The Matrix (1999)

I like how you can make anything seem like important art if you just apply pseudo spirituality and intellectualism to it hard enough.

The Stupidsis a savage deconstruction of the dumbing down of American culture while simultaneously making a powerful statement on the bliss of ignorance. Somehow while opening our eyes to these important facets of day to day life it finds time to point a finger at the bloated bureaucracy of the American government in a scathing indictment of our sheeplike tendency to accept the rulings of our "elected" lords on high.

Return to Sender indeed...

But you plebes probably just didn't get how brave and deep a film it truly was. Tom Arnold is America's greatest unheralded hero.

As much a bigass letdown matrix revoltions was its easily better than all 3 sw prequels combined. Prequels on their own are a shaky venture because the characters you know are in no danger of dying and the characters you dont know are all potential cannon fodder. Ironically Lucas before he lost touch with reality made a fantastic prequel called indiana jones: the temple of doom. He knew indy never dies and a prequel works in that case because the characters besides him werent as important as the story around them.

Grimmlokk_sl said:

I like how you can make anything seem like important art if you just apply pseudo spirituality and intellectualism to it hard enough.

The Stupidsis a savage deconstruction of the dumbing down of American culture while simultaneously making a powerful statement on the bliss of ignorance. Somehow while opening our eyes to these important facets of day to day life it finds time to point a finger at the bloated bureaucracy of the American government in a scathing indictment of our sheeplike tendency to accept the rulings of our "elected" lords on high.

Return to Sender indeed...

But you plebes probably just didn't get how brave and deep a film it truly was. Tom Arnold is America's greatest unheralded hero.

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The song "I'm my own Grandpa" is just ripe with symbolism--showing how American culture is the ultimate rejection of Spirituality, or Moksha. And instead full embraces the three physical aspects of Samsara, by being his own grandson and grandfather at once, he doubles his Kama! This is clearly meant to show the material excess of American life, that we must have TWO lives during every cycle of rebirth!

All in all, this one song contains more spirituality than the entire Matrix Sequels....So much more poignant, just an all around excellent critique of the American lifestyle and it's disturbing Yang imbalance.

Edge was the guy that wouldn't shut up about how amazing the Star Wars prequels are right? Its like arguing with the neckbeard version of Merlin (Zeus)...why fuckin bother?

I want to see a 3 hour prequel that shows the first "free" guy. The last hour can be a zion dance scene after enough people are free.

what tenet of Hinduism involves a 6hour dance rave/orgy?


Also, should read The Invisibles if you have not.

All the symbolism and allegory and deeper meaning in the world is pointless if the movie containing it isn't entertaining enough to engage the viewer. Without being grounded in a solid plot and interesting characters to keep people watching, it's just expensive intellectual masturbation. This is where Matrix 2 & 3 failed, it isn't because the typical western viewer is unfamiliar with Hindu & Buddhist concepts, it's because the movie those concepts were woven into was so shitty that nobody cared enough to pay attention and try and understand them.

To this day, I've never actually watched Revolutions in it's entirety, from beginning to end. I've tried, but always end up bored to tears and switch off half way through.

Azrayne_sl said:

The Matrix is boring, has no solid plot or interesting characters.

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Somethings tells me you didn't actually see these movies.

Iannis_sl said:

It's like that passage in earthsea where Sparrowhawk follows the wizard fallen into hazia addiction into the dry lands. He thought he was discovering the deepest mysteries but he was simply wandering aimlessly in the places even a novice knows how to safely traverse. You want some good, subtle, clever, coherent east meets west philosophy societal observation -- anything Le Guin wrote before the early 90's, even the crazy girly shit (she wrote some girly fucking shit). Some of the stuff after.

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Jesus Christ dude, +1 for obscure references.

The Edge_sl said:

Somethings tells me you didn't actually see these movies.

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You manufactured from whole cloth the quote you attributed to Azrayne. He is talking about Reloaded and Revolutions specifically and in that regard he's mostly right.

so who the fuck was the architect, in a philosophical and literal sense? if rogue programs (smith, merovingian, oracle, keymaker, etc) are like malware that refuse to get tossed into the recycle bin (train), agents are virus scanners, humans are the power supply, is the architect like Windows 8 and all the thousands of AIs in the "mainframe" are websites/apps who just want to do their daily thing but the stupid architect wanders in occasionally bringing up a white room with monitors (metro fullscreen window) to show its still around?

He's the kernel? Lol.

I liked Reloaded fairly well, just felt incomplete and very transitional. I chalked that up at the time to being the middle movie of a trilogy, and expected all the unanswered questions to have nice payoffs in Revolutions.

That didn't happen. All of the fun new stuff like the Merovingian etc. completely fell flat in movie 3, and it's like they weren't even written to follow one another. You have characters who are introduced as important that never have any payoff at all (Seraph), and all the real world crap in movie 3 that's just lame. Also, DBZ fight at the end was hella gay.

At the end of 3 they should just have had Neo wake up at his computer again and then he says "Whoa what a crazy dream" then he gets dressed and drives to his office job.

Slaythe_sl said:

This thread is starting to resemble the Prometheus one from back on FoH. I don't care how in depth the symbolism is if you don't execute the actual film. There's two sides to this and they bombed one of them in the two sequels.

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+1

tarquinn_sl said:

At the end of 3 they should just have had Neo wake up at his computer again and then he says "Whoa what a crazy dream" then he gets dressed and drives to his office job.

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man.....the it's-all-a-dream bullshit?that would be worse than the actual ending.....or maybe not eheh

After watching two most of us were willing to forgive a lot of it because we were theorycrafting so hard about Zion just being another level of the Matrix designed to catch people who rejected the first one.

Chris Nolan would have made that shit happen!

I liked the part where the exo squad fought against the squid monsters that was wicked cool

spronk_sl said:

so who the fuck was the architect, in a philosophical and literal sense?

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He was the Oracle's opposite.

The Architect exists to balance the Matrix. The Oracle exists to unbalance the Matrix.

The Architect is logical. The Oracle is intuitive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang