Post by Harkovast on Dec 22, 2014 22:06:43 GMT
No one can be told why The Matrix Reloaded sucks, you have to see it for yourself....
But let's have a go anyway.
Everyone always has a go at George Lucas for completely ruining the Star Wars prequels and, by extension, their childhoods.
Well, the most influential show when I was a teenager wasn't Star Wars, it was The Matrix.
I'm not going to waste time telling you why The Matrix is awesome because you've almost certainly seen it and already know. I am also not going to recap the first film's plot or the characters. So if you don't know them, go back to the rock you live under, in the cave you live in, and watch the first movie. Presumably while snacking on the fish heads you eat, you troglodyte.
The rest of us are going to talk about the sequels.
Personally, one of the things I really liked about it was the ending. When the movie was over, everything had been wrapped up. All the loose ends had been covered and the story of an epic journey had been brought to a satisfying conclusion.
And then they announced two sequels.
I'm just going to talk about one of them here, because even though these are both unspeakably, unbelievably bad, they are bad in different, unique ways that require handling separately.
So, let me walk you through what can laughably called the plot to this thing, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
The film starts out with Trinity doing a big action sequence riding around on a motor bike and fighting people.
The film then immediately pisses me off by pulling that awful it-was-just-a-dream-so-don't-you-feel-stupid-for-being-invested-in-the-outcome gimmick.
The crew of Nebuchadnezzar mostly got killed last movie, so now we just have Morpheus, Neo, Trinity and the new guy Link who does all the computer operating for the team. Fun fact, the character Tank appeared to survive the first film but the actor had a falling out with the films creators, the Wachowski Brothers (now the Wachowski Brother and Sister...stay with me on this!) so they wrote him out and had him replaced.
Link is bland and boring as fuck but he is honestly one of the better characters because he actually manages to express any human emotions, unlike the boring pieces of wood everyone else seems to have devolved into. I swear that in the first film all these characters seemed cool, but now they just seem so lifeless and unemotional that it becomes a chore to look at them.
The good guys meet up with loads of other ship captains in The Matrix to discuss what to do. They talk about how there is an army of 250,000 sentinels coming to destroy the human city of Zion. I say talk about, because we aren't shown this army, but just get to hear some of the characters say that it is important.
Everyone says that in story telling you should "show, don't tell" but this movie disagrees! This is particularly odd, because the threat of this army we just got told about is the motivation for everything that happens in the movie.
The meeting is interrupted by some agents showing up.
Now, as we should all remember from the end of the last film, Neo became the One (see what they did with the name there?) and was finally powerful enough to battle the agents and destroy them.
So going into this fight scene, one might wonder why the agents would be any threat any more, since we now know Neo is basically Jesus and we've seen him destroy them almost casually.
So Neo starts fighting them, and though he is clearly more powerful than them, it seems like it is an actual fight for him to take them on, not just a casual walk over like we saw at the end of the last film.
The film justifies this by having Neo say-
"Hmmm, upgrades."
So there we have it, ladies and gents, the entire journey of the last film, the mission to become the One and save the human race, all rendered completely meaningless. His god-like control of The Matrix can now be countered by a software upgrade to the agents.
And so it begins...
Now it becomes clear that Neo is beating the agents, but everyone who saw the first film knows that killing agents is a waste of time as they just take over another human and reappear.
So Neo is not in any serious danger, and the agents are not in any serious danger...and then after beating them up Neo flies away. And that's the end of that.
It is at this point in the movie you also get the first inkling that the movie might be wasting your fucking time.
Pointless Scene You Could Skip Count- 1
Afterwards, Agent Smith shows up, thus FURTHER ruining the ending of the last film, because the whole climax was him being destroyed.
But now there are... (wait for it)...TWO of him!
DUN DUN DUR!
Yeah that really makes up for making the ending to one of my all time favourite movies meaningless, thanks for that. Totally worth it. (Does sarcasm work in text? Cause it totally wasn't worth it.)
Our heroes leave The Matrix and go to the last human city of Zion.
A lot of people were excited to finally see Zion after it was talked about so much in the first film, but I never wanted to. The reason is that everything in the real world in these films is run down, miserable and crappy looking, to contrast with how sleek and bad ass everything looks when they go in The Matrix.
So now we see Zion and it looks crappy run down and miserable. Big whoop.
Alright, credit where its due, there is one tiny bit that's cool where all the traffic control people who run the defences, telling ships when to land, are in a cool virtual reality thing where everything around them is white.
Things That I actually Liked Count- 1
In Zion is becomes clear that not everyone believes the prophecy and a lot of them think Morpheus is some kind of whacky extremist.
I think these scenes are important, because we need to mix it up a bit. We've already devoted a lot of attention to totally ruining Neo's character, so now we can get to work totally ruining Morpheus' character. He's gone from awesome sensei and guide to whacko cult leader.
These people must be the most hard core atheists ever because Morpheus literally has the Jesus for his religion who can do actual real miracles on demand!
But to be fair, all that prophecy stuff does turn out to be bollocks later...but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Morpheus gives a speech to the people of Zion in a big cave where he is really shouty and it's honestly not clear if it was supposed to be funny or not.
Then everyone in Zion has a big rave in the cave.
No, that's not just rhyming for the sake of it, they really do have a rave. They all jump around and get very sweaty to some dance music.
This is interspersed with scenes of Neo and Trinity shagging.
Why are we cutting between these two scenes? Are the scenes meaningful? Does one of them offer light on the other or provide a contrast to it? Of course not! Its just sweaty gross ravers and gross sex because they have those weird black plug sockets all over them (and Trinity and Neo look too alike, they could be brother and sister. Neo needs to learn that Luke Skywalker got special powers DESPITE the incest, not because of it!)
Late at night, Neo is out for a stroll when he has a chat with one of the Zion Ruling Council. They have an ASTOUNDINGLY boring conversation where the councillor says how strange it is that there are machines in Zion that are keeping the humans alive, but ones outside trying to kill them. Neo doesn't seem very impressed with this first year, philosophy student musings and in the end the councillor actually states that there is no point to anything he is saying.
Well that was helpful!
Pointless Scene You Could Skip Count- 2
My brother came up with an interesting theory about this speech, that it was really meant to imply that the council are in league with the machines and are betraying Zion. This might have been an interesting twist and would make a lot of sense with what we learn later.
So obviously that's completely wrong, we are just padding out the run time right now.
Meanwhile, in The Matrix...
Wait a minute, why do they keep sending other people in to The Matrix? Why don't they just send Neo every time? I mean, he is the One, who can beat agents who no one else can even fight.
Just send him every time, why put anyone else in danger?
The stupidity of sending others into harm's way becomes apparently when we see a couple of people from Zion in The Matrix (freed humans? What's the term for people running around who have been let in on the whole matrix secret thing?) getting chased by Agent Smith.
One of them escapes but the other one is caught by Agent Smith who uses a strange new power to turn the guy into another Agent Smith.
Now here is a really interesting bit. The newly created Smith picks up the phone that the humans were using to escape The Matrix. I completely missed the significance of this but apparently this is a hugely important revelation that Smith has now taken over a guy's body in the real world.
Didn't get that from the description I just wrote? I didn't get it from the FUCKING MOVIE!
The guy who gets changed is someone we've never seen before, so I didn't recognise him when he shows up in the real world acting all crazy.
He acts shifty and cuts himself...which Agent Smith doesn't do, so I didn't make any connection there.
Also why would Agent Smith want to be a human? Agent Smith hates humans! (It's the smell!) So to him, being in a human body would be literally the worst torture imaginable. But now he has done it to himself willingly?
Do I need to start another counter for characters totally ruined?
Alright, guess I do.
Characters ruined- 3
Neo goes to see the Oracle to find out what to do about the machine army we were told about (remember the machine army? Yeah, we're still worrying about those.)
When he gets there, there is a guy dressed in white called Seraph who is some kind of body guard for the Oracle. We never saw him in the previous film, so bunging him in now just seem awkward. Did she get a body guard in the mean time or something?
He starts fighting with Neo.
Why are they fighting you might ask?
Well after they are done he explains that you do not truly know someone till you have fought them.
No really, he says that.
Does that...does that mean he fought the Oracle? Cause she looks like an elderly black lady...so that would be kinda strange to watch.
Pointless Scene You Could Skip Count- 3
Neo chats with the Oracle for a bit and she tells him he has to find someone called "the Key-maker".
She doesn't really say why, but Neo seems happy to move the plot along.
Keep in mind that the audience now has no idea why the characters are doing what they are doing (neither do the characters) and will not have it explained to them until later in the movie.
She then departs and Agent Smith shows up.
He explains that he doesn't know why he has all these amazing new powers, but he wants to kill Neo...for some reason.
I guess because Neo blew him up?
Even though that seems to have made him more powerful.
So then loads more of Agent Smith show up and fight Neo.
Here we run into the same problem with the previous fight with Agents. Neo can clearly batter them all, but we know they can't be killed, so what's the point?
Neo keeps knocking them around and they keep jumping back up.
Then a ton more of them show up and he fights them even more.
He continues to batter them, so then even more of them show up and...
*yawn*
Wow, how did Matrix super kung-fu become so fucking boring?
This pointless fighting just goes on and on with no stakes, no sense that either side is getting anywhere.
Nothing is happening.
This violence means literally nothing.
At the end, Neo just flies away again.
We didn't learn anything, nothing was accomplished.
I find myself sighing in disappointment just typing all this out.
What's more, the special effects are so unrestrained that Neo starts to look like a bad PS2 game as his CGI clone leaps around spin-kicking fake-looking Agent Smiths to the interest of no one.
Alright, now like the film makers, I've decided to break this up (let's hope I don't have to pad the review with some fight scenes!)
Coming up in part two...
A pretentious Frenchman.
Lipstick on a dick.
Were-wolves.
A cake that gives you an orgasm if you eat it.
I can't wait!
But let's have a go anyway.
Everyone always has a go at George Lucas for completely ruining the Star Wars prequels and, by extension, their childhoods.
Well, the most influential show when I was a teenager wasn't Star Wars, it was The Matrix.
I'm not going to waste time telling you why The Matrix is awesome because you've almost certainly seen it and already know. I am also not going to recap the first film's plot or the characters. So if you don't know them, go back to the rock you live under, in the cave you live in, and watch the first movie. Presumably while snacking on the fish heads you eat, you troglodyte.
The rest of us are going to talk about the sequels.
Personally, one of the things I really liked about it was the ending. When the movie was over, everything had been wrapped up. All the loose ends had been covered and the story of an epic journey had been brought to a satisfying conclusion.
And then they announced two sequels.
I'm just going to talk about one of them here, because even though these are both unspeakably, unbelievably bad, they are bad in different, unique ways that require handling separately.
So, let me walk you through what can laughably called the plot to this thing, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
The film starts out with Trinity doing a big action sequence riding around on a motor bike and fighting people.
The film then immediately pisses me off by pulling that awful it-was-just-a-dream-so-don't-you-feel-stupid-for-being-invested-in-the-outcome gimmick.
The crew of Nebuchadnezzar mostly got killed last movie, so now we just have Morpheus, Neo, Trinity and the new guy Link who does all the computer operating for the team. Fun fact, the character Tank appeared to survive the first film but the actor had a falling out with the films creators, the Wachowski Brothers (now the Wachowski Brother and Sister...stay with me on this!) so they wrote him out and had him replaced.
Link is bland and boring as fuck but he is honestly one of the better characters because he actually manages to express any human emotions, unlike the boring pieces of wood everyone else seems to have devolved into. I swear that in the first film all these characters seemed cool, but now they just seem so lifeless and unemotional that it becomes a chore to look at them.
The good guys meet up with loads of other ship captains in The Matrix to discuss what to do. They talk about how there is an army of 250,000 sentinels coming to destroy the human city of Zion. I say talk about, because we aren't shown this army, but just get to hear some of the characters say that it is important.
Everyone says that in story telling you should "show, don't tell" but this movie disagrees! This is particularly odd, because the threat of this army we just got told about is the motivation for everything that happens in the movie.
The meeting is interrupted by some agents showing up.
Now, as we should all remember from the end of the last film, Neo became the One (see what they did with the name there?) and was finally powerful enough to battle the agents and destroy them.
So going into this fight scene, one might wonder why the agents would be any threat any more, since we now know Neo is basically Jesus and we've seen him destroy them almost casually.
So Neo starts fighting them, and though he is clearly more powerful than them, it seems like it is an actual fight for him to take them on, not just a casual walk over like we saw at the end of the last film.
The film justifies this by having Neo say-
"Hmmm, upgrades."
So there we have it, ladies and gents, the entire journey of the last film, the mission to become the One and save the human race, all rendered completely meaningless. His god-like control of The Matrix can now be countered by a software upgrade to the agents.
And so it begins...
Now it becomes clear that Neo is beating the agents, but everyone who saw the first film knows that killing agents is a waste of time as they just take over another human and reappear.
So Neo is not in any serious danger, and the agents are not in any serious danger...and then after beating them up Neo flies away. And that's the end of that.
It is at this point in the movie you also get the first inkling that the movie might be wasting your fucking time.
Pointless Scene You Could Skip Count- 1
Afterwards, Agent Smith shows up, thus FURTHER ruining the ending of the last film, because the whole climax was him being destroyed.
But now there are... (wait for it)...TWO of him!
DUN DUN DUR!
Yeah that really makes up for making the ending to one of my all time favourite movies meaningless, thanks for that. Totally worth it. (Does sarcasm work in text? Cause it totally wasn't worth it.)
Our heroes leave The Matrix and go to the last human city of Zion.
A lot of people were excited to finally see Zion after it was talked about so much in the first film, but I never wanted to. The reason is that everything in the real world in these films is run down, miserable and crappy looking, to contrast with how sleek and bad ass everything looks when they go in The Matrix.
So now we see Zion and it looks crappy run down and miserable. Big whoop.
Alright, credit where its due, there is one tiny bit that's cool where all the traffic control people who run the defences, telling ships when to land, are in a cool virtual reality thing where everything around them is white.
Things That I actually Liked Count- 1
In Zion is becomes clear that not everyone believes the prophecy and a lot of them think Morpheus is some kind of whacky extremist.
I think these scenes are important, because we need to mix it up a bit. We've already devoted a lot of attention to totally ruining Neo's character, so now we can get to work totally ruining Morpheus' character. He's gone from awesome sensei and guide to whacko cult leader.
These people must be the most hard core atheists ever because Morpheus literally has the Jesus for his religion who can do actual real miracles on demand!
But to be fair, all that prophecy stuff does turn out to be bollocks later...but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Morpheus gives a speech to the people of Zion in a big cave where he is really shouty and it's honestly not clear if it was supposed to be funny or not.
Then everyone in Zion has a big rave in the cave.
No, that's not just rhyming for the sake of it, they really do have a rave. They all jump around and get very sweaty to some dance music.
This is interspersed with scenes of Neo and Trinity shagging.
Why are we cutting between these two scenes? Are the scenes meaningful? Does one of them offer light on the other or provide a contrast to it? Of course not! Its just sweaty gross ravers and gross sex because they have those weird black plug sockets all over them (and Trinity and Neo look too alike, they could be brother and sister. Neo needs to learn that Luke Skywalker got special powers DESPITE the incest, not because of it!)
Late at night, Neo is out for a stroll when he has a chat with one of the Zion Ruling Council. They have an ASTOUNDINGLY boring conversation where the councillor says how strange it is that there are machines in Zion that are keeping the humans alive, but ones outside trying to kill them. Neo doesn't seem very impressed with this first year, philosophy student musings and in the end the councillor actually states that there is no point to anything he is saying.
Well that was helpful!
Pointless Scene You Could Skip Count- 2
My brother came up with an interesting theory about this speech, that it was really meant to imply that the council are in league with the machines and are betraying Zion. This might have been an interesting twist and would make a lot of sense with what we learn later.
So obviously that's completely wrong, we are just padding out the run time right now.
Meanwhile, in The Matrix...
Wait a minute, why do they keep sending other people in to The Matrix? Why don't they just send Neo every time? I mean, he is the One, who can beat agents who no one else can even fight.
Just send him every time, why put anyone else in danger?
The stupidity of sending others into harm's way becomes apparently when we see a couple of people from Zion in The Matrix (freed humans? What's the term for people running around who have been let in on the whole matrix secret thing?) getting chased by Agent Smith.
One of them escapes but the other one is caught by Agent Smith who uses a strange new power to turn the guy into another Agent Smith.
Now here is a really interesting bit. The newly created Smith picks up the phone that the humans were using to escape The Matrix. I completely missed the significance of this but apparently this is a hugely important revelation that Smith has now taken over a guy's body in the real world.
Didn't get that from the description I just wrote? I didn't get it from the FUCKING MOVIE!
The guy who gets changed is someone we've never seen before, so I didn't recognise him when he shows up in the real world acting all crazy.
He acts shifty and cuts himself...which Agent Smith doesn't do, so I didn't make any connection there.
Also why would Agent Smith want to be a human? Agent Smith hates humans! (It's the smell!) So to him, being in a human body would be literally the worst torture imaginable. But now he has done it to himself willingly?
Do I need to start another counter for characters totally ruined?
Alright, guess I do.
Characters ruined- 3
Neo goes to see the Oracle to find out what to do about the machine army we were told about (remember the machine army? Yeah, we're still worrying about those.)
When he gets there, there is a guy dressed in white called Seraph who is some kind of body guard for the Oracle. We never saw him in the previous film, so bunging him in now just seem awkward. Did she get a body guard in the mean time or something?
He starts fighting with Neo.
Why are they fighting you might ask?
Well after they are done he explains that you do not truly know someone till you have fought them.
No really, he says that.
Does that...does that mean he fought the Oracle? Cause she looks like an elderly black lady...so that would be kinda strange to watch.
Pointless Scene You Could Skip Count- 3
Neo chats with the Oracle for a bit and she tells him he has to find someone called "the Key-maker".
She doesn't really say why, but Neo seems happy to move the plot along.
Keep in mind that the audience now has no idea why the characters are doing what they are doing (neither do the characters) and will not have it explained to them until later in the movie.
She then departs and Agent Smith shows up.
He explains that he doesn't know why he has all these amazing new powers, but he wants to kill Neo...for some reason.
I guess because Neo blew him up?
Even though that seems to have made him more powerful.
So then loads more of Agent Smith show up and fight Neo.
Here we run into the same problem with the previous fight with Agents. Neo can clearly batter them all, but we know they can't be killed, so what's the point?
Neo keeps knocking them around and they keep jumping back up.
Then a ton more of them show up and he fights them even more.
He continues to batter them, so then even more of them show up and...
*yawn*
Wow, how did Matrix super kung-fu become so fucking boring?
This pointless fighting just goes on and on with no stakes, no sense that either side is getting anywhere.
Nothing is happening.
This violence means literally nothing.
At the end, Neo just flies away again.
We didn't learn anything, nothing was accomplished.
I find myself sighing in disappointment just typing all this out.
What's more, the special effects are so unrestrained that Neo starts to look like a bad PS2 game as his CGI clone leaps around spin-kicking fake-looking Agent Smiths to the interest of no one.
Alright, now like the film makers, I've decided to break this up (let's hope I don't have to pad the review with some fight scenes!)
Coming up in part two...
A pretentious Frenchman.
Lipstick on a dick.
Were-wolves.
A cake that gives you an orgasm if you eat it.
I can't wait!