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Teen News: That Matrix
Warning: The following contains a spoiler rating of 2.5 out of 6...
Making fun of the new Matrix movie is probably already like shooting ham in a corndog, er um I mean fish in a barrel or whatever, but damn I just gotta.
Here are just a few quick observations...
1) Rather than build on all the cool stuff from the first one, they merely reference it here. Ex: "Hey Morpheus, remember all the stuff you talked about in the first movie...is that really gonna happen?" Sort of like the latest Star Wars movies. Lucas has an entire universe of new places to show us, but instead he keeps taking us back to the same damn ones we've already seen, just so we can go "Hey, look, it's Tatooine! And everybody I know and love is younger looking! Wow!" Okay, I sort of strayed from my original point here, which is that in both cases, the filmmakers seem to be resting on pre-existing laurels rather than trying to garner up new ones. Does that make sense?
2) Before the movie started I was hit with the gut feeling that I was gonna regret forking over ten clams to this movie; that it would be a succesion of fight scenes held together by a much less interesting plot. By the time the third fight scene came along, I hung my head in my hands. Reba turned to me and, in an attempt to buck up my spirits, said, "Just look at them as beautifully choreographed dance sequences". My first thought was, "But that's the problem, no one fights like this". But again that's beside the point. All that dancing around looks cool. There was of course a sequence where one man is pitted against hundreds of enemies, and of course they only attack one at a time. There's one shot from above where you see these hundreds of guys come pouring in through a door, and it looks so much like a scene from a Warner Bros. cartoon that I just had to make a laugh sound with my mouth hole. But then, FINALLY, in unison, they all just jump on top of our hero in what looks like the ultimate tackle from a football game. Inside I was thinking, "YES! Finally they all attacked at once, and it WORKED!".
3) This just in: The architect of the Matrix is Colonel Sanders.
4) As Mr. Robot pointed out, the music for the fight scenes was hilarious. Right outta Broadway showtune-ville.
5) The revelry scene is a bit nuts. Again I forget exactly who, but someone insightfully pointed out that it looked like a Revlon commercial. All the girls in Zion look like Rae Dawn Chong or Lisa Bonet. Not that there's anything improper with that, just an observation.
6) Audiences aren't moved by much any more. If this movie had come out in the 80's or early 90's, people would be gasping in Terminator 2-style appreciation. Looking at the audience during the most visually "interesting" (and tiresome) chase scene, the audience were just sitting there, placid n' flaccid, as if they were thinking "Okay...that looked cool...what else you got?". We's so jaded!
7) As for the next (and hopefully final) Matrix, wouldn't it be cool if at the very end Keanu wakes up and we see that he is Bill (or Ted, I forget) and it was all just a "way cool dream" he had? He could say something like, "Whoah, that'd make a most excellent movie" before calling Ted (or Bill, I forget) to tell him about it.
Alright, that's all for now.
