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× Talk abut Movies & TV here. Just tell us what you have been watching. Have hyper-academic discussions on visual semiotics. Whatever, it's all good.

Matrix 4: The Search for More Money

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31 Jul 2021 22:10 #325083 by ChristopherMD
The first movie holds up on it's own and that's also kind of the problem. Neither of the sequels were as good. Also I've met people over the years who never watched the animatrix shorts and had no idea what happened at the end. That being said the 4th movie comes out later this year and I don't know if I should be excited or not. What's everyone else's take?
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31 Jul 2021 22:20 - 31 Jul 2021 22:21 #325085 by Gary Sax
Literally the only thing I've heard is that the premise is a huge plot twist and that's a positive to me.

I saw Jupiter Ascending and it was a terrible film (sky rollerblades!) but it has more visual and story creativity in its pinkie than most sci fi has in their entire three movie trilogy. So I will probably see this, bad or not.
Last edit: 31 Jul 2021 22:21 by Gary Sax.
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01 Aug 2021 00:51 #325088 by n815e
The Matrix reminds me of the invasion of Iraq. There was never any real plan on what to do after they freed humanity from the only things keeping them alive, on a barren mechanized planet that couldn’t support them; to pull people from everything they’ve known and suddenly tell them by the way, what you had was better but now you are free to starve and kill each other.

I never liked the Matrix for one simple observation: once you convince someone that “reality” was just a manufactured construct, there’s no possible way for that person to ever believe what they are experiencing is grounded in any sort of reality again. Everything is forever suspect of being just another fantasy construct. Even Neo’s entire experience could just likely be a fantasy to keep him engaged and productive. You can’t remain mentally healthy afterwards.

I don’t blame the guy who betrayed them over steak dinner. Why fight and die for a miserable, schizophrenic existence?
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01 Aug 2021 08:40 #325089 by Jackwraith
Except that, technically, everyone goes through that questioning of existence thing every day. It's the Ship of Theseus question that was first posed by Heraclitus. The original example is about the ship that Theseus and his companions brought back from Crete (minotaur, etc.) It was supposedly put in a museum by the Athenians and gradually rotted away. As pieces decayed, they were replaced until eventually the whole ship had been replaced, piecemeal. The question is: Is that the same ship or is it a perfect replacement?

Humans lose consciousness at least once a day by going to sleep. When you wake up, how do you know that you are still you? Is it possible that you've been replaced by a replica, just like the ship? Yes. You don't know because you weren't aware of what was happening while you were unconscious. This has been posed as a question of whether Star Trek transporters are suicide machines, since the scientific principle is that people are broken down at the atomic level and reconstructed in a new place. Those are replicas by any definition, which means one version disintegrated and a perfect copy was produced.

The same principle applies in The Matrix. Just because the overall system has been revealed to be an artificial construct makes it no different than every time you wake up from a nap. How do you know that the world is "real" and that you are still you?
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01 Aug 2021 10:47 #325090 by Msample
The first movie was very good; the sequels became more bloated and filled with extended navel gazing from a plot standpoint. Subsequent movies from the Wachowskis saw huge budgets and rather disappointing reception. I'll be surprised if they can recapture the magic of the original. Besides Keanu and Carrie Anne Moss they've brought back some other actors like the Merovingian, the Kid, Niobe. But still I am skeptical.
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01 Aug 2021 10:48 #325091 by Ah_Pook
The first matrix was pretty okay. Everything else matrix has been fucking terrible full stop. There could be a universe where this 20 years later matrix is not fucking terrible I guess, but I'm expecting it to stink to high heaven.
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01 Aug 2021 10:56 #325092 by hotseatgames

Ah_Pook wrote: The first matrix was pretty okay. Everything else matrix has been fucking terrible full stop. There could be a universe where this 20 years later matrix is not fucking terrible I guess, but I'm expecting it to stink to high heaven.


Quite a bit of The Animatrix was good.
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01 Aug 2021 12:06 #325093 by Sagrilarus
There are 100,000 floor-length black trench coats hanging in closets right now, awaiting another four weeks of use when this film comes out.
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01 Aug 2021 16:34 #325094 by n815e
Thanks for the thought provoking response, Jackwraith.

I think here it is more about consistent experience that we all expect out of our “reality”. If I went to sleep and got completely rebuilt, but everything remained consistent, the world met my expectations, I could make relatively accurate predictions of how reality functions…, then it wouldn’t phase me.

But if you do something like in Dark City, where what’s in my mind perceives that everything is no longer consistent or makes sense and this is the new reality, I can’t make the right connections. It’s enough to drive a person insane.

Or maybe think about it in terms of today (and I don’t mean to take the conversation to a political argument). There are many people who have been led to believe things that are simply not true, but they think that these things are reality. And the rest of the world doesn’t conform to that. And you can see they have these emotional explosions or breakdowns and struggle mentally because there is a disconnect. Many of them are choosing to further distance themselves from reality rather than reassess.
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01 Aug 2021 20:19 - 01 Aug 2021 20:19 #325095 by ChristopherMD

hotseatgames wrote:

Ah_Pook wrote: The first matrix was pretty okay. Everything else matrix has been fucking terrible full stop. There could be a universe where this 20 years later matrix is not fucking terrible I guess, but I'm expecting it to stink to high heaven.


Quite a bit of The Animatrix was good.


I've honestly forgotten most of them. Flight of the Osiris was mainly good because it's the only other thing from the studio that made Final Fantasy Spirits Within, iirc, so the animation is hall-of-fame worthy.
The 2-parter that shows the beginning of the Machine War should have had at least some clips at the beginning of the second film, imo. I feel like Neo as human ambassador going to the machine city to talk at the end of the third film doesn't make sense without seeing the machine city ambassador going to the UN before the war.
The only other one I recall is The Kids Story about the kid who believed in Neo's story so much he woke up without a pill. In the films he became the annoying kid who later pilots a mech like the opening episode of an anime. Although if he lived (did he?) I could actually see the character ending up cool as an adult.
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01 Aug 2021 20:34 #325096 by hotseatgames
There was a really cool samurai story done by the director of Ninja Scroll, and there was a noir story on a train done by the creator of Cowboy Bebop.

They don't have anything to do with the story at large, but visually they are worthy of mention.
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01 Aug 2021 22:13 #325097 by Michael Barnes
I love all three Matrix movies, Animatrix, and I’m looking forward to the new one. The problem people have with Reloaded and Revolutions is that the Wachowski sisters -never intended to give you what you thought you wanted-. The first film was really kind of a cultural moment because it brought to a head the influence of anime and Hong Kong cinema. The second was almost like that plus willfully pretentious, cerebral 1970s sci-fi, also opening up the concept of The Matrix to accommodate ghosts and vampires. It also sticks one of the greatest chase scenes in film history (better than those we saw in the 70s) right in the middle of it like it’s no big thing. Then the third movie is all 80s action movie bluster culminating in what may as well be a live action Space Invaders sequence. All of this is wrapped up in mythology, prophecy, Spaghetti Westerns, Cameron/Spielberg/Kubrick/Carpenter/Scott, Joseph Campbell, Jean Baudrillard, Cyberpunk and virtually every nerd point of interest from the 70s up.

The result is a kind of “Unified Nerd Theory, a series of films that brings all of these influences together. It’s like a nerd culture bible in a way that Ready Player One desperately wishes it were.

The problem is that the first film was really groundbreaking- with Bill Pope, the W sisters brought all of that Asian influence to a huge western audience and showed completely new ways of visual storytelling through editing and the “bullet time” technology which completely set the look of movies, TV, videos, and commercials for years. It’s as important a technical milestone as The Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde are.

The production design, the music, the writing...all of it was absolutely on point and culturally impactful at the time. I remember when I saw it the girl I went with, we were both like OK this is going to be another John Mnemonic. But we walked out and the first thing I said was “that was the best science fiction movie I’ve seen since Aliens”. What blew me away about it was seeing things like the blurred multi-fist panel from the Hokuto No Ken manga on the screen, tentacle robots, gunplay that wasn’t embarrassingly stuck in Lethal Weapon days, and genuine Yuen Wo Ping wirework.

I do find myself wishing that they had waited longer to make the others- there’s effects in them that I think were a little too ambitious for the time like the “burly brawl”. But the reality of it is that no movie after the first one would ever live up to most people’s expectations, especially when the Wachowskis were always going to do their own thing regardless of what audiences thought or wanted.

I fully expect the fourth film to be exactly what Lana Wachowski wants it to be...what that is, I have no idea but I can’t wait to find out.

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01 Aug 2021 22:14 #325098 by Msample
I’ll never forget the collective WTF uttered by people in the theater when the fucking cave rave scene came on during the second movie.
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01 Aug 2021 22:21 #325099 by jason10mm
I know I don't get replaced by a replica when I sleep, no one could make one with all my aches and pains, it never would have passed QC :p
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02 Aug 2021 00:01 #325101 by dysjunct

jason10mm wrote: I know I don't get replaced by a replica when I sleep, no one could make one with all my aches and pains, it never would have passed QC :p


I think that’s just planned obsolescence.
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