Thursday 6th November 2003
No, that's not a typo; it's a pun. And a warning. Here be spoilers.
Here's the surface data.
We went off and saw Matrix3 last night. That's probably a given; I tend to see films when or before they come out. Although I'm beginning to rethink that strategy; a pair of tickets to see this thing cost eighteen bucks; for $19.95, I'll be able to get the disc and watch it more than once, within measurable proximity to an ashtray and a case of MisterPibb costing less than one waxy 'glass' in the cinema. Also seeing a film at home allows me to avoid talking my printer into liking fandango.com enough to print out the tickets for me [I can't really blame it for its reluctance], wandering out into the arctic night of Denver [Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes: it'll get worse], getting into the very line at the cinema you're reportedly able to avoid by going to fandango.com [never trust a talking brownbag], managing to sit within the same zipcode as the meretricious mendicants [who actually dressed up as...I think the motif was Matrix meets StarTrek meets an advance on their allowance] dogmatically reading the MooviTurms at each other and calling their fucking bookies on Sprite to place...I never particularly liked people; I've since learned to hate them.
That's technically immaterial. But, according to Harry Knowles, it's all about your mood going in. My mood going in was essentially that, by implication, this film had to be minimally better than Matrix: Retarded, and that I didn't have much time left to see it before Hunter finally snapped and told me every damned thing about this film she's known about since 1987. Which is to say that I've intentionally avoided learning anything about this trilogy since I first inadvertantly learned that it was already at the cinema in 1999. No real reason; I just didn't want all the plot specifics of the sequels after working out that the first film was roughly the same with our without sound.
So. Notwithstanding the various annoyances, or any ontological fallacy that they were created merely to make me feel unnaturally intelligent, I'm in the cinema, the trailers start, the lights dim down [in that order, of course]; the audience, mesmerised by moving images on the screen so recently populated by mere slides, lose track of the chirpy little noises they make to justify their existence and stare vacuously at the paradox of Tom Cruise appearing in the marginally intellectual context of The Last Samauri. Then the film begins.
Still rebooting after seeing Peter O'Toole in a trailer, the audience mercifully forgot to cheer as the monochrome WB logo rippled its way into view; so we were spared that, at least. I'm still trying to figure out why these imbeciles cheer on opening night when A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away follows the Fox logo; it's always been my understanding that applause was designed to encourage the players to keep going; I can assure you that I've studied films extensively, and they keep running whether or not they get your instant feedback.
All right. The film.
Obviously, this isn't a standalone story. It utterly relies on the first film, and very slightly on the second. However, I haven't seen the other two films since they were in the cinema; I think that initially worked to my advantage; it was later, after thinking about it for a while, that I started wondering how in the living hell we went from the beginning of the first film to the end of the third.
The film begins with the general mood of any given Monday-afternoon soap opera. You know what I mean. If you missed Friday's show, and have never seen the show before, you'll get away from it after ten seconds and resolve to avoid the entire mess for the rest of time. But for sketchy memories of the ending of Matrix: Retarded, I might have done the same thing here.
The basic story is pretty simple. Once upon a time, people created CyberdyneLite, which invented SkyNetBot, which worked out that, robbed of its solar power, it could use homosapiens as a powersource. Which, of course, is not a new idea; I heard the same thing from physics majors with twelve credit hours and a bag of weed in 1987.
The powersources fueling the machines live fulltime in the matrix, assuming it all to be the real world. This probably isn't news to anyone.
But: a few special people [probably the same ones who tend to get abducted by aliens, wiretapped by the NSA, and shunned by people with zero tolerance for LARPers] dream of a less fictional existence, and ultimately get evicted out into this postapocalyptic Dark City community in which everyone wears tattered sweaters and gothboots. And they say there's no such thing as progress....
Simple as this situation sounds, it can't last. Once the machines locate the last population centre of homosapiens, they'll kill them all and shut down the matrix. Even though the matrix is required to keep the powersources alive, to keep the machines alive.
But, lucky for the human race, a lowlevel hacker who codes what may or may not be the wetware from Strange Days [we got a glimpse of this stuff before confirming that the matrix emulated Earth in 1999], turns out to be the messiah. Which should be obvious because he adheres to messianic law about as well as Jeepers did in that other tale.
The messiah talks to a prophet who may or may not know anything at all, incuding Latin, and learns that he either is or isn't the messiah. Then he and his disciples run off to meet Shroedinger's Cat and most of the characters worth worrying about get deleted. Great.
Eventually, Neo decides to be the messiah after all, and he beats up the programme which has been designed to...do something, I suppose. I'm not sure what Agent Smith was supposed to be, precisely; I just know that, if it performs its function as slowly as it talks, it's written for a Commodore VIC20. Neo sends Smith to the Recycle Bin and the world is saved. Except for all the people happily beileving that the matrix is the real world, whom Neo decides to save by showing them that the real world is actually East London during a blackout and the only thing to eat is the stuff that Chef Barth wouldn't put in the burgers on You Can't Do That on Television.
In retrospect, I assume that the Matrix trilogy was about as intentional, initially, as the Star Wars saga. I don't doubt that they had a larger idea from Day One than they were able to put into a single film; I seriously doubt that they'd put any real thought into what could happen in another four or five hours of footage.
The only reason Matrix Retarded was any better than The Phantom Menace was that it lacked Jake 'Yippeee' Lloyd. Although, in fairness to Lucas, Menace is beginning to look a lot better now that we've seen Clones; it could still work out to have some importance in 2005. Given what I know now, the second Matrix film was...well, let's think about this for a moment....
In the second film, we discover that whether Neo is the messiah is actually immaterial, because the prophesy itself was created by the machines as a trap. Which doesn't fully work, since the real story behind the prophesy still requires the reincarnation of the messiah, whether he's a saviour or not. Also, an amazingly forgettable assassin has to put off killing Neo because some anonymous kid hurries over to deify him first. But, in the end, the assassin [whom we'd forgotten about] shows up in the coma ward next to Neo. Which is a cliffhanger thing, for some reason. Then the film ends.
Then I see the third film. And this is where we start exploiting a few spoilers. I'll pull that ever-fascinating TheForce.net spoilersheild here. Highlight to read. WebTV users: get a real browser.
The assassin, it turns out, is [somehow] the realworld parallel of Agent Smith. We don't know how; why don't know why. And what I really don't know is why they failed to A) make that evident before the second film ended, B) give us another four-year intermission before the third film [people were especially afraid to die between 1980 and 1983, simply because they couldn't handle missing out on Return of the Jedi after seeing The Empire Strikes Back], and C) come up with a plausible explanation for Smith to have got a physical body. And, maybe, D) used RealSmith as something more than a complaining meatbag who served only to blind Neo and force him to see the real world the way he saw the matrix.
Neo remains comatose for a bit, and trapped in TrainStationPurgatory somewhere between comas and reality and the matrix. He wastes some time meeting a bhuddist programme who confuses karma with dharma and learns that the station is controlled by the TrainMan, who's a sort of cross between the pilot from The Road Warrior and Lurch. When he tries to leave the station, he disappoints everyone who's ever NoClipped HalfLife by leaving through one side and entering from the other like Fox Moulder kept doing the night he met Tomlin and Asner on the XFiles. Which is to say that someone missed the opportunity to add in a truly neat effect which occurs when you attempt to leave a level in a videogame and wander into one which hasn't loaded yet, and then turn around to see where you just came from. If that had been in the film, even for five seconds, I'd have liked it a lot more.
Meanwhile, the Scoobies track down OracleV2 [I'm still wondering whether they really wanted to replace the Oracle because the matrix was resetting, or if they just couldn't talk the chick from the first two films into touching this filmscript], and then go off to break into the Frenchman's club at two frames per second [of all the things they could keep reusing from the first film, they have to concentrate on that boring gunfight in the lobby] and banter a bit about what they're going to trade for Neo's release.
Frenchy releases Neo, who then goes to see OracleV2, who tells him nothing of any particular intelligence, and one sentence of any eventual importance. Then it's back to the real world to find the other ship so they can get back to Zion.
Neo has other plans. Having processed the total lack of information from OracleV2, he decides he's got to invade the machines' city and do something. Trinity, regrettably enough, goes with him.
Of course, BaneSmith goes with him too, gets the jump on Trin, gets hold of Neo, hints for six hours that he's Smith, gets in a fight, burns out Neo's eyes, and becomes dead. And they're back on the road to Cybertron.
Zion prepare for war, now that the machines know where Zion is. I don't know how the machines found Zion; it must have happened in the second film. But they're on their way. So the Zionists [on so many levels] load up their battlemechs while the little goof who bumped BaneSmith to get Neo's autograph in the second film talks his way into the army like a fourth-grader trying to buy cigarettes. Finally convincing Captain Scowl that he's either going to do something critical to resolve the plot and/or become the main martyr within an hour, he goes away and we go back to the matrix for a while.
Back in the matrix, the Smiths saunter into OracleV2's kitchen to wax paradoxical about cookies and assmilate her into cybermormonism. One of the Smiths giggles.
The machines reach Zion; battlemechs fight back; I start wondering what idiot planned this campaign. Find an EMP; boobytrap the docks to collapse and kill the machines; anything. Instead, they shoot the squids while other squids perform the sort of plastic surgery Michael Jackson keeps getting. Every once in a while we get away from that just long enough to see Vasquez from Aliens fire surface-to-surface missiles and miss all the targets.
Morpeus, et al, race toward Zion, apparently predicting that they'll need to park in the docks and trigger their EMP. They have to get there through the squid tunnels, for some reason, which make the Death Star Trench look like the Salt Flats that KITT was tested on in Knight Rider. Expect a videogame in which you can relive the adventure soon.
Neo reaches Botland and discovers that he sucks after all. The defensive armada break his ship, which crashes, killing Trinity instantly. Or...what's that other word...over the course of fifteen minutes of reminiscing and blubbering about what she shoulda done the last time she got killed. I mean: no pressure; take your time shaking off the mortal coil; whatever you came here for, there should still be time to do it before the squids back in Zion are done killing the last homosapiens on Earth at ten per second.
The ship reaches Zion; Private Wormy and Rocketeur Vasquez believe in each other and stuff so they can shoot the locks off the door, just in time for the ship to hit it anyway; fortunately, the ship was heavy and fast enough to obliviate the door now that the breadties holding it shut have been removed. They blow the EMP, and the annoying guy from the second film complains that their defenses are now completely dead. I can't guess why no one took that opportunity to make him completely dead.
Neo raps with BugFaceBot about Smith's new plan to take over both worlds, and proposes a truce; so the machines let him go into the matrix to get into--for a change--a fight with Smith. Which is about the same as the myriad other fights with Smith, but in the rain. Punch, kick, fly, fall, and Smith decides that all is ginchy because everything is going as he [with his new OracleV2 codecs] has foreseen. His deja dot vu suggests that he should stand just about...here, and Neo should say....
And Neo repeats whatever that important thing was that OracleV2 had told him. Something sage, I suppose. Don't count all your chickens in one basket. Who knows.
Smith gapes; Neo grabs Smith; Smith assimilates Neo; Neo breaks Smith; Smith dies. Again. Like SeaLab blowing up.
Neo also dies, apparently.
Back in Zion, the machines stop growling and start panting. Then they split. Private Wormy screeches out 'the war is over' in his best impression of Squiggy from Laverne&Shirley. And there was much rejoice.
Epilogue: the matrix. OracleV2 is back. Colonal Sanders appears at the horizon with his amazing ability to blather on bombastically about the matrix he built for millennia, but says little. Instead, we learn that the war is over. For as long as that lasts. And the homosapien batteries who wish to learn that the real world is dark and cold and full of creamed corn will be allowed to be released. And she supposes that Neo will return someday. And that's pretty well that.
Now. The entirety of the third film could have been five minutes of wrapup at the end of the second film. In fact, replacing the pointless pontification in the television room with this film would have made the second film a little shorter. To be fully realistic, the whole trilogy effectively had all the actual information of a single episode of Angel; take out all the Tekken shit and maintain a healthy 24fps, and each of the three flms averages about fifteen minutes in length.
It's not precisely a bad trilogy. The idea--however pinched from everything from Tron to The Last Starfighter to Blade Runner to WarGames to The Terminator to Electric Dreams to The Neverending Story to Short Circuit to Alice in Wonderland to The Bible to...all that aside, the idea was okay. Technosolipsism. Great. I've written ten novels based on a similar concept. Just...decide in advance whether you want to make a quantum paratransitional intellectual clusterfuck, or Atari Boxing: The Motion Picture; combining the two doesn't really double the fanbase; it just bugs everyone equally. Just a thought.
More later....
--Gremlin