Unless you’re near one of the cinemas in Australia (and maybe in the US too? I don’t know) that’s showing all nine of them as a package. Apparently it’s only for this weekend, though, so other Australian Dopers have about 10 hours to try to catch a screening.
I just saw them in the cinema yesterday, here in Melbourne. Visually (and aurally - there was some freaky surround sound going on) very impressive on the big screen.
I saw all nine in Cinemas of Friday.
Highly reccomended, completely different experience.
The whole point of 2nd Ren is that its anime and has its own a particular style. Its more meant to be a parable rather than an accurate historical account.
There are dozens of things I could point out that require massive suspension of disbelief but are there for a symbolic point.
Also: The original matrix used power as a throwaway line and they are pretty much stuck with it. I dont think its meant to be that major a plot point.
What I still cant figure out is what the child was doing at the end, playing in the snow? Was the child in the real world and being captured by agents or was he in the dream world?
I was pretty disappointed by it. I thought the whole point of these shorts was to present new information about the history of the whole thing. There wasn’t any new information in this one - it was just a dramatization of stuff we already knew. I don’t like anime anyway, so if I’m going to watch it, I want more of a payoff than that.
I think that someone who doesn’t like Anime going into The Animatrix is a bit like someone who doesn’t like action films going into The Matrix. If you do enjoy it, you probably won’t like it for the same reason that 99% of people do.
There is an alternate theory about the battery thing. The theory goes that the human rebels have it all wrong. The humans are kept harmless and docile. Instead of eliminating them en masse, they contained them and then gave them a subjective utopia. The humans hated this reality and so the machines re-wrote the software and gave them a reality that had what they crave: Violence and pain.
The rebels thinking that the machines are using them to power themselves is just a lack of understanding on their part. They may have found a device that collects power on the pods and made that conclusion, but odds are that any such device is just used to help power the pod and that the “energy harvesting” motive is a superstition on the part of the future humans primitive (mis)understandings of how things work.