Something I wish I could do is go back and see The Matrix again for the first time. On a big screen. That would involve some kind of amnesia ray, and unfortunately we only have two types of those. One is has a caliber rating and works by destroying your memories with very fast-moving pieces of hot lead, while the other is likely best wielded by Icepick Freeman. The point is this: The Matrix, when I first saw it, got so many things so right that it was impossible not to love it. The well-choreographed fight scenes had me leaving the cinema feeling not aggressive but powerful, like I could punch through steel and jump six metres in the air. I had rock music flowing through my veins and the whole world moved in slow motion. I could have dodged bullets if the need arose.
What got to me most about The Matrix, though, were the ideas. There's this whole world created as a thin disguise to keep a human population alive and deluded. When Morpheus told Neo that his eyes hurt "because you've never used them before", I got chills. Of course, a human body actually makes a lousy battery, and you still need to feed it. I've heard the theory advanced that keeping humans captive in this world is their revenge for being forced to store and display terabytes of pornography to spotty teenagers and sad middle-aged men, not for power generation. Whatever their motivation, it was done.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - I don't know how much I knew in advance about the movie.
PPS - Probably very little.
4 comments:
I know exactly how you feel. I didn't see it on the big screen the first time - however. Two of my guy friends got me to watch it, prefacing it 'Now, if you don't understand what's happening, we'll stop it'.
Fools.
They kept stopping the movie and asking if I got it - and I wanted to slap them and tell them to just keep it going because I got it and it was AWESOME!
I also felt the same way in 'Minority Report'. The theories of justice and the science behind it really made me go 'Wow!'. And I'm an action fan to my very core, so all the running and chashing was fantastic.
Those are two movies I wish I could see again for the first time.
Word. The only problem of course is that it was so amazingly awesome that everyone loved it and it was spoofed to death. Then everyone became sick of it.
The two sequels that we thought we wanted didn't help much either.
Agreed on the spoof point. Copying awesome things badly is not humour, and changing the projectiles in a bullet-dodge spoof doesn't make it funny. I'm glad we seem to be over the other side of the Matrix spoof hill now.
As for the sequels, I'm one of the two people in the world who rather liked them, but I do think the action scenes were far less engaging than in the first movie, simply because the original used real people to do the stunts. The sequels used computer-generated stuntpeople very frequently and lost all credibility on that front.
I'm with John on the second and third movie, although when viewed back to back (not done lightly!) it is a pretty damn good story line.
Just remember, spoofs shouldn't make you think less of the original, merely that the spoofs need to be exterminated swiftly and painfully.
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