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Post by ganews on Apr 5, 2024 9:01:53 GMT -5
Maybe it's just an artifact from reading about a planned 5th movie on Polygon, but I'm reading a lot of chatter about how great the Animatrix was, better than any live action sequel. I taped it off Adult Swim 20 years ago but now remember nothing of it except for the one with two people swordfighting blindfolded as foreplay.
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Apr 5, 2024 10:21:26 GMT -5
Maybe it's just an artifact from reading about a planned 5th movie on Polygon, but I'm reading a lot of chatter about how great the Animatrix was, better than any live action sequel. I taped it off Adult Swim 20 years ago but now remember nothing of it except for the one with two people swordfighting blindfolded as foreplay. I think the swordfighting one would’ve been mind blowing to a kid in the early aughts, but I thought the attempt at realistic looking CGI animation looked absolutely awful when I watched it a couple of years back. I do not personally think the Animatrix as a whole is as good as the original, but there is a segment about some juvenile deliquents finding a glitch in the Matrix that I think is genuinely great and the only reason I’d rank it below the original is that it feels kind of slight (I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense at all, I just don’t think it’s trying to do anything especially substantive). There’s also a neo-noir segment that I thought was a lot of fun. Apart from that, the other seven segments never really rose above the level of “pleasant enough way to pass the time”. That said, if you wanted the Wachowskis to give you a ton of lore on the backstory of how the machines took over, you get that in the first two segments (which, in spite of the sort of social commentary you might expect if you were to learn that the machines were once marginalized beings before enslaving humanity, I found the actual lore itself incredibly dull). Honestly, I think you probably found it kind of unmemorable because the film is just kind of unmemorable. |
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Post by Celebith on Apr 9, 2024 0:58:40 GMT -5
I'm not even convinced The Matrix is a good movie, let alone one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made (R-O-F-L-M-A-O). The most baffling aspect of this movie is when people say (as Nude does here) "oh, I thought this was Underworld-style dopey white-girls-in-leather-catsuits mall-goth beat-em-up hokum, but that was before I realized it was a trans allegory!" The spot this wretched film occupies in our cultural consciousness would be better filled by Fight Club*, or Strange Days, or They Live, or literally any of the anime and wuxia films the Wachowski sisters wholesale lifted this movie's cinematography from. Shit, if you're going to hold up a mid-tier live-action anime film with bong-rip-tier philosophy, Inception is just as good as The Matrix, and you don't have to listen to fucking KMDFM in the process. * p.s., on the topic of trans allegories, surely fight club counts? tyler is explicitly ed norton trying on a hyper-macho persona, but there's nothing in the film to contradict the idea that marla is also a persona that our boy(?) eddie could try on - the persona (s)he wants to adopt, instead electing to become a masculine cartoon rather than embrace a feminine true self. a dear friend of mine turned me on to this reading of the film, saying that it helped him work out his own sexuality as a teen. sounds about right to me.)People may have been slow to pick up the 'trans allegory' bits because a)the Wachowskis hadn't transitioned yet, making it less prominent, and b)almost all the philosophical discourse around it was about Baudrillard, and Simulation and Simulacra. It seems more like reading Everything, Everywhere, All At Once as a commentary on ADHD brain, which one of the Daniels apparently didn't realize himself until someone pointed it out to him, and then he achieved total enlightenment. Sure, Switch was originally going to present as different genders in and out of the Matrix (I don't remember which was which) but overall, they didn't play much with the ability to present differently 'online'. Shit, Ready Player One did a better job of that. Which wasn't bad as far as that goes. The SFX and soundtrack and other stuff were all pretty cool, and bullet time wasn't in use much at all. I liked it more because it seemed like a great adaptation of White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension RPG setting, down to all the philosophical bits. The sequels didn't hold up, until Resurrections, which was fun enough considering that WB was going to do it with or without the Ws' contributions. But it is like Star Wars, or Hendrix or take your pick of other revolutionary art / artists, where they split the timeline into a 'before' and 'after'. Star Wars doesn't seem amazing these days in part because it reshaped / refocused what 'these days' are. In a better world, They Live and Satoshi Kon would both get waaaaay more respect than they do. Has Kon been involved with anything that has been less than great? I don't run into Fight Club fanbois much these days, but I'm definitely using your trans allegory argument the next time I run into a true believer. It works, and also trolls them. |
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Post by Celebith on Apr 9, 2024 1:04:36 GMT -5
And my actual take is that Reloaded and Revolutions are massively UNDER-rated. Great films all. If the TI ever starts group-watching bootleg movies again, I nominate Revolutions. I haven't seen it since the one time in the theater, saw the first two many times. timezones make it difficult, but I'm always DTF (down to filmwatch). |
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Post by ganews on Apr 9, 2024 11:18:22 GMT -5
overall, they didn't play much with the ability to present differently 'online'. Shit, Ready Player One did a better job of that. The reason they shouldn't have trusted Cypher is because he is still bald inside the matrix. No (white, anyway) bald man imagines or designs his true inner self as bald, just like old people are surprised to look in the mirror and see an old person. |
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