I know, I was just expecting it to me a minority rather than a majority.
First of all, I thought the Matrix was the best directed action movie I had seen in years and had some exceptional action sequences (though some borrowed a bit too heavily from certain Hong Kong action films I had seen). After years of action sequences that were “less than three second shot of an action; jump cut to another action that isn’t necessarily connected to the previous action; repeat every second and a half” the Matrix was a breath of fresh air.
They flushed all that good will down the toilet with the story, though. Most of the other people have already made the appropriate complaints, but the thing that killed the movie for me was the lobby scene. Our “heroes” just walked into a building and killed over twenty innocent people. They didn’t have to do that, they could have jumped from rooftop to rooftop to get access. They didn’t need to walk in the front door with an arsenal and just kill police officers doing their job.
The first time I saw it, I really liked it. The second time I saw it, I thought it was a two-hour TV commercial for sunglasses and cell phones.
But even if it was one of my all time favorite movies, I would still be sick of all of the crap it spawned and the damage it inflicted on every other American action movie that came after it. Fight scenes are easily dated as being pre- and post-Matrix.
But what really pissed me off was the Wired list of the 20 Best Science Fiction films of all time, visible here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/scifi.html You will note that the Matrix is number 3, one slot above the “proverbial good science fiction film” 2001: A Space Odessey. WTF where they thinking? Take Matrix off the list entirely and replace it with Forbidden Planet.
They were not aliens. There were no aliens in “The Matrix”.
As was explained in the movie, the this was tried. It was a failure. The humans could not thrive in that environment - they needed a certain amount of imperfection.
Big letdown. The obvious flaws (like using humans to generate energy) were all over the place. Doesn’t anybody in Hollywood know how heavy 30 secs. of ammo is? Since I already knew how filmakers did the hanging action shots, they were old hat to me. I also had seen Omega Doom, so the styles were an obvious rip off of that. I’ve never seen a Matrix fan explain away the similar looks of the two films.
In short, 2 ZikZak commercials short of a Max Headroom episode.
To say nothing of the fact that given the details of how you get into the Matrix, there’s no way Cipher could have even been in that restaurant without another crew member there to load the program, hook him up, unhook him, etc. Assuming he could have loaded the program and plugged himself in without other crew members around to notice, how did he get out again by himself?
Yeah, I liked it the first time, couldn’t believe how obvious it all was the 2nd time. My favorite scene is when Morpheus says his clever line about humans being reduced to batteries, and when he holds the battery up, there’s a loud bell on the soundtrack, in case you missed the deep, deep meaning there. :rolleyes:
“Do you think my speed and strength have anything to do with my muscles in here?”
I still have friends who believe it’s the greatest movie ever made, refusing to listen when I bring up any of the aforementioned complaints. Personally I don’t think it’s the steaming pile of crap like some have made it out to be, but neither is it Citizen Kane. When those friends made all kinds of comments like, “it really makes you wonder about life,” I responded that it didn’t really make me wonder. The only scene like that is where Mouse (hacker kid) is suggesting why everything tastes like chicken. Unfortunately, everything doesn’t. Maybe my friends are all secretly stoners.
Way overated and vapid. Must see for the talks at movies crowd.
“Whoa, dude!”
Ah, it’s so refreshing to see some intelligent points being made about this film, the chief one being that it is terrible. The two things that bothered me the most were:
-
The previously mentioned “good guys kill innocent people” sequence. I couldn’t believe the writers would be either too dumb to notice or too callous to care about the heroes of their movie basically doing a “Columbine” on innocent cops. It’s creepy, really – sort of like they were saying, “Hey, what if these guys who go on shooting sprees in OUR world aren’t really murderous maniacs, but misunderstood geeks who are fighting a secret battle to save the world?” Do we really want movies that appeal to that mindset?
-
At the climax we find out that the good guys can actually CREATE physical objects inside the Matrix. And this ability would basically give them unlimited power, right? Uh-huh. Never mind what an incredibly lucky break THAT was . . . what I want to know is, couldn’t they at least come up with something creative? You can make anything you want out of thin air, and what’s your plan to defeat the bad guys?
“Guns. Lots of guns.”
Way to go, Keanu!
Also related: if the bad guys created the entire virtual world, can’t they program that world to be impervious to virtual bullets that were themselves programmed into existence by some hackers? The makers of the Matrix world can’t override the commands of the invading humans?
Anyway, you get the idea: the movie doth suck righteously, amazing special effects aside. If I see the sequels, it will be on DVD, to look at the purty pictures while trying to ignore the Swiss cheese storyline.
:rolleyes:
Just a quick thing to throw in here…
Keenau Reeves wooden acting was perfect for the blank slate character, as stated above. But would you have rather seen (or think he could even pull it off) Will Smith as Neo? That’s right, Big Willy turned down the roll. Could you imagine the music video for that? Rapping about “my man morpheus showing me some fun, a girl named Trinity hot as the sun, and theses evil dudes called agents right? trying to hold me back from being the one. but they cant stop me man, its my destiny, oracle told me dat. im the fastest they is, i be dodgeing the bullets, etc etc”
Plus Keenau’s natural stupidity helped play with the fact that he cant figure out Trinity. The Oracle said so, "not too bright though.’
I liked it OK the first time, though I had serious problems with some of the plotting - I enjoyed it on the level I enjoy most movies made from comic books, they are an interesting diversion but can’t be taken seriously.
On subsequent viewings I started liking it less. The pacing is horrible, there is too much redundancy in the explanations of what the matrix is, and the lack of depth in the characters becomes more and more evident. Now I find it very annoying.
Meh. I already made my opinions on The Matrix known in this thread, which was created in response to my comments in this thread.
The comparison to Plato’s allegory of the cave must be in the “How to Defend The Matrix Manual for Fanboys”, because it’s in the first thread linked above.
“waltermittyisms”
eh??
I’ve posted this before, in an older thread, but it’s the only movie in which I have ever fallen asleep in a theatre. Well…nodded off. Woke up…nodded off…woke up…
What little I saw wasn’t keeping me interested, and I think Keanu Reeves is a no-talent halfwit, so, count me in as one who didn’t much care for this movie.
And Keanu coming up with a good plan would have made suspension of disbelief easier? 
I didn’t see the movie until a roommate rented it. He found my near-hysterical laughter (especially during the “deep” bits) inappropriate. I would still say that as long as you consider it a comedy, it’s not unwatchable. Not good, but not unwatchable.
“There is no plot.”
I might have enjoyed it if I had seen it before getting involved in Jack L Chalker’s Wonderland Gambit (catch-phrase: “everything you think you know is wrong”). As it was, I spent too much time thinking what could have been done with the concept.
Um, yeah! That’s right.
:backs away from RickJay:
Yeah, I mean, did you see that one where Keanu did Shakespeare? Yeah, that was totally AWESOME!
:far, far away:
I mean, some people say he’s wooden, but that’s like, an insult to balsa, am I right?
:confident that anyone who thinks Keanu is an actor thinks I just complimented him:
And that thing he did in The Matrix? No way man, he didn’t suck. That part was written for Keanu. Yeah, they needed a hero who was, like, the least common denum . . . deman . . . oh yeah, the least common denominator. Yeah, that’s it! He’s the least common denominator! Only, he knows kung-fu!
:drops sarcasm, goes to bed:
Well, to begin with I enjoyed the movie. I consider it one of my favorites. Is it deep? I don’t know, probably not taken as a whole. Is it good fodder for extrapolating on the premise of what defines ‘reality’ over a few pints of Guinness? Sure…
A variation of this has been mentioned a few times in this thread. I did not have a problem with the “innocent” casualties in the film for two reasons.
1.) We are told early in the film my Morpheus that they do not take anyone out of the Matrix beyond a certain age as they cannot adjust to “the real world”. So essentially, those “innocents” are in a sense already nothing more than, and never will be anything other than batteries. Harsh? Yes, but it is the world in which the characters live and die.
2.) Considering number 1, and considering that the physical manifestation of being “cops” is nothing more than a fallacy that gets shot - it is no loss nor reason for concern. Hey, it is a tough world that the movie presents. A world that has been this way for centuries.
They’ll never be removed from the Matrix, what they are is nothing but a power source, and the death of a few (okay, a lot) should not be of much concern to those free.
I do not understand the objection to this. Yes, all the characters (Morpheus, Trinity, Cipher, Mouse, etc.) have an ability to create or alter the reality of the Matrix. Thus leaping from tall building to tall building and other fun stuff. The Matrix itself is nothing more than created physical objects. From the clothes to the street lights to the sunshine, etc. All created from nothing. The bonus for Neo is the ability to manipulate the program at levels beyond what any other human (or agent) can do. It doesn’t seem like a lucky break to me, but a logical extension of the system presented in the movie.
Now, as for using guns… what would you have Neo do? A flying flame breathing green dragon to gobble up agents? Sta-Puff Marshmallow Man? Seems to me that it matches convention for the time-period constructs of the Matrix.
Hmmm… the Bill & Ted’s solution!
:rolleyes: