Matrix Spoiler

[breathesgelatin]

This review kinda sums up my opinion:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/fi...iew.asp?ID=677

Oh and one more thing:

KEYMAKER???? Did no one think of Ghostbusters??? Keymaster and Gatekeeper??? That just sums up the movie for me. I can't believe it takes itself so seriously.

[breathesgelatin]

More funniness:

Destiny may have drawn Neo and Trinity together, but you couldn't imagine them sustaining a five-minute conversation.

From http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/m...s%5Ftop%5Fheds

hahahahaha!

As you can see, I have a sort of personal vendetta against this movie.. Hope it doesn't offend anyone... I normally don't take very strong positions on stuff, but whatever!

[SilverTurtle]

I loved it. Although I am rather eager for Revolutions, which I expect to be better, only because it will have an actual ending.

The philosophy, actually, was a lot of German stuff - not that I'm all that familiar with it, but I've read a few different references to that in various articles- and I find it interesting. You can think about it or you can just wait for the fighting.

I really liked the fact that as stuff is revealed, you have to question it. Like *SPOILERS* when Neo says to the Oracle "you're not human" & you think.. 'why didn't anyone think of that in the first movie? how do they know she's not just lying to them?' Or with the Architect towards the end.. why should Neo believe him? etc. *END SPOILERS*

And I loved the fight scenes. I usually hate car chase scenes, but the fighting was nice. The "Burly Brawl" - the one everyone here is saying was too long- LOVED it. I watch a lot of Hong Kong films, so I'm like "enough plot, more fighting!!!"

I think it's funny some people said it was too video-gameish. Since the point is that they're in a computer program.. I think that's actually a big accomplishment on the F/X team's part.

So- GO SEE IT

[sigmadiva]

I saw it last night and it is okay. I can agree with what most have said so far. The fight scence with 1 x 10e67 Mr. Smiths got boring after a while. The excitement for me was that the movie seemed to take you through different levels. Its like you start on the outside and with each major scene you go a little deeper.

I was dissapointed with Neo's conversation with the Matrix Architect. I felt that the conversation should have been deeper, revealed more information. It seemed like one issue, making choices, was talked to death.

My problem with Keanu is that whenever I see him in something I think like 'Bill and Ted does the Matrix'. I forget if he was Bill or Ted, but which ever he was, I always see him as that. His acting in the Matrix:Reloaded seemed a bit stiff. I felt Trinity's deep love for Neo, but I did not feel Neo's love for Trinity.

All in all I would see it. I love Sci-Fi. Off topic, I loong for a classic Godzilla movie.

[Lady Pi Phi]

Originally posted by breathesgelatin
...I can't believe it takes itself so seriously.

I don't think they do take themselves seriously. I don't think their out there trying to give the world a philosophy lesson. They are trying to entertain.

In a interview I saw with Jada Pinkett-Smith I think she said it perfectly. Basically she said this movie as all the eye candy that you want, and for those that might want to think it a little it does that too. I'm not here to debate philosophy with you though. I'm sure you're not the only one who hated the movie. I was confused many a time, but I enjoyed it, and thought it was well done. I am definitly looking forward to the third one.

[kddani]

Originally posted by breathesgelatin
Did anyone else not dig it? I mean for reasons other than just the ending?

I'm with you, breathesgelatin. I wasn't a fan of the first one to begin with, but I got dragged to see this one last night. We were at some small theatre in nowheresville, OH (went to a wedding with a friend, we stayed overnight b/c it was such a long drive).... so it was a smaller screen. Guess i'm spoiled from the big theatres around here, but I was going cross-eyed during the fight scenes.... it was a lot to look at.

BG- i agree with pretty much everything you said. I was definately not very impressed...... I thought the storyline was lame and it was way too long (what, about 2 hours 20 minutes or so?).... of course I went to the 10pm showing and had been up since 5AM and was dead tired. I kept on praying that it would be over.

So yeah, we can be the dissenters here for all of you who like it, more power to you though

[33girl]

I just can't believe it was the future and that cleavagy chick was wearing a dress w/ a PEPLUM. I would think they would have been outlawed by then.

I didn't see Matrix 1 so I had no clue what was happening, but I maintain that the mark of a good sequel is you shouldn't have to see the first one to enjoy the sequel. The keymaker thing had Mr 33 and me laughing too. A big group of us went and the 2 guys who set it up are OBSESSED with the Matrix. I think they were offended that we were chuckling.

BTW Pittsburghers and anyone else that has a Loew's theater - the Loew's Club is the WAY TO GO and worth the extra $$. I don't think I will be able to watch a movie in regular seats anymore.

[DWAlphaGam]

Originally posted by breathesgelatin

Oh and one more thing:

KEYMAKER???? Did no one think of Ghostbusters??? Keymaster and Gatekeeper???

HAHAHA, yeah, I thought that too (I posted it earlier in the movies you saw this weekend thread).



I really liked the movie, but I had a massive headache afterwards from watching all of the fighting and chase scenes. Also, some of the scenes (i.e., the sex/dance scene, the 1,000 Agent Smith scene, and the freeway scene) were about 4 times as long as they had to be. I am going to see it again to see if I can figure out the answer to some of the questions I had afterwards, such as:



(WARNING: SPOILERS!!!)



(1) Is the Keymaker a program or a human? I thought he was a program like the Oracle until he got shot.

(2) If Persephone (presumably) is a human, is her husband (the French guy, I can't remember his name) human as well or is he a program? I thought he was a program protecting another program (the Keymaker) like that dude protecting the Oracle, but then Persephone went off about how they used to be in love, which machines are not capable of (as was drilled into our heads by the stupid-ass dance/sex scene).

(3) Is Zion/the future "real" world actually part of the Matrix? How else would Neo have those powers at the end?

(4) Why the hell do they keep putting Keanu Reeves in movies if he can't act his way out of a wet paper bag? (Although I'll probably never find the answer to that one!)

[SigmaChiCard]

Okay, the following is something a buddy of mine sent me that hee picked up from some site, you can read this as wise thoughts on a profound movie, or bullshit by a fan....whichever, but enjoy neverthless......

===========================

Going into The Matrix: Reloaded, I wasn't worried if the fight scenes or special effects would measure up to the first filmit was the metaphysics that bothered me. The first Matrix was such a neat allegory of Gnostic philosophy, I was more concerned with how the Brothers Wachowski could successfully extend the metaphor into three films than whether they could pull off even more virtuoso examples of cinematic ass-stomping. What was mindblowing about the first movie, after all, wasn't the fight choreography or bullet time, but its brave assertion that the banal, day-to-day reality we live in isn't the real world. In that sense, all the wire-fu was just the candy coating on the red pill the filmmakers were offering to every high school student and cubicle slave in the world. (Though, since I study martial arts myself, I found the idea of kung fu as being metaphorical for something happening in hyper-reality, a la Thibault's mysterious circle, to be pretty darn appealing.)

Thankfully, Reloaded more than allayed my fears, even if it seems that half the reviewers either didn't understand what the Wachowskis were getting at, or else were only paying attention during the highway chase. Watching the movie, I was personally less impressed by the fists of digital fury than by the Brothers' evident familiarity with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the theology of Origen of Alexandria. Seen in the light of the books they're referencing, the movie's plot is brilliant; of course, to the non-initiate, the characters' actions and dialogue seems arbitrary and incomprehensible, and the exposition is just filler between car crashes. It would seem, therefore, that a bit of exegesis of The Matrix: Reloaded is warranted. But be warned:

If you haven't seen the movie yet, don't read on. There are some major spoilers.

Much like that other great Keanu Reeves vehicle, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, The Matrix: Reloaded centers around the hero's journey into the Underworld. Frazier, in The Golden Bough, notes that it is a prophetessin this case, the Oraclewho sends the hero off on his journey, from where he returns with special knowledge. And, of course, that's just what Neo does, though it would have been a while lot more amusing if he'd had Alex Winter along. (The Oracle probably isn't entirely benign, by the way, even though she may not consciously intend any harm: She is, after all, the one who sent Neo on the path to the Core.)

Neo's first task is to rescue the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim, doing his best Rick Moranis impression) from the Merovingian, who is a daemonin both senses of the wordleft over from a previous version of the Matrix. (The Merovingians were the ruling Frankish dynasty; they were succeeded by Charlemagne's family, the Carolingians, and then by the Capetians, who thought they were descended from Christ.) The guy in the health food store where I buy my granola and soy milk thinks that The Merovingian was one of Neo's predecessors, but all the explanation I need, as well as the way I understand his obvious fascination with human pleasures, is found in Genesis 6:4 "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them. . ." According to various sources, including Kabbalah, this mating of men and angels (here, a computer program from an earlier version of the Martrix) is what produced various monsters, such as the vampires and wraiths that serve the Merovingian. Dante, bringing a Christian sensibility to the proceedings, placed these monsters in his Inferno. Thus, though the Merovingian is sort of an antediluvian remnant of the former world, he's also (as is shown by the fact that his wife is named Persephone) kind of like Hades, the holder of the keys to the underworld. What the Keymaker does, much like the golden bough the Sybil gives Aeneas, is open doors and permit Neo access to the underworldor, in this case, the Core.

After the requisite battles and explosions, Neo gets into the Core and finds The Architect. Considering that The Architect built the Matrix, you might think that he's God. Of course, he's nothing of the sort. In Gnostic theology, it is Satan, not God, who has created the world in order to imprison humanity. It is also the Architect who is unleashing the Sentinels to destroy Zion; that is, beginning the Battle of Armageddon. It is my prediction that in the third and final film, it will be revealed that there is a power behind the Architect, and that he is the one who sent the One into the Matrix. It is also my prediction that this guy will look a lot like Neo.

The important thing is choosing what to believe from the raft of condescending exposition that the Architect inflicts on Neo. He says, basically, that though ninety-nine percent of humans believe in the illusion of the Matrix, there is that troublesome one percent (comparable to the few awakened Gnostic true believers) who refuse to believe in the created world. This tends to produce massive amounts of instability, and crashes the system. (Not coincidentally, most of the people in Zion seem to be black or Hispanic, which makes perfect sense: If you're a white suburban Matrix resident, driving your Matrix SUV to your Matrix golf club, why doubt the nature of reality?) The solution is that they allow the dissidents to escape to Zion, which they can then periodically destroy. They have also created the Prophecy of the One, who is in fact a device sent by the machines into the "real" world so that his knowledge of humanity may be integrated into the system in order to further perfect the Matrix-illusion, and then allowed to re-start Zion so that the cycle can begin again. The idea of multiple creations and a cycle of created and destroyed worlds is, needless to say, also found in theologies as wildly variant as the Mayan and the Buddhist.

The idea that the Prophecyand Zionwere just another means of control is lifted right out of French philosophy. The first movie made use of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation; this movie seems to be dipping into Foucault and Derrida, who wrote that the systems of power and control are all-pervasive, and language is one of the ways they make their influence felt. The Prophecy is, like all prophecies, speech, and thus language. More importantly, it is a religion, and, as John Zerzan writes, the purpose of a religion is to manipulate signs, that is, words, for the purpose of control. Zion is the longed-for millennial promised land; by keeping the war between good and evil foremost in their hearts, even the freed humans are kept from doubting their own world, from thinking too hard about why things are the way they are.

Understanding why things are the way they are requires an understanding of another holy text: Asimov's Laws of Robotics. The machines, as demonstrated by Smith's need to try to kill Neo even after being "freed," don't have free will. (Likewise, in Gnostic theology, angels and other such divine beings also don't have free willonly humans do.) The bit about the machines needing human bio-energy to survive, as Morpheus (the dreamer) explained in the first movie, is bullshit. The machines keep humanity alive but imprisoned, even after taking over the world, because they were created to serve people. In other words, the machines would like to destroy humanity, but they CAN'T. Instead, they need a human to make the choice.

As the Architect reveals, Neo is not the first One, but rather the sixth. Why the sixth? The answer is that Neo's five previous incarnations represent the Five Books of Moses that make up the Old Testament. Neo (representing Christ, and thus the New Testament) differs from his five predecessors in his capacity to love. In the work of Origen of Alexandria and other Church Fathers, it is love ("eros" in Greek) that compels Christ to come down from the heavens to redeem humanity. Furthermore, "neo" means "new"as in "New Covenant." In Neo, the machines have finally found the iteration of the One who will make the illogical choice of saving Trinity and dooming humanity. [Note to the theology geeks who've been e-mailing me: I know the difference
between eros and agape, but Origen used both terms for reasons I'd have to delve into pre-Socratic philosophy to explain.]

This is the Architect's real purpose in giving Neo a choice between two doors. At once all human and all machine, rather than being a device to refine the Matrix into a more perfect simulation of reality, re-found Zion, and thus continue the endless cycle of death and rebirthas the Architect says he isthe purpose of the One is to be manipulated into estroying all of humanity. However, not having free will themselves, the machines are not able to comprehend it in othersand thus Neo, being also human, is a bit of a wild card. It is Neo's destinyas was Christ's in Origen's theologyto break the cycle of death and rebirth, and offer humanity a new future. This is shown by the fact that, by the end of the movie, Neo (and also, incidentally, Smith) gain power over machines in the "real world" which shows that he has power not only over the firstlevel simulated world of the Matrix, but also the second-level simulation of Zion.

Miscellaneous touches I liked:

* Neo and Trinity are shown making love beneath an arch. In religious iconography, being shown beneath an arch is a traditional sign of divinity.
* Masaccio's fresco at the right, for instance, shows the Holy Trinity beneath an arch.
* The fact that The One comes from the machine world is a brilliant way to write around the fact that Keanu Reeves can't act.
* Neo's own gift of prophecy is explainable by the fact that, like the Oracle, he comes from beyond the Matrix that is, the world and thus exists outside of time, much like God in St. Augustine's theology.
*I saw the movie sitting next to a really cute girl.


Things to be wrapped up in the third movie:

*Who's behind The Architect?
*Neo will need to make a choicebut what is this choice?
*The climactic Battle of Armageddon between Good and Evil will have to
take place but what will happen afterwards?
*What's Agent Smith's role in all this? His ability to multiply is
reminiscent of the demon Jesus exorcised ("my name is Legion"), but I
bet he's going to wind up being an ally of Neo's.
*How is Neo able to zap the machines in the "real world"?
*How did Tank die?
*Will Link live to see Zee again?
*Will Niobe leave Jason Lock and go back to Morpheus?
*Will priestly cassocks become a fashion trend for men?
*What pivotal role will be performed by Neo's adoring acolyte?
*How will Bane sabotage the human defense of Zion? Will Neo kill him?
*What led Morpheus to the Oracle in the first place?
*Is the "real world" only another level of simulation, an outer matrix,
indicative of matrices upon matrices, onionlike in their layering upon
each other?
*What're they going to do about the fact that Gloria Foster, who played
The Oracle, died?
*Will Neo wake up and say, "Bill, dude, you won't believe this bitchin'
dream I just had. . ."?

[chideltjen]

my friends were all waiting for Rick Moranis to come out of the keymaster room.

Yeah... the "trailer" for M3 didn't really leave a whole lot behind. It was a collection of images and a music montage from the next film. Very lil dialog. Leaves a lot of questions. Guess that was the point. But still wasn't worth sitting around waiting for the longest credit roll since Apocolpyse Now!

I don't really understand the story so I figured I would see the second Matrix for all the CGI effects. I will agree that some scenes were just too freakin long. The Smith/Neo fight could have been cut in half.
I did think it was hilarious when Neo was with the architech and all of the TV screens would show his inner emotions. The fact that Keanu was flipping off the camera, saying "bullsh*t", and ripping out his hair had me rolling in the isles.

Ok my friend had a theory as to why the dancing/orgy/rave scene was actually that long and even in the movie. Supposedly it was included in that aspect of the story to show that Zion was going to party hearty before the machines come and take over. In the context of the movie itself, it wanted to show that these people were true humans and not hooked up to machines anymore. Only true humans could feel desire, passion, and love.

Is Zion/the future "real" world actually part of the Matrix? How else would Neo have those powers at the end?

Zion is where all the "free minds" are. We are all hooked up to the Matrix via the holes in our heads and are controlled by a machine that has programed our life. Well these guys in Zion unhooked themselves as a rebellion to the machines and are carrying on in what life should be. Why Neo had his super powers in Zion... I dunno. But I was hoping to clear up the other part.

[steelepike]

Originally posted by SigmaChiCard

*I saw the movie sitting next to a really cute girl.

Thats the most important thing in that long post.

And furthermore that was an amazing look into the archetypes and symbolism used in the matrix. Much more indept than i had thought.