a tale of sound and fury...

[egypturnash]

I found myself conscious annoyingly early. So I decided to go see 'Matrix Reloaded'.

It didn't leave me pissed off the way 'Phantom Menace' did. But it sure wasn't a good movie.

Opening titles (with no actor lists, just two green-shaded corporate IDs and the signature falling-symbols stuff). Action sequence, talking heads with thesauri, action sequence, curiously boring rave intercut with sex, more sesquipedalian types making proclamations in stentorian tones, poorly lit CG robots you could barely read, pompous talking head with comedy French accent, annoyingly inertialess kung-fu, lengthy but oddly dull car chase, reference to the plot of the videogame tie-in, conversation with the God of Circumlocution Architect of the Matrix, Kenau Reeves doing his Christopher Reeves imitation (except he only had to fly through the city instead of around the world), and then GO SEE THE NEXT MOVIE.

Oh, and then some really obnoxious music over the credits, then a trailer for said next movie, mostly consisting of The One and The Many (that is, the viral Agent Smith) running at each other on a rainy highway.

There you go; you've just seen 'Matrix Reloaded' in however long you took to read this instead of the hour and a half or so it takes to watch it.

The movie started with a bang, but the Zion stuff just brought it to a screeching halt. It never really recovered. Plus, the part of Neo was for the most part played by a 3D model with Kenau's phiz texmapped on the front. Action sequences started with no reason than 'gee, it's been a while since any ass was kicked' - the battle with the guy guarding the Oracle was particularly blatant. "You can never know someone until you have fought them." I rolled my eyes.

A lot of the action sequences had things that bothered me besides their suddenness. I didn't notice any rendering problems, though I know they were largely computer creations; what bugged me continually was the motion. Black-clad characters would make a sudden reverse of motion without even an anticipation to make the move halfway believable. I don't expect everything to obey the laws of physics, but I expect them to obey caricatured laws of physics. And they often didn't even do that. This is the animator's curse: weird motion jumps out at you, like it or not. Both the courtyard Neo-vs-SmithSmithSmithSmith battle and the castle foyer Neo-vs-Merivogian's Minions fight had a lot of this. SmithSmithSmithSmith was worse, but there was a point where one Minion leapt into the air in slow-mo, displayed absolutely no hang time, and descended in slow-mo. "Wrong", said the back of my brain. "Needs more drawings at the top there."

The candy the Oracle gave Neo was the Red Pill. Ooooooh. Wake up, Alice! It's all a dream and I don't like the way Charles is looking at you!

Someone needs to take away the Walcholski's thesaurus. Every "wise" character demonstrated their "wisdom" by saying essentially nothing, wrapped round with endless sentences of polysyllabic words. They droned on and on with no rhythm, no subtelty, no rhythm, no texture, no punch. Sure, big words are great, but so are sharp, quick stabs of them. Listening to the dialogue was painful, and makes me want to swear off any words of more than two syllables for the next five months.

Comments

[tabriscoonz.livejournal.com]

yay. I'm always happy to hear that other people hated it for the same reasons I did.
You forgot to add that everyone wore sunglasses. "Hey guys next meeting is in a dank low lighted sewer! It's about sponser money, not being able to see damn it."

And the Zion counsel looked like a CD signing for Parliment.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

The computer work wasn't that impressive to me. Too often during the action sequences, I thought I was watching a particularly bad game of Tekken.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

[cut and pasted from the last time I talked about this. nearly in its entirety.]

I found myself waiting for each fight scene to hurry up and end... what I was waiting for, I don't know. I went, there were pictures on the screen and I watched them. That's all I can find to say about this movie. Almost but not quite a waste of time.

I found myself waiting for each fight scene to hurry up and end...

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

Yes! That has to be the one sentence that best sums up my feelings about the movie.

Re: I found myself waiting for each fight scene to hurry up and end...

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's because everything is CG, or because it's so smooth, but that could be a factor. I was mentally comparing the car chase to the ones in Ronin. The Matrix movies seem to really want to be a Hong Kong action picture, except that the action in HK pictures, staged and choreographed from one shot to the next as it is, is in the world of real things, and it shows.

I really wanted to like this movie. I wanted to be thrilled by it and have it carry me away, but the few moments when it did, it only reminded me of my personal fantasies, which I've had long before anything called The Matrix reared its head. I've rarely written them out because they don't stand on their own, something this movie demonstrates.

There was just a lot of nothing going on in this film.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

The movie was mostly padding.

It should have been the first half hour, at most, of the sequel. With whatever they do in the third movie as the rest of it (probably shorn of its padding). But instead it had to be a trilogy. If it had been a mere first act, all that dialogue pregnant with polysyllabic verbiage would have been pared down to its essence, and been far better for it.

Funny; one of the trailers before 'Matrix Reloaded' was for 'Terminator 3'. The voiceover was something about "one man who can save the world from machines'. "Wait", I remarked to myself. "Isn't that the movie I'm about to see?"

And now I kinda want to see 'Ronin' again.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I'm wary of taking a chance on T3 because I'm worried it'll be more of this (or that I'm too jaded to watch these kinds of films anymore). Shallow movies poison other shallow movies. I've seriously asked myself if this summer represents the pinnacle of action films and that people will start to lose interest from now on... but I know the average citizen laps up this shit, so it's not likely.

I've got the disc, you've got the player.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

It seems as though the commoners aren't pleased with the movie, either: http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/26/sprj.cas03.box.office.ap/index.html.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Fuck, I saw a little bit of Ronin at work, and now I want to see the whole thing. is it holy-shit good?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It was pretty good. Actual plot, actual acting on the characters, a couple of complex action scenes including a car chase going the wrong way up crowded freeways. Low on the blatant effects, but the story is interesting enough that this is not an issue at all.

[zrath.livejournal.com]

From what I remember from seeing the late John Frankenheimer (the director) talking about "Ronin", he said that the car chases where done completely live and without any CGI of any kind.
Considering this is the guy who did "Grand Prix", I believe him.
He also directed, among many other cool flicks, "The Manchurian Candidate", which is an incredible piece of work.
Well worth tracking down.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

*nod* Everything was live, and it shows. But Peggy doesn't have to track down the disc, as I own it. :)

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

It wasn't a total loss for me. The things that got me going were Neo's opening dream--the first shot of a known character being of their vinyl-clad rear is always a Good Thing^TM--seeing 50+ Agent Smiths onscreen (which probably could only be topped by seeing 50+ Aragorns onscreen), the Matrix 6.0 bombshell from the Architect (the Ones have all been beta-testers!), seeing Morpheus wielding a katana, the tribal cave-rave music, and a bunch of stuff I'll probably remember my appreciation for when I watch it again in the cheap theatre. Also, I like the way that Trinity has more of a personality of her own in this incarnation. She was my favorite character in the first movie, but I found her a bit stilted and weak, not really showing the strength of something that other characters seemed to respect her for; I got the impression that she was a lot more solid in herself in Reloaded. Excellent.

But yeah; Reloaded is your typical second-in-the-trilogy fare; I'm expecting Revolutions to blow both 1 and 2 out of the water, as I've come to expect from trilogies.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I would have to agree.

I found myself waiting not only for each fight scene to end, but for each dialogue scene to end. I think I was waiting for a plot to happen. It kept on getting interrupted by excess verbiage and ass-kicking.

I may have also been waiting for Neo to show any hint of an internal life so I could care about him and his problems. He had one in the first movie - he was being dumbfounded by both the Horrible Truth of the Real World, and by his amazing new powers. Here, he was just this CG puppet dealing out ass-kickings.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I've heard people say that it wasn't as good as the first Matrix movie, but I was never impressed by that one, either. I'm not just saying that because I got suckered by the new one. I think I got to the stage where I thought the first one was 'neat.' When I came to realize that everybody was in adulation of the film, I felt disbelief... the backstory was just terrible, and as I've said elsewhere, the action bits aren't anything I haven't been visualizing for years.

But I will admit that the action parts were very well-done and in that respect the movie was solid... so was the production design. Reloaded felt like a step backwards in this regard.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't mind seeing the Wachowski brothers direct a movie with a little restraint, or a better plot.

[(Anonymous)]

>Every "wise" character demonstrated their "wisdom" by saying
>essentially nothing, wrapped round with endless sentences of
>polysyllabic words. They droned on and on with no rhythm, no
>subtelty, no rhythm, no texture, no punch.

In one of his Father Brown Mysteries, G.K.Chesterton had this to say about Mystics and Mystagogues:

"True mystics don't hide their mysteries, they reveal them. And after you've seen it and walked around it and touched it, it's still a Mystery. Mystagogues hide their mysteries away under veils and incantations and circumlocutions, and once you pull the veils away, you find only a platitude." Or a Matrix 2.

(From several-year-old memory; I don't have my reference materials handy when I'm posting these.)