Mary Kay wrote:
"What you say interests me and, I guess I've never really got over being an English major. I adore symbolism and coded messages and all that sorta stuff."
Heh. Well, then, if you only ever see one series of films where stylishly trench-coated people float through the air dodging bullets and fighting machine intelligences with kung fu, see *The Matrix* and its sequels.
"I shall have to give it serious thought because I'll have to overcome my truly serious personal aversion to things which mess with the borders of reality in ways I find disturbing."
Well, that all depends. If you do see the film and you take Morpheus' (Laurence Fishburne's) explanation for what human beings are to the machines at face value, the whole thing can become comfortingly silly.
If you assume the possibility that he's misinformed or omitting some complexity for the sake of dramatic impact, well, the heebie-jeebie factor goes right back up again.
And Damien wrote:
"For this reason, I find _The Matrix Reloaded_ to be a more interesting movie than _The Matrix_, although the latter is a better movie overall."
You took the words right out of my gray matter! The first film is more atmospheric, better paced, constructed in a tighter fashion, and seemed to put the characters at a bit more risk (the bruises and blood were more frequent, and they felt more real). On the other hand, the second film handed out five new mysteries or lines of speculation for every old one it purported to answer, and I'm an absolute sucker for that sort of thing.
A good post, Patrick. Cripes, we have so much trouble in skiffy lit circles defining terms like "skiffy lit" itself-- I have zero desire to get bogged down in a discussion of something as subjective and razor-edged as "depth." Although I will snarkily add that for some folks "deep" is inevitably symonymous with "unpopular and obscure," so of course the *Matrix* films can't possibly qualify. Wink, wink.
I rather enjoyed the film despite its pacing flaws, and have had a rousing few days of pleasant correspondence about it in a few forums out in 'net-land, all sorts of convoluted "what did the autonomous artificial intelligence know, and when did he/she/it know it?" stuff.
If I may hazard a generalization, a lot of the people in my circles of acquaintance aren't so much enjoying the "grand philosophy" of the *Matrix* films as the novel chance to analyze a pair of films where almost nothing, deep or shallow, intelligent or silly, logical or ludicrous, seems to be left to chance by the film-makers. Much of the symbolism is no doubt totally superfluous to the plot and the revelations promised in the third film, but virtually every tiny little passing detail seems to have been stuck there on purpose-- everything from the symbolism of character names to the subtle hints in dialogue and the teeny-tiny color-scheme and clothing details.
The Wachowskis *might* be all sorts of things-- silly, pretentious, etc., but they plainly care enough to leave the landscape of each film scattered with clues. As a result, they not only invite audience speculation, they *reward* it in a way that, say, the *Star Wars* prequels painfully don't.
And, like I said, that's rare and novel, and it leads me (and others!) to say, "Eh, so what?" to various other blemishes in the story.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 3 |
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