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Made in in
[MOD]
Otiose in a Niche






Hyderabad, India

So the first Matrix film from 1999 was darn near perfect inspiring parodies, rip offs and all kinds of copies.

The next two... not so much.

But it's almost 10 years since Matrix 3-This Makes No Sense, so I thought I'd ask if this once great film still casts any sort of shadow on pop culture? If they made a new one would anyone care or is the franchise completely dead?

It seems ages since I saw any spin off media (books, comics, video games) so I'd really like to hear from younger Dakkites who might not even remember the first one when it came out.

 
   
Made in gb
Avatar of the Bloody-Handed God






Inside your mind, corrupting the pathways

I'd like to see a new film, perhaps exploring some of the odder/more obscure aspects of the matrix - kind of like what we saw in the animatrix comics.

Maybe a few "lesser" "the one"'s or people who can partially break the matrix, slowly learning what it is they are a part of or something...

I also wouldn't mind seeing a precursor film set when the computers rise up and start the matrix (I could pretend that it was a good Terminator 3 ).

   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Burtucky, Michigan

Yea, seeing a film on "the war" and all that would be friggin awesome (read as long as they dont hoe it up like #2 and #3)
   
Made in gb
[ADMIN]
Decrepit Dakkanaut






London, UK

The animatrix movie (assuming thats what you meant by comics) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328832/

covers the war, the rise of the machines, and the odd individual breaking out of their own accord. I thought it was better than the first matrix movie. The last 2 movies were so bad that their suckage destroyed all popular perception of the first movie. The gaping plot holes/bad logic in the story prevented it from having a long term sustainable draw as well. Things like perfect AI not instantly being able to wipe out anyone, not knowing about nuclear, tidal, wind or geothermal power, etc.

The main thing that still stands in my mind though is that the matrix is made to reflect the peak of 'humanity' in the late 90s, which is still quite true from an American/western european middle class perspective.

Check out our new, fully plastic tabletop wargame - Maelstrom's Edge, made by Dakka!
 
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Burtucky, Michigan

The only thing that somewhat saves the 2nd movie IMO, are the Twins. Those 2 are awesome bad guys. The rest of that movie, is just ass put to film. And the 3rd, is easily 3x as much ass
   
Made in gb
Avatar of the Bloody-Handed God






Inside your mind, corrupting the pathways

legoburner wrote:The animatrix movie (assuming thats what you meant by comics) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328832/


That is the one - I was thinking of some of the matrix comics that were around and confusing them with the animatrix shorts

Have to agree with you one the 2nd and 3rd films pretty much killed off any sway that the first film had

   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Burtucky, Michigan

Those movies just prove my point, if a book/movie is only originally meant to have a set number done, IE 1 movie, or 3 books and so on, then for the love of god, keep it that way. Dont go "Hey, Matrix did gooooood" and then sprout out movie films/books. It pretty much, always, fails.




*cant spell

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/03/11 16:00:22


 
   
Made in gb
Fixture of Dakka






Sheffield, UK

All I remember from the later films is the stupid rubber doll fights that go on forever.

Such a waste. I remember when the phrase 'you look like Neo from The Matrix' wasn't an insult.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zCHYrw41tI (1:00)

Spain in Flames: Flames of War (Spanish Civil War 1936-39) Flames of War: Czechs and Slovaks (WWI & WWII) Sheffield & Rotherham Wargames Club

"I'm cancelling you, I'm cancelling you out of shame like my subscription to White Dwarf." - Mark Corrigan: Peep Show
 
   
Made in gb
Bane Knight




Inverness, Scotland.

The sequels were a bit of a mess - not as memorable as The Matrix and a lot less classy.
   
Made in in
[MOD]
Otiose in a Niche






Hyderabad, India

legoburner wrote:The animatrix movie (assuming thats what you meant by comics) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328832/


Nah there was an attempt at Matrix Comics but I think it peetered out pretty fast.

http://www.amazon.com/Matrix-Comics-Vol-1/dp/1932700005

Forgot to mention the Animatrix, strange they never did an Animatrix 2.

covers the war, the rise of the machines, and the odd individual breaking out of their own accord. I thought it was better than the first matrix movie. The last 2 movies were so bad that their suckage destroyed all popular perception of the first movie. The gaping plot holes/bad logic in the story prevented it from having a long term sustainable draw as well. Things like perfect AI not instantly being able to wipe out anyone, not knowing about nuclear, tidal, wind or geothermal power, etc.

The main thing that still stands in my mind though is that the matrix is made to reflect the peak of 'humanity' in the late 90s, which is still quite true from an American/western european middle class perspective.


Before the sequels there was some speculation that Morpheus was lying/wrong. That the machines were actually doing some kind of twisted version of Asimov's first law. They'd concluded that humanity was self destructive and had to be imprisoned for its own good. A revelation like that could have been awesome.

 
   
Made in us
Fanatic with Madcap Mushrooms





Auburn CA

I liked the 3rd one alot.


 
   
Made in ca
Battle-tested Knight Castellan Pilot







Most of the stories kicked ass in the animatrix

Madhouse does such good animation =o] So does Production IG


   
Made in us
Consigned to the Grim Darkness





USA

People started to realize it really wasn't all that great?

It was good sure, but it sure as hell wasn't the best thing since tacos.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/03/11 16:56:01


The people in the past who convinced themselves to do unspeakable things were no less human than you or I. They made their decisions; the only thing that prevents history from repeating itself is making different ones.
-- Adam Serwer
My blog
 
   
Made in gb
Bane Knight




Inverness, Scotland.

FabricatorGeneralMike wrote:
Most of the stories kicked ass in the animatrix

Madhouse does such good animation =o] So does Production IG




Didn't Squaresoft do CGI for one of the Animatrix episodes?
   
Made in us
Mutated Chosen Chaos Marine







I had a friend who said the third Matrix film was the best one. I killed him with a gardening shovel.
   
Made in us
Veteran ORC







LoneLictor wrote:I had a friend who said the third Matrix film was the best one. I killed him with a gardening shovel.


Convenient; you can bury him with the murder weapon


Never honestly cared for the Matrix. Though the trench coats were awesome!

I've never feared Death or Dying. I've only feared never Trying. 
   
Made in us
[DCM]
Tilter at Windmills






Manchester, NH

The first one was great; the problem with the later ones was that all the holes and inconsistencies from the first one couldn't just stay shrouded in mystery and left unexplored. Some stuff from the first one comes off dumb in retrospect, like "No one can tell you what the Matrix is", but we could suspend our disbelief when the first was all their was, and fill in the gaps with geek philosophical speculation.

Based on the first one Neil Gaiman wrote an excellent short story called Goliath. The link I'm finding for it has crappy formatting, so I'm just going to C&P it here. EDIT: Crap, I have to re-do all the paragraphing and formatting. THANKFULLY, I have a copy of it in print form in his short story collection Fragile Things, so here I go:

Neil Gaiman, Goliath wrote:I suppose that I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already knew the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now that I know the truth, as you will, my love, if you're reading this, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels.

They say, Here's the truth, and I say, Is that all there is? And they say, Kind of. Pretty much. As far as we know.

So. It was 1977, and the nearest I had come to computers was I'd recently bought a big, expensive calculator, and then I'd lost the manual that came with it, so I didn't know what it did any more. I'd add, subtract, multiply and divide, and was grateful I had no need to cos, sine or find tangents or graph functions or whatever else the gizmo did, because, having been turned down by the RAF, I was working as a bookkeeper for a small discount carpet warehouse in Edgware, in North London, near the top of the Northern Line, and I was sitting at the table at the back of the warehouse that served me as a desk when the world began to melt and drip away.

Honest. It was like the walls and the ceiling and the rolls of carpet and the News of the World Topless Calendar were all made of wax, and they started to ooze and run, to flow together and to drip. I could see the houses and the sky and the clouds and the road behind them, and then that dripped and flowed away, and behind that was blackness.

I was standing in the puddle of the world, a weird, brightly coloured thing that oozed and brimmed and didn't cover the tops of my brown leather shoes (I have feet like shoeboxes. Boots have to be specially made for me. Costs me a fortune). The puddle cast a weird light upwards.

In fiction, I think I would have refused to believe it was happening, wonder if I'd been drugged or if I was dreaming. In reality, hell, it had happened, and I stared up into the darkness, and then, when nothing happened, I began to walk, splashing through the liquid world, calling out, seeing if anyone was there.

Something flickered in front of me.

"Hey fella," said a voice. The accent was American, although the intonation was odd.

"Hello," I said.

The flickering continued for a few moments, and then resolved itself into a smartly-dressed man in thick horn-rimmed spectacles.

"You're a pretty big guy," he said. "You know that?"

Of course I knew that. I was 19 years old and I was close to seven feet tall. I have fingers like bananas. I scare children. I'm unlikely to see my 40th birthday: people like me die young.

"What's going on?" I asked. "Do you know?"

"Enemy missile took out a central processing unit," he said. "Two hundred thousand people, hooked up in parallel, blown to dead meat. We've got a mirror going of course, and we'll have it all up and running again in no time flat. You're just free-floating here for a couple of nanoseconds, while we get London processing again."

"Are you God?" I asked. Nothing he had said had made any sense to me.

"Yes. No. Not really," he said. "Not as you mean it, anyway."

And then the world lurched and I found myself coming to work again that morning, poured myself a cup of tea, had the longest, strangest bout of deja vu I've ever had. Twenty minutes, where I knew everything that anyone was going to do or say. And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they're meant to.

And the hours passed, and the days, and the years.

I lost my job in the carpet company, and got a new one bookkeeping for a company selling business machines, and I got married to a girl called Sandra I met at the swimming baths and we had a couple of kids, both normal sized, and I thought I had the sort of marriage that could survive anything, but I hadn't, so she went away and she took the kiddies with her. I was in my late 20s, and it was 1986, and I got a job on Tottenham Court Road selling computers, and I turned out to be good at it.

I liked computers.

I liked the way they worked. It was an exciting time. I remember our first shipment of ATs, some of them with 40 megabyte hard drives... Well, I was impressed easily back then.

I still lived in Edgware, commuted to work on the Northern Line. I was on the tube one evening, going home - we'd just gone through Euston and half the passengers had got off -- looking at the other people in the carriage over the top of the Evening Standard and wondering who they were - who they really were, inside - the thin, black girl writing earnestly in her notebook, the little old lady with the green velvet hat on, the girl with the dog, the bearded man with the turban...

The tube stopped, in the tunnel.

That was what I thought happened, anyway: I thought the tube had stopped. Everything went very quiet.

And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off.

And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off. And I was looking at the other passengers and wondering who they really were inside when the train stopped in the tunnel. And everything went very quiet.

And then everything lurched so hard I thought we'd been hit by another train.

And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off, and then the train stopped in the tunnel, and then everything went -

(Normal service will be resumed as possible, whispered a voice in the back of my head.)

And this time as the train slowed and began to approach Euston I wondered if I was going crazy: I felt like I was jerking back and forth on a video loop. I knew it was happening, but there was nothing I could do to change anything, nothing I could do to break out of it.

The black girl, sitting next to me, passed me a note. ARE WE DEAD? it said.

I shrugged. I didn't know. It seemed as good an explanation as any.

Slowly, everything faded to white.

There was no ground beneath my feet, nothing above me, no sense of distance, no sense of time. I was in a white place. And I was not alone.

The man wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and a suit that looked like it might have been Armani.

"You again?" he said. "The big guy. I just spoke to you."

"I don't think so," I said.

"Half an hour ago. When the missiles hit."

"In the carpet factory? That was years ago. Half a lifetime."

"About thirty-seven minutes back. We've been running in an accelerated mode since then, trying to patch and cover, while we've been processing potential solutions."

"Who sent the missiles?" I asked. "The U.S.S.R.? The Iranians?"

"Aliens," he said.

"You're kidding?"

"Not as far as we can tell. We've been sending out seed-probes for a couple of hundred years now. Looks like something has followed one back. We learned about it when the first missiles landed. It's taken us a good twenty minutes to get a retaliatory plan up and running. That's why we've been processing in overdrive. Did it seem like the last decade went pretty fast?"

"Yeah. I suppose."

"That's why. We ran it through pretty fast, trying to maintain a common reality while coprocessing."

"So what are you going to do?"

"We're going to counter-attack. We're going to take them out. It's going to take a while: we don't have the machinery right now. We have to build it."

The white was fading now, fading into dark pinks and dull reds. I opened my eyes. For the first time. I choked on it. It was too much to take in.

So. Sharp the world and tangled-tubed and strange and dark and somewhere beyond belief. It made no sense. Nothing made sense. It was real, and it was a nightmare. It lasted for thirty seconds, and each cold second felt like a tiny forever.

And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off...

I started talking to the black girl with the notebook. Her name was Susan. Several weeks later she moved in with me.

Time rumbled and rolled. I suppose I was becoming sensitive to it. Maybe I knew what I was looking for - knew there was something to look for, even if I didn't know what it was.

I made the mistake of telling Susan some of what I believed one night - about how none of this was real. About how we were really just hanging there, plugged and wired, central processing units or just cheap memory chips for some computer the size of the world, being fed a consensual hallucination to keep us happy, to allow us to communicate and dream using the tiny fraction of our brains that they weren't using to crunch numbers and store information.

"We're memory," I told her. "That's what we are. Memory."

"You don't really believe this stuff," she told me, and her voice was trembling. "It's a story."

When we made love, she always wanted me to be rough with her, but I never dared. I didn't know my own strength, and I'm so clumsy. I didn't want to hurt her.

I never wanted to hurt her, so I stopped telling her my ideas, tried to kiss it better, to pretend it had all been a joke, just not the funny kind...

It didn't matter. She moved out the following weekend.

I missed her, deeply, painfully. But life goes on.

The moments of deja-vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely.

And then I woke up one morning and it was 1975 again, and I was sixteen, and after a day of hell at school I was walking out of school, into the RAF recruiting office next to the kebab house in Chapel Road.

"You're a big lad," said the recruiting officer. I thought he was American, but he said he was Canadian. He wore big horn-rimmed glasses.

"Yes," I said.

"And you want to fly?"

"More than anything," I said. It seemed like I half-remembered a world in which I'd forgotten that I wanted to fly planes, which seemed as strange to me as forgetting my own name.

"Well," said the horn-rimmed man, "We're going to have to bend a few rules. But we'll have you up in the air in no time." And he meant it, too.

The next few years passed really fast. It seemed like I spent all of them in planes of different kinds, cramped into tiny cockpits, in seats I barely fitted, flicking switches too small for my fingers.

I got Secret clearance, then I got Noble clearance, which leaves Secret clearance in the shade, and then I got Graceful clearance, which the Prime Minister himself doesn't have, by which time I was piloting flying saucers and other craft that moved with no visible means of support.

I started dating a girl called Sandra, and then we got married, because if we married we got to move into married quarters, which was a nice little semidetached house near Dartmoor. We never had any children: I had been warned that it was possible I might have been exposed to enough radiation to fry my gonads, and it seemed sensible not to try for kids, under the circumstances: didn't want to breed monsters.

It was 1985 when the man with horn-rimmed spectacles walked into my house.

My wife was at her mother's that week. Things had got a bit tense, and she'd moved out to buy herself some 'breathing room'. She said I was getting on her nerves. But if I was getting on anyone's nerves, I think it must have been my own. It seemed like I knew what was going to happen all the time. Not just me: it seemed like everyone knew what was going to happen. Like we were sleepwalking through our lives for the tenth or the twentieth or the hundredth time.

I wanted to tell Sandra, but somehow I knew better, knew I'd lose her if I opened my mouth. Still, I seemed to be losing her anyway. So I was sitting in the lounge watching The Tube on Channel Four and drinking a mug of tea, and feeling sorry for myself.

The man with the horn-rimmed specs walked into my house like he owned the place. He checked his watch.

"Right," he said. "Time to go. You'll be piloting something pretty close to a PL-47."

Even people with Graceful clearance weren't meant to know about PL-47s. I'd flown one a dozen times. Looked like a tea-cup, flew like something from Star Wars.

"Shouldn't I leave a note for Sandra?" I asked.

"No," he said, flatly. "Now, sit down on the floor and breathe deeply, and regularly. In, out, in out."

It never occurred to me to argue with him, or to disobey. I sat down on the floor, and I began to breathe, slowly, in and out and out and in and...

In.

Out.

In.

A wrenching. The worst pain I've ever felt. I was choking.

In.

Out.

I was screaming, but I could hear my voice and I wasn't screaming. All I could hear was a low bubbling moan.

In.

Out.

It was like being born. It wasn't comfortable, or pleasant. It was the breathing carried me through it, through all the pain and the darkness and the bubbling in my lungs. I opened my eyes. I was lying on a metal disk about eight feet across. I was naked, wet and surrounded by a sprawl of cables. They were retracting, moving away from me, like scared worms or nervous brightly coloured snakes.

I looked down at my body. No body hair, no wrinkles. I wondered how old I was, in real terms. Eighteen? Twenty? I couldn't tell.

There was a glass screen set into the floor of the metal disk. It flickered and came to life. I was staring at the man in the horn-rimmed spectacles.

"Do you remember?" he asked. "You should be able to access most of your memory for the moment."

"I think so," I told him.

"You'll be in a PL-47," he said. "We've just finished building it. Pretty much had to go back to first principles, come forward. Modify some factories to construct it. We'll have another batch of them finished by tomorrow. Right now we've only got one."

"So if this doesn't work, you've got replacements for me." "If we survive that long," he said. "Another missile bombardment started about fifteen minutes ago. Took out most of Australia. We project that it's still a prelude to the real bombing."

"What are they dropping? Nuclear weapons?"

"Rocks."

"Rocks?"

"Uh-huh. Rocks. Asteroids. Big ones. We think that tomorrow unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us."

"You're joking."

"Wish I was." The screen went dull.

The metal disk had been navigating its way through a tangle of cables and a world of sleeping naked people. It had slipped over sharp microchip towers and softly glowing silicone spires.

The PL-47 was waiting for me at the top of a metal mountain. Tiny metal crabs scuttled across it, polishing and checking every last rivet and stud.

I walked inside on tree-trunk legs that still trembled and shook. I sat down in the pilot's chair, and was thrilled to realise that it had been built for me. It fitted. I strapped myself down. My hands began to go through warm-up sequence. Cables crept over my arms. I felt something plugging into the base of my spine, something else moving in and connecting at the top of my neck.

My perception of the ship expanded radically. I had it in 360 degrees, above, below. And at the same time, I was sitting in the cabin, activating the launch codes.

"Good luck," said the horn-rimmed man on a tiny screen to my left.

"Thank you. Can I ask one last question?"

"I don't see why not."

"Why me?"

"Well," he said, "the short answer is that you were designed to do this. We've improved a little on the basic human design in your case. You're bigger. You're much faster. You have faster processing speeds and reaction times."

"I'm not faster. I'm big, but I'm clumsy."

"Not in real life," he said. "That's just in the world."

And I took off.

I never saw the aliens, if there were any aliens, but I saw their ship. It looked like fungus or seaweed: the whole thing was organic, an enormous glimmering thing, orbiting the moon. It looked like something you'd see growing on a rotting log, half-submerged under the sea. It was the size of Tasmania.

Two-hundred mile-long sticky tendrils were dragging asteroids of various sizes behind them. It reminded me a little of the trailing tendrils of a portuguese man o' war, that strange compound sea-creature: four inseparable organisms that dream they are one.

They started throwing rocks at me as I got a couple of hundred thousand miles away.

My fingers were activating the missile bay, aiming at a floating nucleus, while I wondered what I was doing. I wasn't saving the world I knew. That world was imaginary: a sequence of ones and zeroes. I was saving a nightmare...

But if the nightmare died, the dream was dead too.

There was a girl named Susan. I remembered her, from a ghost-life long gone. I wondered if she was still alive (had it been a couple of hours? Or a couple of lifetimes?). I supposed she was dangling from cables somewhere, with no memory of a miserable, paranoid giant.

I was so close I could see the ripples of the thing. The rocks were getting smaller, and more accurate. I dodged and wove and skimmed. Part of me was just admiring the economy of the thing: no expensive explosives to build and buy. Just good old kinetic energy: big rocks.

If one of those things had hit the ship I would have been dead. Simple as that.

The only way to avoid them was to outrun them. So I kept running.

The nucleus was staring at me. It was an eye of some kind. I was certain of it.

I was a hundred yards away from the nucleus when I let the payload go. Then I ran.

I wasn't quite out of range when the thing imploded. It was like fireworks - beautiful in a ghastly sort of way. And then there was nothing but a faint trace of glitter and dust...

"I did it!" I screamed. "I did it! I fething well did it!"

The screen flickered. Horn-rimmed spectacles were staring at me. There was no real face behind them any more. Just a loose approximation of concern and interest. "You did it," he agreed.

"Now, where do I bring this thing down?" I asked.

There was a hesitation, then, "You don't. We didn't design it to return. It was a redundancy we had no need for. Too costly, in terms of resources."

"So what do I do? I just saved the Earth. And now I suffocate out here?"

He nodded. "That's pretty much it. Yes."

The lights began to dim. One by one, the controls were going out. I lost my 360 degree perception of the ship. It was just me, strapped to a chair in the middle of nowhere, inside a flying teacup.

"How long do I have?"

"We're closing down all your systems, but you've got a couple of hours, at least. We're not going to evacuate the remaining air. That would be inhuman."

"You know, in the world I came from, they would have given me a medal."

"Obviously, we're grateful."

"So you can't come up with any more tangible way to express your gratitude?"

"Not really. You're a disposable part. A unit. We can't mourn you any more than a wasps' nest mourns the death of a single wasp. It's not sensible and it's not viable to bring you back."

"And you don't want this kind of firepower coming back toward the Earth, where it could be used against you?"

"As you say."

And then the screen went dark, with not so much as a goodbye. Do not adjust your set, I thought. Reality is at fault.

You become very aware of your breathing, when you only have a couple of hours of air. In. Hold. Out. Hold. In. Hold. Out. Hold....

I sat there strapped to my seat in the half-dark, and I waited, and I thought. Then I said, "Hello? Is anybody there?"

A beat. The screen flickered with patterns. "Yes?"

"I have a request. Listen. You - you people, machines, whatever you are - you owe me one. Right? I mean I saved all your lives."

"Continue."

"I've got a couple of hours left. Yes?"

"About fifty-seven minutes."

"Can you plug me back into the... the real world. The other world. The one I came from?"

"Mm? I don't know. I'll see." Dark screen once more.

I sat and breathed, in and out, in and out, while I waited. I felt very peaceful. If it wasn't for having less than an hour to live, I'd have felt just great.

The screen glowed. There was no picture, no pattern, no nothing. Just a gentle glow. And a voice, half in my head, half out of it, said, "You got a deal."

There was a sharp pain at the base of my skull. Then blackness, for several minutes.

Then this.

That was fifteen years ago: 1984. I went back into computers. I own my computer store on the Tottenham Court Road. And now, as we head toward the new millennium, I'm writing this down. This time around, I married Susan. It took me a couple of months to find her. We have a son.

I'm nearly forty. People of my kind don't live much longer than that, on the whole. Our hearts stop. When you read this, I'll be dead. You'll know that I'm dead. You'll have seen a coffin big enough for two men dropped into a hole.

But know this, Susan, my sweet: my true coffin is orbiting the moon. It looks like a flying teacup. They gave me the world back, and you back, for a little while. Last time I told you, or someone like you, the truth, or what I knew of it, you walked out on me. And maybe that wasn't you, and I wasn't me, but I don't dare risk it again. So I'm going to write this down, and you'll be given it with the rest of my papers when I'm gone. Goodbye.

They may be heartless, unfeeling, computerised bastards, leeching off the minds of what's left of humanity. But I can't help feeling grateful to them.

I'll die soon. But the last twenty minutes have been the best years of my life.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/03/11 20:03:50


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Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Mesopotamia. The Kingdom Where we Secretly Reign.

The third one was okay, but in no way compared to the first.

Animatrix is awesome, though. I think that the sequels were pared down into a single movie and they tweaked the plot a bit it wouldn't be quite so terrible.

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On an Express Elevator to Hell!!

The first one was incredible. I remember when it turned up at the cinema, I don't think anyone was really prepared for it. There was the trailer of Neo and Morpheus stood in a white room, when the racks of guns come rushing past, some cool music and that was it. I think everyone at that time was still focused on Star Wars 1, so it kind of crept up on people. Then I remember going to the cinema and being like "OMFG WHF THIS IS THE BEST FILM EVERRR!!!11!!!"

But, sadly it did so well that the sequels were an inevitability, and the movies firmly disappeared up their own arses. There was an awesome action sequence in number 2, but overall it had nothing like the impact of the first one. How could it? We already knew what was coming.

There are a number of films which have come to cinema over the past 50 years, which would have been absolutely wonderful to see for the first time at their time of release. I wish I had been there for Clockwork Orange, perhaps The Graduate, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now or even 2001 or Alien (not forgetting of course the original Star Wars). All of these films arguably changed the face of cinema, had a big influence on films that came after, and I am jealous of those who experienced them first hand and before they became common cultural references. But, at the same time there are other films I have been fortunate enough to be around for: Jurassic Park was an amazing cinema experience as a child, and Avatar succeeded in turning me back into a child once more, and I left the cinema grinning like an idiot like so many other people. And as much as people joke about it now, and it has become something of a cliche, The Blair Witch Project was incredibly scary upon its initial release.

And, I think the Matrix was one of those films. Elements of its design and production have been copied by countless other films, and I think even if it doesn't persist in terms of a massive licensing $ for Warner Brothers in the same way as something like Star Wars, I think it will have a far reaching legacy. 13 years later (and I can't believe it is that long ago), I would say it is definitely one of my top 5 films,and probably top 3 cinema experiences. It was a masterful piece of movie-making - the scene where Neo first takes on an agent on the roof of the building still makes the hairs on my arms stand on end, and it was one of those few pieces of modern cinema where everything came together well. Perfectly cast, the script and plot idea, the new technology for the effects, the music and cinematography was absolutely A*.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/03/11 20:01:25


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Kid_Kyoto wrote:
It seems ages since I saw any spin off media (books, comics, video games)


Wait you mean Ghost In the Shell : Stand Alone Complex isn't related to the Matrix films?


*hides*
   
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KingCracker wrote:The only thing that somewhat saves the 2nd movie IMO, are the Twins. Those 2 are awesome bad guys. The rest of that movie, is just ass put to film. And the 3rd, is easily 3x as much ass


Seriously? The albino rastafarians?

I think it was a great film (the Matrix) and that's where it should have been left. Seriously why does every successful film have to be turned into a franchise these days? ...and yeh I know the answer is money, it's just a shame.
   
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The 1st movie was the best for story, the second was the best for action. The 3rd? Disappointing.

But they're still some of my favourite films. And let's be honest, Agent Smith has to be one of the best (and most quoteable) bad guys EVER.

"He was already dead when I killed him!"

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Inside your mind, corrupting the pathways

You just can't get a better action sequence than the lobby from the first film.

Must have watched it 100 times

   
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Burtucky, Michigan

ifStatement wrote:
KingCracker wrote:The only thing that somewhat saves the 2nd movie IMO, are the Twins. Those 2 are awesome bad guys. The rest of that movie, is just ass put to film. And the 3rd, is easily 3x as much ass


Seriously? The albino rastafarians?

I think it was a great film (the Matrix) and that's where it should have been left. Seriously why does every successful film have to be turned into a franchise these days? ...and yeh I know the answer is money, it's just a shame.




Those would be the twins ya! I just liked them, their abilities, the butterfly knives, and they kicked ass.
   
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Phototoxin wrote:
Kid_Kyoto wrote:
It seems ages since I saw any spin off media (books, comics, video games)


Wait you mean Ghost In the Shell : Stand Alone Complex isn't related to the Matrix films?


*hides*



GitS was around first =oÞ~~~

Not SAC, but the manga and movie. I would love to see a Fuchikoma in the matrix =o]
   
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Chicago

The first Matrix movie was incredible from the moment it started until the ending credits rolled. The second and third films were pretty disappointing. But, they did do a great job of filling in the gaps left in the first film.

Specifically, that moment in Reloaded when Neo uses his powers in the "real" world and you suddenly realize he's still in the Matrix. I remember seeing that and being blown away. All the pieces suddenly fall into place.

And, it raises all sorts of other interesting questions: Are the other members of the resistance people or computer programs? Is the Matrix effectively multi-player, or does each individual have his own Matrix and is only interacting with programs? Is Neo the last remaining human, or are there others? Is Neo, himself, actually human, or is he just a computer program? Is Smith actually a rogue program, or is he just another part of the illusion the machines have built?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/03/12 18:29:22


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I liked the Matrix series a lot until the last 2 minutes of the 2nd movie when Neo did "magic" in the real world.

Then, it got stupid.

Oh, well.

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RVA

I think the premise relies on technophobia, especially regarding integrating communications technology into routine consciousness, that is simply not as threatening any more. As such, a Matrix movie at this point (or indeed when Matrix II and III were released) would be more about all the cool things you can do inside of a reality simulating computer program rather than about reconsidering the value and nature of truth. That is to say, it would be a movie about playing a really advanced videogame. And that's even less relevant than the technophobic angle.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/03/12 18:33:33


   
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kronk wrote:I liked the Matrix series a lot until the last 2 minutes of the 2nd movie when Neo did "magic" in the real world.

Then, it got stupid.

Oh, well.


heh. I actually remember coming out of the cinema and talking to my friends about how it might have been a matrix within a matrix. ...but yeh no luck on that one.

The point the series turned bad for me was the half hour long conversation with some old guy in a white suit which was hard enough to understand when you did actually care what he was saying, impossible when you don't.
   
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The Great State of Texas

I was more ok with the 3rd movie, and by that I mean the battle for Zion. I could give a ^*%)( about Neo or the Matrix or whatever at that point. I just wanted to see sentient robots vs. mecha in Gunfight at the Center of the Earth.

-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
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