Posted by Baron Greenback [198.26.132.101 - WCS1.NORFOLK.NIPR.MIL] on 16 May 2003 at 00.15.15 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: The Ticketmaster Has You... posted by Baron Greenback on 15 May 2003 at 17.31.04 ZuluTime:

Well, I watched the movie. Yes, it was predictable. Yes, it relied on it's special effects entirely. Yes, it was a formula film, filled with enough pseudopsychological bullsh*t to satisfy the masses (think jedi are from venus, AI are from mars), enough distraction packed action per second to satisfy those of us with attention deficit, and enough easter eggs to satisfy those of us that like to take movies apart and nitpick, thereafter creating horrific fanfic backstory or, worse yet, "slash" depicting various characters as their actors at hollywood parties.

So, I'll just talk about what this movie got right.

First of all: In every fight scene, in every movie, since approxamately 1960, where there were more than two people involved, there is ALWAYS one question, that is echoed time and again by the guy on the sofa. That question, of course, is "Why oh why don't they all rush him at the same time". Well, they did. And, it was good.

Second, they've capitalized on their antihero. Everyone who'se ever watched any film worth watching loves antiheroes. Hugo "priscilla" weaving is just, well, cool. That's right, cool. Although, the buzz about him turning "good guy" in the third movie seems, sadly, more justified after watching the movie; it's not the good guy thing itself that bothers me, just the castration that usually comes with it.

Thirdly, of course, the CG effects that saved sci-fi, that sci-fi attempted to destroy shortly thereafter by abusing the living hell out of them, played a second fiddle to their new ones. The bullet time was there. Hell, it was half the film. The waving arms, the fight-club-ish roundabouts in the rooms, everything. What you see in this one, though, is just absolutely beautiful demolition after beautiful demolition. Remember the white house in independance day? The one that took half a year to create, based on an actual ? It doesn't compare to, among other stuff, the scene where the two semi trucks run into eachother head on, collapse into eachother in bullet time, and manage to explode in a manner that doesn't look like the car just caught fire for no particular reason other than that it's a car in a movie. It was surrounded, of course, by pedestrian cars just flying everywhere, escalating and escalating. It was enough to blow up a pentium- actually, of course, it was enough to run five graphics companies into the ground and force them to declare bankruptcy, but I'm sure you can find more of that with google yourself.

Finally, they ended the movie right. I know everyone is going to disagree with me. It was the cliche cliffhanger ending. Everything in the movie was cliche; it's like watching someone else's shadowrun game, where the GM has attention deficit and a . That's not the point. The point is, they didn't dangle any more strings than they had to. One "how'd they do that" that needs to be explained, which I guess would be a spoiler, regarding the sentinels, and that's it. The rest is character backstory. Which, of course, is impossible to up, as several thousand apes on several thousand typewriters-er-several thousand script kiddies on several thousand livejournals- have proven with their yards upon yards of slash trash. And, of course, the parrallels to "Empire" are almost overkill. It's almost like it's rubbing everything the original star wars was in kerosene, vomit, and George Lucas' face, in that order. Very nice after sitting through a recent star wars atrocity.

Alright, that's it from me. Very open to fanboy discussions on "why they didn't just switch power sources and scrap the matrix when this whole one crap came about, or at least clean up the atmosphere" etcetera.