Ok, now let’s talk about something REALLY important. Any predictions for Matrix Revolutions (coming out Nov. 5, I believe)? If you already somehow know what’s going to happen, don’t give it away and ruin it for us zealots, please!
It will be better than the second one – but that wouldn’t take much. :?
I heard it is supposed to be the best out of the three. Maybe they made the Reloaded shitty on purpose because therefore Revolutions would be considered great comparitively.
It better be better, much better. Else ‘Reloaded’ nor ‘Revolutions’ will make it into my DVD collection (loved ‘The Matrix’).
So, I am going to mailorder Equlibrium now …
Here’s my idea.
The machines (as hinted by the Senator) are not all bad. In fact they have been merely keeping humans on life-support, plugged into a matrix, whilst they clean up the earth for them (beacuase the humans blotted out the sun remember). There task after many centuries (6 100 year or so cylces of ‘The One’) is complete, but they are just waiting for humans to be ready to be released back into the world without fucking it up again. Their ‘test group’ for human progress is ‘Zion’ (in fact a second-level matrix created for the ‘rebels’ who reject the first one), and particularly The One. The One, this time Neo (you can tell he’s the one, because his name’s an anagram of ‘one’) is the one who has made the right choice, based on love, and also has someohow merged with the machines, so can lead the machines and the humans, out of the matrix and back into the new cleaned-up world. The threat to this is Smith.
Brian
nice…but i little too rosy
i meant that i cant see the machines …ah forget it, i think you are right!
I heard a rumour that we will discover at the end of the film that Darth Vader is actually Luke’s father.
I expect to see more of Spoon Boy.
[quote=“Bu Lai En”]The machines (as hinted by the Senator) are not all bad. In fact they have been merely keeping humans on life-support, plugged into a matrix, whilst they clean up the earth for them (beacuase the humans blotted out the sun remember). There task after many centuries (6 100 year or so cylces of ‘The One’) is complete, but they are just waiting for humans to be ready to be released back into the world without fucking it up again. Their ‘test group’ for human progress is ‘Zion’ (in fact a second-level matrix created for the ‘rebels’ who reject the first one), and particularly The One. The One, this time Neo (you can tell he’s the one, because his name’s an anagram of ‘one’) is the one who has made the right choice, based on love, and also has someohow merged with the machines, so can lead the machines and the humans, out of the matrix and back into the new cleaned-up world. The threat to this is Smith.
[/quote]
WOAH! Now that would be a twist! However, the army of 250,000 sentinels digging towards Zion would seem to argue against your theory. If they showed up there and didn’t rain down death upon the inhabitants, I think the audience would be disappointed! Still, the Oracle did say, “The only thing I’m interested in is the future, and the only way we can get there is together.” Hmmm…
Does the Terminator perhaps make an appearance?
Not to be a contrarian, but I really liked Reloaded, although I do agree that there were too many tedious speeches, and the celebration of humanity music video could’ve been cut way shorter. I think the thing I enjoyed about it was that it captured my imagination intellectually. (Though I realize that’s not what most people generally go to the movies for; nevertheless, there were some pretty badass action sequences too – particularly the freeway chase.)
I also like the pivotol role of the ‘freedom of choice vs. determinism’ debate, as to me this seems to be the primary question of human existance in modern times (IE: do we really have any freedom, or is everything biologically/chemically determined? Should we bother talking to a shrink, or just pop a pill? As I note the large number of students who seem incapable of learning no matter how hard I try to teach them or even how hard they study, the question is particularly scary!)
Another thing I think was really interesting about the movie was that the prophecy turned out to be “just another mechanism of control”. That was a daring move on the writers’ part, I think, because the audience, being raised with similar religious underpinnings that have been played out repeatedly in various sagas (Dune being an example), wants and expects the prophecy to be true. As a matter of fact, I think the machine’s ruse is one of the reasons many viewers rejected the movie. (That and the discussion with Colonel Sanders that I had to watch twice to completely follow.) A lot of people felt exactly what Morpheus felt – that they’d been led along, betrayed, etc.
I also got a kick out of the facct that Smith (who in the last movie defined the human race as a virus) has now become a renegade self-replicating being bent on subverting the Matrix for his own purposes (IE, a computer virus!)
Here’s the review from The Hollywood Reporter:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2015802
I believe Spock comes back to life in this one…
The reviews so far have not been kind. Perhaps I was in error in thinking it couldn’t be worse than the second one.
Seen Revolutions last night and to keep it short it’s neither worst nor better than Reloaded. It has more action and less talk, the story is a bit ‘smoother’ but that’s about it, nothing really new, surprising or impressive - at least I never could get excited about it.
And all this superhero stuff - it gets worst, something we would expect from a Chinese Kung-Fu flick or a B-movie and the ending … terrible.
Neither Reloaded nor Revolutions will make it into my DVD collection then, unless they sell at a bargain price (which they probably will in a year or two).
A real shame, Matrix would have been a better ‘triology’ without part 2 & 3.
I disagree with Rascal. Revolutions was great. Better than Reloaded, but of course not as good as the first movie (that was too good).
They didn’t really answer allt he questions and pull all the loose ends together, but it was very entertaining. The big battle scene was fantastic and the fights worked. they were good without the staleness of some of the fights in Reloaded.
Brian
I expected it to be bad after reading all the negative, but it really wasn’t as bad as they say. I wouldn’t buy the DVD, but it wasn’t a waste of money. Not enough time was spent in the Matrix–I really like studying the details of the backgrounds, etc. There is more of an element of cheesiness in this one (machines love too). Don’t expect any new and breathtaking effects, although the computer graphics were very detailed. There was one new character in the movie, Charra, who seemed to be an homage to Pvt. Vasquez in Aliens. Does anyone agree?
Funny - a lot of people hated the ending, whereas I was very satisfied with it, other than that fake-looking sunrise. I mean, come on, they have the capacity to create such awesome special effects for the attack on Zion, but they can’t make an even slightly realistic-looking sunrise? By the way, did you notice that’s the first time we’ve ever seen the color blue in the Matrix?
I liked the ending because to me it made a lot more sense than the alternative, which would’ve been the humans somehow winning. Given what we saw of the machines in this movie, that would’ve been difficult to swallow. I also thought that Neo sacrificing himself was in line with the quasi-religious savior theme that’s been running throughout the story.
I did think Smith ran off at the mouth just TOO much in this film(particularly if you include his lines by way of Bane), and I wish the bit in the Matrix where they confront the Merovingian had been longer. Finally, I must ask this of the actress who plays Perciphone…are those REAL?
(SPOILERS)
Say what you want about George Lucas, at least he waited nearly twenty years (and until his fourth movie) before screwing over the franchise.
I thought The Matrix was one of the better science fiction films to come out in the last decade, but the second and third films are surprisingly – even shockingly – dull. How is it possible to go from such a beautiful piece of work to such crap in four short years? The Matrix is a near-perfect sci-fi film, lean and beautiful. The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions are video games with no sensible story and too many fucking philosophers playing actors. The Matrix had a perfect villain (agent Smith) who put you on the edge of your seat whenever he was on the screen; Reloaded and Revolutions have thousands of agent Smiths and they aren’t one-thousandth as exciting as the single one was in the first movie. The music in The Matrix was stirring; the music in the sequels is jarring.
To tell you the truth, I lost all interest in saving Zion when I discovered in Reloaded that it was run by the Berkeley City Council. At least I think it was the Berkeley City Council. Where else could they find so many old hippies? A sixty-year old blonde with dreadlocks who is the head of the council and looks like she penned The History of the Clitoris in Post-Modern Literature? An older black man in dreadlocks who looks like the fellow you might find slumped against the wall on a city street corner with his tin cup proffered out? That’s bad enough, but when they put Cornell West (the black Harvard professor who occassionally teaches and writes about philosophy when he’s not too busy rapping or acting) on the council, it was too much. When I saw that, I began to root for the machines digging down to Zion. At least we would be saved from the social philosophizing of the Berkeley City Council.
The action scenes in Revolutions are, in general, a slight improvement over Reloaded, but are still far duller than the original. The final fight between Smith and Neo is endless, listless, and sometimes even nonsensical. They first beat on each other in the street, then they beat on each other in some building that looks like the virtual dojo Neo first trained in the martial arts, then they beat on each other in the air, before they go back to the ground again to beat on each other some more. None of this beating is integral to the plot in any special way, although occasionally they stop beating each other to talk nonsensically at each other.
Compare that action scene to the famous and exciting fight of the first movie that took place in the subway station between the same two protaganists. There, the fight meant something. Neo’s confidence in himself is growing, and it shows when he chooses to stand and fight an indestructible agent rather than flee. That’s meaningful to the character arc of Neo in a way that none of the fighting is in Reloaded and Revolutions.
There are other problems with Reloaded and Revolutions. There are now too many characters in its plot. In Reloaded, we were introduced to Link as the new operator, and we were introduced to Link’s wife, and we were introduced to Link’s wife’s sister, and we were introduced to some kid who thinks of Neo as a savior, and we were introduced to Captain Niobe – none of whom we get to know very well. (Morpheus, once a major character, also has almost nothing to do in the third movie.) Yes, they all play a critical part in an action scene or two in Revolutions, but the producers of the film seem to have included them, so far as I can tell, mainly on the believe that extraneous black actors make their movie more soulful. There are many other minor characters in the film who have similar wasted roles, including the boxer Roy Jones.
But my biggest bitch with the two recent installments of the Matrix is what has been done to Trinity. In the first movie, Trinity was the finest female action character to ever grace the screen since Sigourney Weaver played Lt. Ellen Ripley in Aliens. She was a tough no-nonsense bitch, holding back on her emotions, never quite revealing what she was all about, but obviously vulnerable. In the Reloaded and Revolutions, she’s been so domesticated she might as well be wearing a polka-dot dress and apron. With the exception of a couple of scenes – one in Reloaded where she almost goes psycho on some Euro-trash whore who just wants to lock lips with Neo – Trinity’s only real role in the new movies is to look at Neo with loving eyes and coo at him. Frankly, even as a male chauvinist pig, I found it disgusting. I wanted the old S&M Trinity back in the movie; the role fits better with her wardrobe anyway.