Matrix musings
Nov. 24th, 2003 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatThe voy boards are down again, which is a good thing since I was getting cranky reading some of the posts, maybe voy was too? Hmmm.
At any rate taking yet another break from the marketing plan, actually I hit a wall on it a few hours ago and distracted myself with watching the first half of Fiddler on The Roof on TCM as well as looking through job postings.
Saw Matrix Revolutions this weekend. While it was entertaining, it was not nearly as entertaining or innovative as the first one. The first hour the metaphors came fast and furious, the second hour we got the cliche ridden battle complete with nifty special effects and the Paul Atredies themed epiphany.
Don't understand why all the hoopla, the Matrix philosophy seems pretty straight forward to me. Lots of religious allegory. But nothing really new or reality bending.
Interesting sci-fi triology the Matrix. I've seen all three films now, plus the Animatrix, so I have a pretty good idea what the filmmakers were going for.
The story is basically about humanity coming to grips with it's own creation and the creation learning to deal with it's maker.
Years ago, as documented in the Animatrix - a series of short animated flicks giving us the back story to the triology - humanity created artifical life forms which over time became sentient. Instead of recognizing the sentience, humanity exiled the life forms, enslaved them, or tried to exterminate. The new life forms evolved and surpassed humanity, to the extent that they were able to defeat humanity in a huge war. Desperate humanity declared nuclear war and attempted to blast the sky - removing the source of the mechanical life forms energy which is solar energy or sunlight. It didn't work - the mechanical life forms figured out another means of energizing itself - the bioelectric energy of organic life. So the roles shifted and the machines enslaved humanity, creating a matrix type universe for the human mind to exist in, while the human bodies empowered the machines - a symbiotic existence. The humans who escaped the machines set up their own little city called Zion which they in turn used machines to provide them with electricity and the ability of flight, transportation, and tunneling. One of the council-members - Anthony Zerbe informs Neo that the machines and humanity need each other. Extermination doesn't work. They can't survive without each other.
That's the outside world. Then we have the inside world - known as the Matrix. (The inside world by the way, I found far more interesting.)
The philosophy is explored through a series of allegorical characters which the Wachowski brothers have uplifted from myth. These characters all inhabit the inside world of the Matrix, not the outside world of Zion and Machine City. (And have been explored before in film in better ways. Here they are bit too obvious and two-dimensional. But I'll get to that later.)
First is the oracle and the source which are echoed by neo and agent smith as bipolar opposites whose existence depends on the other one.
The source balances the equation - he represents order. Each equation has only one answer.
The oracle unbalances the equation - she represents chaos. The oracle believes an equation has numerous answers.
The source believes in control and fate. Destiny.
The oracle believes in choice and free will. We make our own destiny.
The source destroys errant programs, exiles or deletes them. The oracle keeps them, collects them, creates them.
Neo creates Agent Smith in the first movie, by infecting him with his own matter. Agent Smith is a program created by the source to keep order in the matrix, after Neo infects Smith and breaks him apart, Smith's program mutates becoming in effect the anti-Neo. As Neo can bend the reality within the matrix to his will, so can Smith - except Neo is attempting to free the minds of those inside, Smith is attempting to assimilate them into himself. (Star Trek Next Generation actually explored this theme much earlier in the series Star Trek with Lucious of Borg, and I Borg). Each time Agent Smith infects someone with his essence they become a copy of Agent Smith (sort of like Invasion of The Body Snatchers), he can now infect humans as well as programs. In fact he is able to enter the human world of Zion, by infecting a human. In Zion he sabotages the plans of the humans, and he blinds Neo, before Neo destroys his human shell - causing him to retreat to the Matrix again where he has become all powerful.
Matrix Revolutions starts with Neo caught between worlds - he is at a way station (which looks exactly like a subway station) waiting for a train which is his only means out of this place on the fringes of both his own consciousness and the Matrix. A limbo of sorts. In order to get back to his body, he must get back to the Matrix, to do this he has to take a train. But the train man works for his enemy, a French man who runs a cafe and who wants Neo to remain in Limbo.
In Matrix Reloaded the French man owns a cafe where the exiled programs are hidden. The exiled programs are those programs who stopped performing their purpose and started acting outside the boundaries of the program - they are the vampires, werewolves, ghosts, basically the denziens of the French man's province, a red and black cafe. In case you can't figure out who the French man is, his wife's name is Persephone, she sits at his right hand and cannot feel love and desperately desires it. In the first movie, Persephone leads Neo to the clockmaker who helps him find the source, when he shows her what love is like - similar to Orpheus' playing a hymn.
In Matrix Reloaded - Trinity, Neo's lover, comes to the cafe and convinces the french man to bring Neo out of limbo with the point of a gun - sort of the reverse of Orpheus, Eurydice goes to rescue him. The French Man is Hades. The train man - Cereburus - the river guide to and from hell. To reach the world of light and illumination - the hero must first pass through hell, and to get out of hell, he must find an emotional connection which a man at the limbo station tells him is love. While in Limbo - Neo meets three people - a man, his wife and their child - satey. The man who speaks to him is knowledge - he tells Neo two things: 1)karma means our purpose, what we are meant to do, 2) love is the connection - how we connect.
Satey - his daughter - represents hope or illumination. The child at the end of the rainbow so to speak. Satey goes to the oracle who has Satey help her make cookies with her hands (which brought up a nostalgic childhood memory by the way - when I was a child, a close friend taught me to mix chocolat chip cookies with my hands, for some reason they tasted better that way, haven't done that in years).
Before Trinity and Morpheus rescue Neo, they visit the oracle who looks different than before (b/c the actress who originally played her died), she tells them she lost a piece of herself but is just in a different shell. When Agent Smith comes to assimilate her, she doesn't fight, partly because she knows a part of herself will remain just inside a new shell.
The next bit of imagery is Neo's trip to the machine city, where he goes to set up a truce with the machines intent on annihilating the humans. Before he reaches the city he is blinded by Agent Smith - blind he is able to see Agent Smith's true form and the true form behind the machines - which is pure red light. No longer does he see the ugly shells. Like Paul Atredies from Dune, Neo is empowered with a second sight when he becomes blind. Trinity can only take him so far, before she dies in his arms. Neo must go on alone. The machines jack him into the Matrix and he fights the negative representation of himself and his fears - the anti-matter. The only way he can win this battle though is by surrendering, allowing Agent Smith to assmiliate him, because the assimilation allows the machines to annihilate Agent Smith, by becoming one, Smith and Neo counter-act one another - allowing the equation to finally balance without conflict. Neo's selfless sacrifice, pushes him beyond concepts of good and evil. His arms are spread in a cruxifixion pose similar to the Christian allegory - of the sacrifice that redeems others.
Nice. But not overly innovative and somewhat clunky in the way it was arrived at. I could have done without all the cliche battle scenes, especially between the world-weary veteran and young kid. Most of the characters were undeveloped. I did not care when Trinity died, since outside of being Neo's love interest, I had no idea who she was. Morpheus receded almost entirely in the background. Niobe seemed to be a Han Solo type character we never really got to know.
Same with the other characters I can't even recall the names of, they were that inconsequential and underdeveloped. The directors/writers seemed more interested in religious allegory and special effects than in character - a mistake George Lucas made in his more recent movies. Which makes the last two Matrix movies somewhat lacking in real emotional impact not to mention a bit flat.
The metaphors? Well if you are into the whole Hades/Persephone mythos - you might want to check out some of Luis Bunenal's films, the film Black Orpheus,
and Orphee. This movie didn't do it very well.
While Hades/Persephone were very attractive, they lacked impact and we saw them very briefly. The whole oracle/source metaphor was a bit clunky and most viewers seemed confused by it. I'm sure it's been done before and better - but my mind can't remember where at the moment. Just as the whole Neo/Smith duel has been done before and while interesting at times, Hugo Weaving really steals the show, it falls a little flat. It's basically the fight between the man and his shadow.
The stunts? Run of the mill. See Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix for good stunts. This one didn't do anything that spectacular. The effects? Disappointing.
In one scene - I could almost see the blue screen - it's when the veteran is being hammered by mechanical squids.
What was entertaining about the Matrix was deciphering the metaphors, and the time I spent with Neo inside the matrix world. But the lack of character development for the characters including Neo, made it difficult for me to care whether they won or loss. Overall? I'd give it a B. Took my mind off things. In retrospect?? I liked the first two films better.
At any rate taking yet another break from the marketing plan, actually I hit a wall on it a few hours ago and distracted myself with watching the first half of Fiddler on The Roof on TCM as well as looking through job postings.
Saw Matrix Revolutions this weekend. While it was entertaining, it was not nearly as entertaining or innovative as the first one. The first hour the metaphors came fast and furious, the second hour we got the cliche ridden battle complete with nifty special effects and the Paul Atredies themed epiphany.
Don't understand why all the hoopla, the Matrix philosophy seems pretty straight forward to me. Lots of religious allegory. But nothing really new or reality bending.
Interesting sci-fi triology the Matrix. I've seen all three films now, plus the Animatrix, so I have a pretty good idea what the filmmakers were going for.
The story is basically about humanity coming to grips with it's own creation and the creation learning to deal with it's maker.
Years ago, as documented in the Animatrix - a series of short animated flicks giving us the back story to the triology - humanity created artifical life forms which over time became sentient. Instead of recognizing the sentience, humanity exiled the life forms, enslaved them, or tried to exterminate. The new life forms evolved and surpassed humanity, to the extent that they were able to defeat humanity in a huge war. Desperate humanity declared nuclear war and attempted to blast the sky - removing the source of the mechanical life forms energy which is solar energy or sunlight. It didn't work - the mechanical life forms figured out another means of energizing itself - the bioelectric energy of organic life. So the roles shifted and the machines enslaved humanity, creating a matrix type universe for the human mind to exist in, while the human bodies empowered the machines - a symbiotic existence. The humans who escaped the machines set up their own little city called Zion which they in turn used machines to provide them with electricity and the ability of flight, transportation, and tunneling. One of the council-members - Anthony Zerbe informs Neo that the machines and humanity need each other. Extermination doesn't work. They can't survive without each other.
That's the outside world. Then we have the inside world - known as the Matrix. (The inside world by the way, I found far more interesting.)
The philosophy is explored through a series of allegorical characters which the Wachowski brothers have uplifted from myth. These characters all inhabit the inside world of the Matrix, not the outside world of Zion and Machine City. (And have been explored before in film in better ways. Here they are bit too obvious and two-dimensional. But I'll get to that later.)
First is the oracle and the source which are echoed by neo and agent smith as bipolar opposites whose existence depends on the other one.
The source balances the equation - he represents order. Each equation has only one answer.
The oracle unbalances the equation - she represents chaos. The oracle believes an equation has numerous answers.
The source believes in control and fate. Destiny.
The oracle believes in choice and free will. We make our own destiny.
The source destroys errant programs, exiles or deletes them. The oracle keeps them, collects them, creates them.
Neo creates Agent Smith in the first movie, by infecting him with his own matter. Agent Smith is a program created by the source to keep order in the matrix, after Neo infects Smith and breaks him apart, Smith's program mutates becoming in effect the anti-Neo. As Neo can bend the reality within the matrix to his will, so can Smith - except Neo is attempting to free the minds of those inside, Smith is attempting to assimilate them into himself. (Star Trek Next Generation actually explored this theme much earlier in the series Star Trek with Lucious of Borg, and I Borg). Each time Agent Smith infects someone with his essence they become a copy of Agent Smith (sort of like Invasion of The Body Snatchers), he can now infect humans as well as programs. In fact he is able to enter the human world of Zion, by infecting a human. In Zion he sabotages the plans of the humans, and he blinds Neo, before Neo destroys his human shell - causing him to retreat to the Matrix again where he has become all powerful.
Matrix Revolutions starts with Neo caught between worlds - he is at a way station (which looks exactly like a subway station) waiting for a train which is his only means out of this place on the fringes of both his own consciousness and the Matrix. A limbo of sorts. In order to get back to his body, he must get back to the Matrix, to do this he has to take a train. But the train man works for his enemy, a French man who runs a cafe and who wants Neo to remain in Limbo.
In Matrix Reloaded the French man owns a cafe where the exiled programs are hidden. The exiled programs are those programs who stopped performing their purpose and started acting outside the boundaries of the program - they are the vampires, werewolves, ghosts, basically the denziens of the French man's province, a red and black cafe. In case you can't figure out who the French man is, his wife's name is Persephone, she sits at his right hand and cannot feel love and desperately desires it. In the first movie, Persephone leads Neo to the clockmaker who helps him find the source, when he shows her what love is like - similar to Orpheus' playing a hymn.
In Matrix Reloaded - Trinity, Neo's lover, comes to the cafe and convinces the french man to bring Neo out of limbo with the point of a gun - sort of the reverse of Orpheus, Eurydice goes to rescue him. The French Man is Hades. The train man - Cereburus - the river guide to and from hell. To reach the world of light and illumination - the hero must first pass through hell, and to get out of hell, he must find an emotional connection which a man at the limbo station tells him is love. While in Limbo - Neo meets three people - a man, his wife and their child - satey. The man who speaks to him is knowledge - he tells Neo two things: 1)karma means our purpose, what we are meant to do, 2) love is the connection - how we connect.
Satey - his daughter - represents hope or illumination. The child at the end of the rainbow so to speak. Satey goes to the oracle who has Satey help her make cookies with her hands (which brought up a nostalgic childhood memory by the way - when I was a child, a close friend taught me to mix chocolat chip cookies with my hands, for some reason they tasted better that way, haven't done that in years).
Before Trinity and Morpheus rescue Neo, they visit the oracle who looks different than before (b/c the actress who originally played her died), she tells them she lost a piece of herself but is just in a different shell. When Agent Smith comes to assimilate her, she doesn't fight, partly because she knows a part of herself will remain just inside a new shell.
The next bit of imagery is Neo's trip to the machine city, where he goes to set up a truce with the machines intent on annihilating the humans. Before he reaches the city he is blinded by Agent Smith - blind he is able to see Agent Smith's true form and the true form behind the machines - which is pure red light. No longer does he see the ugly shells. Like Paul Atredies from Dune, Neo is empowered with a second sight when he becomes blind. Trinity can only take him so far, before she dies in his arms. Neo must go on alone. The machines jack him into the Matrix and he fights the negative representation of himself and his fears - the anti-matter. The only way he can win this battle though is by surrendering, allowing Agent Smith to assmiliate him, because the assimilation allows the machines to annihilate Agent Smith, by becoming one, Smith and Neo counter-act one another - allowing the equation to finally balance without conflict. Neo's selfless sacrifice, pushes him beyond concepts of good and evil. His arms are spread in a cruxifixion pose similar to the Christian allegory - of the sacrifice that redeems others.
Nice. But not overly innovative and somewhat clunky in the way it was arrived at. I could have done without all the cliche battle scenes, especially between the world-weary veteran and young kid. Most of the characters were undeveloped. I did not care when Trinity died, since outside of being Neo's love interest, I had no idea who she was. Morpheus receded almost entirely in the background. Niobe seemed to be a Han Solo type character we never really got to know.
Same with the other characters I can't even recall the names of, they were that inconsequential and underdeveloped. The directors/writers seemed more interested in religious allegory and special effects than in character - a mistake George Lucas made in his more recent movies. Which makes the last two Matrix movies somewhat lacking in real emotional impact not to mention a bit flat.
The metaphors? Well if you are into the whole Hades/Persephone mythos - you might want to check out some of Luis Bunenal's films, the film Black Orpheus,
and Orphee. This movie didn't do it very well.
While Hades/Persephone were very attractive, they lacked impact and we saw them very briefly. The whole oracle/source metaphor was a bit clunky and most viewers seemed confused by it. I'm sure it's been done before and better - but my mind can't remember where at the moment. Just as the whole Neo/Smith duel has been done before and while interesting at times, Hugo Weaving really steals the show, it falls a little flat. It's basically the fight between the man and his shadow.
The stunts? Run of the mill. See Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix for good stunts. This one didn't do anything that spectacular. The effects? Disappointing.
In one scene - I could almost see the blue screen - it's when the veteran is being hammered by mechanical squids.
What was entertaining about the Matrix was deciphering the metaphors, and the time I spent with Neo inside the matrix world. But the lack of character development for the characters including Neo, made it difficult for me to care whether they won or loss. Overall? I'd give it a B. Took my mind off things. In retrospect?? I liked the first two films better.
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-25 12:54 am (UTC)Rufus
I am such a geek...
Cerberus (one e)
Date: 2003-11-25 01:00 pm (UTC)I find myself agreeing with you, though I haven't seen the Anamatrix. As soon as I realized that the Oracle was wearing yin-yang earrings, I knew what the movie's 'point' was and how it would end. And without cool special effects to distract me, I was bored.
Re: Cerberus (one e)
Date: 2003-11-25 09:08 pm (UTC)Yep, without character development or special effects, the story got boring. All that appeared to be propelling it forward were the metaphors.
Nitpickers' delight
Date: 2003-11-25 01:51 pm (UTC)Yes, I know we watched the movie together, but I thought maybe some of the others LJ posters could give us some answers to these questions:
-- If an EMP was the weapon of last resort against the attack of killer calimari, why wasn't there an EMP generator set up INSIDE Zion? Why were they all attached to those cool subterranean hovercraft coveniently trapped outside the city for the climactic battle?
-- Why did the squids almost always attack the exo-skeletonized Zion-ites from the front? Wouldn't an attack from all directions have eliminated the human warrior in no time flat?
-- Speaking of dubious battle strategies, how could thousands upon thousands of mechanical squids, all guided by the nigh-omnipotent machine intelligence, allow stray, unprotected humans to wander around the battlefield unmolested?
-- Same nitpick, more obvious example: how could those same mechanical squids, all guided by the aforementioned nigh-omnipotent machine intelligence, allow the kid to open Gate #3? They should have wiped him out before he took a step.
-- How exactly did the Machines eliminate Smith after he absorbed Neo? I thought they were unable to purge Smith from their collective memory banks. (BTW, Hugo Weaving rocked in this movie. He was so much a force that even Ian Bliss' imitation of him as the possessed Bane was more fun than Keanu's Neo. Missssster Annnnnndersssssson....)
-- Why did the Wachowskis shunt the amazing Laurence Fishburne to the background and devote huge chunks of movie time to a pair of awful WWII cliches (the Kid and his gruff commander)?
OK, there's no good answer to the last one.
There was some interesting visual material in Revolutions: the "Mobil Ave." train station/limbo realm and Neo's vain attempt to escape (heh); the design of the Merovingian's Club Hell; Monica Belluci's breasts (always a pleasure, Monica); Neo's "Messiah Vision"; Neo and Trinity's flight to the Machine City (loved when they broke through to the sun), and the Machine City itself; the Neo/Smith battle, and the final scenes with the Oracle, the Source, Seraph, and Sati.
But, as usual with religious allegory, the symbolism trumped the characters. (Otherwise known as Geroge Lucas syndrome.) The Wachowskis were so busy maneuvering their chess pieces into the larger scheme of things that we never got a good idea who Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus were as people--and that prevented us from truly caring about their fates. Trinity's death scene should have had the audience weeping, but it was an embarrassment. Keanu tried his best to express wrenching grief (faint praise, I know), but we just didn't care; the longer it went on, the more I looked at my watch and said: "Uh, Carrie Anne, sweetie? Could you move it along?"
In a word: eh. I expected not only Revolutions, but Revelations, but this movie was thin on both.
Grade: B-
-- cjl
no subject
Date: 2003-11-25 03:11 pm (UTC)How's the class going? I've been very little online for a while, so sorry if I missed this. trying to get caught up this week in between the family obligations.
Class and other stuff...
Date: 2003-11-25 09:05 pm (UTC)matrix world, than outside it.)
Class? Okay. Struggling to write a marketing plan on a copyright service, which is a lot harder than I expected.
Tonight's class helped a bit with that - several people gave presentations regarding their plans. I lucked out and don't have to give a presentation, considering I don't have powerpoint on my computer - this is a very good thing. The best of the group were people who had marketing backgrounds.
At any rate - thanksgiving is going to be spent at my own home in NYC, working on my marketing plan, watching whatever movies I find to rent (considering renting Two Towers - to re-watch before RoK (which I'm highly anticipating, except for Shelob - spiders and me do not get along)), and fixing a meal of Cornish Game Hen (marmalade dressing), wild rice, green beans, cranberry/orange muffins, and whatever small tarts or pies I find tomorrow. Oh and apple cider. Found a cheap pair of hens for $5.
Wishing you and yours the best. From your journal entries, it sounds like things are going well?
Re: Class and other stuff...
Date: 2003-11-26 05:35 am (UTC)Your dinner sounds lovely. Wish I had known you were soloing. My family would have loved to have you I'm sure, and you could have ridden up with my sister. If you ever feel like it please consider yourself globally invited up, just be aware our holidays run to the noisy full house variety but you'd be very welcome.
Re: Class and other stuff...
Date: 2003-11-26 08:32 am (UTC)Haven't seen Master & Commander yet - hoping to maybe grab a viewing this coming week. Possibly next Wed, assuming it doesn't disappear on me. I read the first book. (It's not as gripping in my opinion as Dorothy Dunnett historical novels, but it's a good take on the Napoliaenic (sp?) Wars at sea. Really takes you aboard a ship while it's at war.) The movie is a combination of the first and last books in the series. My Dad whose read just about all of them - loved it.
The film does have a couple major things going for it - one of which is the reason Russel Crow gave in - it's a Peter Weir film. The first one he's done since The Truman Show. Peter Weir films include: Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, The Truman Show,
Picnic at Hanging Rock...he's one of those directors that
I'll watch just about anything he does. (In film - the most important party is the director, s/he makes or breaks the show. ) The other things are the cast - Crow and the actor who played his friend in A Beautiful Mind.
Only thing making me wait - is mood. Just haven't been in the mood for a good seafaring yarn.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-26 06:53 am (UTC)Most people I know who've seen it are going into a voluntary mindwipe and pretending the first Matrix movie was the only one.