The Matrix: Resuckified
So I saw the new Matrix movie and it amazes me that they could spend so much money to achieve so little. It lacks almost all of the edgy tension of the original, has far too long preachy “Basil Exposition” infodumps, and has a pointless shot of Keanu Reeves’ butt double’s arse crack. It steals even more liberally from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, taking Gibson’s idea of self-aware programs with a survival instinct and a programmatic Singularity from Neuromancer and Stephenson’s idea from Diamond Age of a subterranean city of unaware, fleshy, dancing meat puppets embedded in a huge computing device. It’s a textbook example of how difficult it is to make a sequel to follow a breakout movie where the sum was greater than its parts. Not really having any idea of how that original synergy worked, some people said “Put More Frozen Bullets In It!”, others said “Put More Luurve In It”, while others said “Put More Slow Kung Fu In It” and all you get is an overflavoured, chaotic mess with, very a la mode, Eurotrash baddies and a new lead bad guy wiz zee impenetrabule fraunch axesaunt.
aaah, it wasn’t that bad. by the way, the frenchies *loved loved loved* the guy with the impenetrable accent. was he really so hard to understand? could the french subtitles on our screen help that much?
yes the romance was nonsense, keanu should keep to looking stunned (his natural look helped his scene with la monica no end), but my big problem in films like this is the animation. if i want to watch a cartoon, i will. but i hate seeing the animation in fight sequences.
Yes, regarding the animation they definitely could have taken the “Less Is More” approach. It’s got that same kind of weird hyperreal unreality to it that spoils a lot of Lord of the Rings – you realise on some fundamental level that what you’re watching isn’t real, or even simulated real, or even a painstakingly crafted simulacrum of real, but a rapidly updated, computer generated, painted animation with superfine textures. Pixar know this which is why they make their stuff so cute that the unreality becomes part of the experience – it seems like these people and Lucas haven’t yet realised how too much of trying to get it too real just turns people off. It’s a bit like those awfully dead Dutch still lifes arrayed in bewildering numbers in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – the pinnaclew of that movement after a century of effort and they were a creative dead end, driven more by corporate one-upmanship and a a painting technology arms race. Now they are about as interesting to look at as the real bowls of fruit sometimes arranged beside them for doubletake effect.