Sunday, November 09, 2003
Well, you all knew it was coming. The Feline Anarchist Matrix: Revolutions review. It was, ahem, inevitable. I was going to post it last night but I had unfortunately broken my computer. Yes, very scary, especially as I hadn't backed it up recently. I did not relish the idea of losing all that data. But I done fixed it today, so all is well.
Yesterday Heather and I braved the Ann Arbor bus system to get to the Briarwood Mall, which is an odd sort of place. It's confusingly set up, even by mall standards, which are generally geared towards getting you turned around and thoroughly confused. The buses seem to run on the same principles. The hours at which they run are sporadic, unpredictable and, on weekends, end before 7 pm. The reasons for this are much speculated-upon, but to no ultimate avail.
So. The movie.
It was disappointing, but we were all expecting that. I'm still debating whether it was better or worse than the second one was. Reloaded was so bad that it was funny, and things like the freeway scene had some redeeming value. Revolutions was bad, but not even bad enough to be funny. Or bad in ways that were just boring, like being far too chatty at bits, and having highly unimpressive fights. So while Reloaded pissed me off for being bad, Revolutions left me with almost no emotion about its badness. Still deciding if that means it was worse or better.
Perhaps I ought to warn you that this may very well (i.e. certainly will) contain some very blatant movie spoilers. So do not read on unless you don't mind such things. Consider yourself duly warned.
I take this time to mention that the Lions just beat the Bears, 12-10! LIONS VICTORY!!! (we love you Jason Hanson)
Back to Matrix.
I was thinking about listing out the movie's merits and faults, but, to be quite honest, there just aren't many merits worth noting, so we'll just deal with the faults here.
The first, and potentially most egregious: the nature of the peace reached between Zion and the Machines. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the whole original point was to free all those humans who were being used as meat power by the Machines. Was that not at least a part of the whole freaking point? So they make peace. Which is nice, really. But what is conveniently not mentioned is the fact that the Machines still have however many billions of humans being harvested for organic power. Do we no longer care about them? Even accepting that many would prefer the Matrix to reality, did we just give up on the whole 'freedom of choice' bit? Eh? Eh?
The Merovignian. Still hanging around. No one got rid of him, so far as I can tell. Heck, so far as I can tell, they didn't even get rid of his skeazy S&M club. Are we just ignoring whatever brand of mischief he's intent on causing? He had such potential to be a cool, or at least funny, character. And they make no use of him at all. At least in Reloaded that whole restaurant scene had comedic value. The club, this time, was dealt with so summarily that it didn't even have time to be properly funny. Plus it didn't have Captain Bracca in it, so it lost a good 2/3rds of its awesomeness value.
Morpheus. Better than the pathetic prophet of Reloaded, but now reduced to a doughy nonentity. You don't care about him one way or the other by the end of the movie. He's ineffectual and almost extraneous at points. Lightyears away from the nonlame leader of the original Matrix. Sad. Just sad.
Trinity. Sure, Neo loves her, that's nice. As the audience, we probably should have a pretty big vested interest in her fate. When she snuffed it, I honestly didn't give a rat's excretory system. Oops. Did I just ruin the movie for you? Sorry. I didn't care. It was a lame scene. They had to kill her off because otherwise Neo wouldn't be able to do what he was supposed to do. He wouldn't be able to Jesus-ify himself properly. Ugh.
The Oracle. Why? Because I believe. Do you know the answer? Yes and no. Will you tell me? No and yes. Why? Because. It was only infinitely annoying. Plus the whole our-actress-upped-and-died-on-us-so-now-we-need-a-story-for-why-the-Oracle-suddenly-looks-different bit.
The Mobil Avenue train station. Limbo, anyone? Sheesh. They couldn't have looked up the Old French or Latin root word for limbo or something and based their train station name on something like that. Lazy gits.
The Manifestation of the Great and Malevolent Machine Mind. It's a fat man's face stuck on a giant metal porcupine. Which emits squids from its pores. If someone can tell me why this is good, rather than silly, I'll be quite willing to listen to them.
The Ultimate Battle. It was extremely tame for the final, most important Matrix battle yet. There have been Matrix battles far more impressive. For a Matrix battle it was very mild and uninspired. OK, so they displaced a lot of rain. Big frelling deal. They didn't do anything cool, they just flew at each other and went through walls. Nothing fancy. Another point, which was made by another review I read. Two men in all black. Fighting at night. In the rain. Sometimes it was a bit difficult to tell who was who and just what was going on. Sigh.
Ay, there's lots more, but if I get into it all we'll be here until next year. I move on.
Oh, and you ought to go see this pretty little tidbit, called The Meatrix. It's funny because it's so well and appropriately done. Makes me want to rally against those damn agricultural conglomorates. Just go see, it's highly worth it.
Friday night I actually didn't end up going to the WORK opening. Oops. I really did intend to go there, seriously. But I was wending my way through the diag, and ran across a large group of people I knew playing football, and they demanded that I join them. Well, it was a really nice night, and you all know how much I like football. Sigh. I'll get down there eventually. It's not as though the show's going anywhere for a while.
Roommate stupidity never ceases to amaze. She's coming down with some sort of cold which involves coughing. So of course she goes out to have a smoke. Stupid and nasty on it's own, but now I have to smell the crud. Ughck. She is also looking forward to Thanksgiving, because she gets to go home and stock up on Nyquil, Percoset and Aderol. Which she takes like candy. I honestly have no idea how people like this manage to exist in real life.
Lunar eclipse last night, it was pretty cool. We could see the moon, but the lights make it so that you can't see the stars, so when it was eclipsed the entire sky looked black. It was freaky. Very Krikkit-esque. Only dorks will get that reference.
As mentioned above, Lions victory today! Ha HA! Almost entirely thanks to Jason Hanson, our kicker. Lawd bless 'im. It was 10-9 up until the last minute or so, and then we got the ball and kicked it. Then the Bears had it with time to make a move, and we intercepted it. Thusly saving the game. Ahhhh, so wonderful. All of the TVs on my side of the hall were acting spastically, so I went to watch the game with Beth. We discussed the attractiveness of Joey Harrington. And we were very, very happy when they won. Ah yes.
Pity about the Dolphins. They went down 31-7 to the Titans. Sigh. I tend to think that it's because they still are using their backup quarterback Griese, as opposed to the starter Jay Fiedler. I think he's still injured. A damn shame, that.
OK, going to Burger King with Amanda and Beth now, for the sheer, unadulterated hell of it. Go Lions!
3:07 PM
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