Matrix Reloaded Kung Fu (spoilers? maybe.)

[Eternal]

I had just watched Twin Warriors (Tai Chi Master) before seeing Reloaded, and now I’m having a hard time keeping the two seperate in my mind. The most obvious reasons are that Yuen Woo Ping’s rather distinctive flair was at work in Reloaded as well, and there was exstensive wire work in both.

But here’s a question: I seem to have it in my head that there was a lot of kung fu-ish lines in this movie. Am I wrong, or at some point did someone yell at Neo that he would “destroy his skill”?

Also: someone said a while back that this would be the first movie to have convincing CGI replicas of people in fight scenes. It may well have CGI men I was fooled by, but I sure did notice several obvious CGI people. As far as I can tell, the FX in the movie are hardly cutting-edge in terms of anything but their scope and expense.

[that.sound.again]

Those obvious CGI fellas… where were they? In the first fight with the 100 Smiths?

That scene was entirely cgi. All of it, including the set, Neo, and all the Smiths. No way they could do camera work like that in the real world.

[Achernar]

When have you seen a CGI human look anywhere near that good? Just curious; I may have missed something. Aliens, animals, and monsters are all easy to do, but having a human not look cartoonish, or at least less so than previously, is pretty impressive IMHO.

Nobody yelled at Neo that they would “destroy his skill”. I can’t even think of a line close to that.

[that.sound.again]

“So, you have some skill.” - french guy in the chateau battle after Neo stops the bullet.

One line that made me laugh out loud was the “You do not truly know a man until you’ve fought him.” statement by the Seraph (Oracle’s bodyguard). What a load of crap!

[Silentgoldfish]

*Originally posted by that.sound.again *
**Those obvious CGI fellas… where were they? In the first fight with the 100 Smiths?

That scene was entirely cgi. All of it, including the set, Neo, and all the Smiths. No way they could do camera work like that in the real world. **

Nope! There were bits at the end that were but most of the lead up was Reeves and stuntmen with similiar builds to Weaving and digital masks.

[El_Elvis_Rojo]

It wasn’t until Neo pulled out the pole that the scene became a CGI fest. And then, it wasn’t so much the people that looked fake to me as it was the clothes. Neo’s coat just looked rubbery to me, and people lost all definition in their elbows. Still, it was a pretty damn good fight scene.
Slight hijack, perhaps, but anyone know what it takes to physically kill an agent? Shooting, stabbing, crushing…these are all pretty well defined, but there were a couple of Smiths Neo hit with a steel pole hard enough to fling them a hundred feet into a brick wall, who simply got back up. What’s it take to drop one of these guys?

[that.sound.again]

You might be right about when the CGI takes over completely. I read this Wired article and thought the transition took place early in the scene and that everything was motion captured; now that i read it again, I see it’s not very specific about when this happens.

Any other good articles on the subject?

Fans will wear out their remotes replaying the scene on DVD, but what they won’t see, even riding the Pause button, is a transition that happens early on. When Neo and Agent Smith walk into the courtyard, they are the real Reeves and Weaving. But by the time the melee is in full effect, everyone and everything on the screen is computer-generated - including the perspective of the camera itself, steering at 2,000 miles per hour and screaming through arcs that would tear any physical camera apart.

The process of creating multiple Smiths was fairly straightforward. First Gaeta and his crew turned a 250,000-square-foot hangar in Alameda into the biggest motion-capture dojo in the world. The punishment was relentless for Yuen Woo-Ping’s army of black belts; between the sequels and the videogame, they did hundreds of takes a day. Buffed out with CG muscle, tailored in simulated suits, and animated with collision data obtained from digital crash-test dummies, the torsos of Yuen’s warriors were transformed in postproduction into wave upon wave of attacking Hugo Weaving clones.