgusting. What a waste of my precious time. Instead of contributing to a potentially great movie, they waste time with senseless car commercials.
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umm the sedan is a Cadillac CTS (?) and the suv is a Cadillac Escalade
its like how in the first part the mobile fones were nokia banana fones
if they are given sponsorship, theyll take it. also the car which one of the agents jumps onto which then flips over is an oldsmobile aero (?)
GM sponsored the movie
oh and yea ive been sayin that the action was overdone right from whne i walked out of the teathre |
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| infinity HiGH |
you know...for a movie that wasn't so good, you people sure are talking about it a lot.
And Alccode; the commercial thing was in Matrix one as well, and it was even more obvious than in this one. Every movie is filled with these little "commercials" because otherwise the stars wouldn't be able to drive Ferrari's. It barely bothered me tho, but that's just me.
I liked the movie a lot. For a sequel it was great; and sequels rarely are. It was obvious from the beginning that it won't have that same cool, magic feel the first one did. |
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| Michael Russo |
| quote: | Originally posted by infinity HiGH
you know...for a movie that wasn't so good, you people sure are talking about it a lot.
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It's definately a good movie. But the better Revolutions is, the better this movie will become.
When I was agreeing with Alccode I was talking about his previous post about the actual storyline, not his take on how overdone it was. He makes good points, but they are very minor. I'm impartial to the advertising, for example, and how are we supposed to know what role Niobe will play? This stuff isn't that big a deal... there's no doubt that the movie's way too commercial though. We all know what happens with music when it gets commercial... same with everything else. Hence the addition of the operator for comic relief (yes, I was cringing while everyone else in the theatre was laughing).
But this isn't a big deal, as long as the movie's good.
But I don't know if the movie's amazing yet. I enjoyed watching it, and that counts for something, and I like the fact that I left the theatre not understanding what was going on. No movies have ever made me think this much. And no movie has ever had such a great rave scene with such a great track blazing in the background. When I heard Fluke I was extremely happy, to say the least. Kinda like eating my own special French cake ;)
And again, slagging the philosophy is premature... we should at least wait until we understand what they're philosophizing about. |
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| StalkerElmo |
| i think yall should just stfu about the matrix theories, and all that bull, jus wait for the Matrix Revolutions and see for urself.. :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: |
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| Michael Russo |
Just found a really great article (thanks to the chill-out forum).
Ken Mondschein, for coporatemofo.com writes:
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Going into The Matrix: Reloaded, I wasn't worried if the fight scenes or special effects would measure up to the first film—it was the metaphysics that bothered me. The first Matrix was such a neat allegory of Gnostic philosophy, I was more concerned with how the Brothers Wachowski could successfully extend the metaphor into three films than whether they could pull off even more virtuoso examples of cinematic ass-stomping. What was mindblowing about the first movie, after all, wasn't the fight choreography or bullet time, but its brave assertion that the banal, day-to-day reality we live in isn't the real world. In that sense, all the wire-fu was just the candy coating on the red pill the filmmakers were offering to every high school student and cubicle slave in the world. (Though, since I study martial arts myself, I found the idea of kung fu as being metaphorical for something happening in hyper-reality, a la Thibault's mysterious circle, to be pretty darn appealing.)
Thankfully, Reloaded more than allayed my fears, even if it seems that half the reviewers either didn't understand what the Wachowskis were getting at, or else were only paying attention during the highway chase. Watching the movie, I was personally less impressed by the fists of digital fury than by the Brothers' evident familiarity with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the theology of Origen of Alexandria. Seen in the light of the books they're referencing, the movie's plot is brilliant; of course, to the non-initiate, the characters' actions and dialogue seems arbitrary and incomprehensible, and the exposition is just filler between car crashes. It would seem, therefore, that a bit of exegesis of The Matrix: Reloaded is warranted. But be warned: If you haven't seen the movie yet, don't read on. There are some major spoilers.
Much like that other great Keanu Reeves vehicle, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, The Matrix: Reloaded centers around the hero's journey into the Underworld. Frazier, in The Golden Bough, notes that it is a prophetess—in this case, the Oracle—who sends the hero off on his journey, from where he returns with special knowledge. And, of course, that's just what Neo does, though it would have been a while lot more amusing if he'd had Alex Winter along. (The Oracle probably isn't entirely benign, by the way, even though she may not consciously intend any harm: She is, after all, the one who sent Neo on the path to the Core.)
Neo's first task is to rescue the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim, doing his best Rick Moranis impression) from the Merovingian, who is a daemon—in both senses of the word—left over from a previous version of the Matrix. (The Merovingians were the ruling Frankish dynasty; they were succeeded by Charlemagne's family, the Carolingians, and then by the Capetians, who thought they were descended from Christ.) The guy in the health food store where I buy my granola and soy milk thinks that The Merovingian was one of Neo's predecessors, but all the explanation I need, as well as the way I understand his obvious fascination with human pleasures, is found in Genesis 6:4—"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them. . ." According to various sources, including Kabbalah, this mating of men and angels (here, a computer program from an earlier version of the Martrix) is what produced various monsters, such as the vampires and wraiths that serve the Merovingian. Dante, bringing a Christian sensibility to the proceedings, placed these monsters in his Inferno. Thus, though the Merovingian is sort of an antediluvian remnant of the former world, he's also (as is shown by the fact that his wife is named Persephone) kind of like Hades, the holder of the keys to the underworld. What the Keymaker does, much like the golden bough the Sybil gives Aeneas, is open doors and permit Neo access to the underworld—or, in this case, the Core.
After the requisite battles and explosions, Neo gets into the Core and finds The Architect. Considering that The Architect built the Matrix, you might think that he's God. Of course, he's nothing of the sort. In Gnostic theology, it is Satan, not God, who has created the world in order to imprison humanity. It is also the Architect who is unleashing the Sentinels to destroy Zion; that is, beginning the Battle of Armageddon. It is my prediction that in the third and final film, it will be revealed that there is a power behind the Architect, and that he is the one who sent the One into the Matrix. It is also my prediction that this guy will look a lot like Neo.
The important thing is choosing what to believe from the raft of condescending exposition that the Architect inflicts on Neo. He says, basically, that though ninety-nine percent of humans believe in the illusion of the Matrix, there is that troublesome one percent (comparable to the few awakened Gnostic true believers) who refuse to believe in the created world. This tends to produce massive amounts of instability, and crashes the system. (Not coincidentally, most of the people in Zion seem to be black or Hispanic, which makes perfect sense: If you're a white suburban Matrix resident, driving your Matrix SUV to your Matrix golf club, why doubt the nature of reality?) The solution is that they allow the dissidents to escape to Zion, which they can then periodically destroy. They have also created the Prophecy of the One, who is in fact a device sent by the machines into the "real" world so that his knowledge of humanity may be integrated into the system in order to further perfect the Matrix-illusion, and then allowed to re-start Zion so that the cycle can begin again. The idea of multiple creations and a cycle of created and destroyed worlds is, needless to say, also found in theologies as wildly variant as the Mayan and the Buddhist.
The idea that the Prophecy—and Zion—were just another means of control is lifted right out of French philosophy. The first movie made use of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation; this movie seems to be dipping into Foucault and Derrida, who wrote that the systems of power and control are all-pervasive, and language is one of the ways they make their influence felt. The Prophecy is, like all prophecies, speech, and thus language. More importantly, it is a religion, and, as John Zerzan writes, the purpose of a religion is to manipulate signs, that is, words, for the purpose of control. Zion is the longed-for millennial promised land; by keeping the war between good and evil foremost in their hearts, even the freed humans are kept from doubting their own world, from thinking too hard about why things are the way they are.
Understanding why things are the way they are requires an understanding of another holy text: Asimov's Laws of Robotics. The machines, as demonstrated by Smith's need to try to kill Neo even after being "freed," don't have free will. (Likewise, in Gnostic theology, angels and other such divine beings also don't have free will—only humans do.) The bit about the machines needing human bio-energy to survive, as Morpheus (the dreamer) explained in the first movie, is bull. The machines keep humanity alive but imprisoned, even after taking over the world, because they were created to serve people. In other words, the machines would like to destroy humanity, but they CAN'T. Instead, they need a human to make the choice.
As the Architect reveals, Neo is not the first One, but rather the sixth. Why the sixth? The answer is that Neo's five previous incarnations represent the Five Books of Moses that make up the Old Testament. Neo (representing Christ, and thus the New Testament) differs from his five predecessors in his capacity to love. In the work of Origen of Alexandria and other Church Fathers, it is love ("eros" in Greek) that compels Christ to come down from the heavens to redeem humanity. Furthermore, "neo" means "new"—as in "New Covenant." In Neo, the machines have finally found the iteration of the One who will make the illogical choice of saving Trinity and dooming humanity. [Note to the theology geeks who've been e-mailing me: I know the difference between eros and agape, but Origen used both terms for reasons I'd have to delve into pre-Socratic philosophy to explain.]
This is the Architect's real purpose in giving Neo a choice between two doors. At once all human and all machine, rather than being a device to refine the Matrix into a more perfect simulation of reality, re-found Zion, and thus continue the endless cycle of death and rebirth—as the Architect says he is—the purpose of the One is to be manipulated into destroying all of humanity. However, not having free will themselves, the machines are not able to comprehend it in others—and thus Neo, being also human, is a bit of a wild card. It is Neo's destiny—as was Christ's in Origen's theology—to break the cycle of death and rebirth, and offer humanity a new future. This is shown by the fact that, by the end of the movie, Neo (and also, incidentally, Smith) gain power over machines in the "real world"—which shows that he has power not only over the first—level simulated world of the Matrix, but also the second-level simulation of Zion.
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This is really great... I'm not sure if I agree with all of it, but nevertheless it is really well done. |
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| Alccode |
| quote: | Originally posted by bomberMAN
After u say all that , you still give up in the last paragraph, that is so sad. Thisway they still win cuz they'll get u to go buy another ticket from which they'll profit. |
Well, I certainly did not expect that. If you are not going to reply intelligently then please do not bother replying.
Now to be serious again. A bad first sequel does not imply a bad second sequel. So I don't see anything wrong with seeing Revolutions. Besides, the Matrix is the Matrix, Reloaded or Revolutions or no. No matter how bad it is, there is always a reason to see it. |
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| Alccode |
| quote: | Originally posted by Michael Russo
Well articulated, Alccode.
This movie is really driving me insane...
The problem I have is that, given the present information we have now, Neo is absolutely pointless. He serves no purpose, and neither does Zion.
Now, obviously, both have a purpose for being there... they are central to the story! But, from the watcher's perspective, or at least the people who went to watch it that have the ability to comprehend things other than fight scenes (ie. people very much unlike bomberMAN), they're still pointless.
If we are to assume that the story is exactly how it was revealed (ie. there is only one matrix, the machines harvest humans for energy, Neo is a human, the architect did not lie to Neo, etc. etc.), then things just don't work... the story doesn't make sense. Now, there has to be something critical that the audience is purposely unaware of.
If Neo is a machine, this still doesn't cut it as far as explanations go... there is still some other critical piece of information missing.
Things would perhaps make more sense if there really were two matrices... but still, there's something else missing.
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Brilliant! That's exactly the problem - we're missing the "key" to the story (hehe). You worded it perfectly: there is a critical piece of information missing. I have to hand it to the Wachowski's for that, at least. They engineered it in a way that no matter what theory we come up with, there is always some sort of flaw in it. E.g. machine-Neo and Double-Matrix theories. We'll just have to wait and see, then...
Now, LKD and infinity HIGH, the commercialization of the 1st Matrix is not too bad, because I did not notice it too much. It's fine and dandy if they're using Nokia phones or whatever. I mean, they have to use a brand of phone, so it's not like that's "shameless advertising."
But the Cadillacs in M2 (thanks for the info LKD) was just shameless. It would have been O.K. to drive 1. But to drive two?? And to have one a sedan and one an SUV? It's like they tried to milk the opportunity as much as they could! Might as well have inserted a real commercial in the movie! I just think they crossed the line a little there... All IMHO, of course. |
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| TheDemon |
| Just saw the movie the other day. understood it and thought its was really good. can't wait for Revolutions. |
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