Brad: Watched Matrix Reloaded last night. Whoa what a pretentious turd.

Brian: Some of the action scenes are pretty good but everything in between is just nonsense.  The part where Neo talks to the Architect is one of the most awful scenes in movie history. Just complete drivel.  A guy fights computer people and robots, why does that need a big explanation?

Oh my god, SHUT UP. The Japanese subtitles are easier to understand.

Brad: The Zion rave has to be one of the least important 5 minutes in move history though. Second best scene: Matrix Vaginal Orgasm.

We don’t need/want to see ANY of this…

But even the fight scenes are a complete bore. To me anyway. Most of the moves are hard slaps to the face which are 98% blocked by the opponent. Other moves are jumping really high and slow over the opponent. And when a punch or kick does connect to the other guy it means virtually nothing; the guy falls and gets back up. As impressive as it looks to see Neo fight 50 Agent Smiths it’s completely pointless and no Smith ever dies or is even rendered unconscious. Just dumb. And isn’t Neo supposed to THE most powerful program/person ever created in the Matrix? He can stop bullets but he can’t freeze opponents or wipe them out completely? What’s the point of stopping bullets and flying at the speed of sound when all you can do is a round-house kick that barely stuns the enemy.

And what jerk-off thought Carrie Ann-Moss was hot enough to be the love interest much less the female star of these films? Man, she is not attractive to me at all. Keanu must’ve been pissed to have to kiss and lay naked with her in these films.

Brian: I almost forgot about the rave.  I bet George Lucas digitally inserts a rave into the celebration at the end of A New Hope. The worst part about the sex scene is that you really can’t tell Keanu and Carrie-Ann Moss apart.
 
You’re right, why does Neo have to try so hard in the fights?  I thought he was supposed to kind of control the Matrix.

Neo basically wasting his time. 

Another thing that makes no sense is that the Oracle from the first one died in real life so they recast here with a woman who looks a lot like her, but it’s addressed in Reloaded that it isn’t her and she looks different, and she explains it’s because she has to hide from Smith or whatever.  Why would you pick the same form but just a little different?  Why wouldn’t they have cast a completely different-looking person if it’s going to be addressed?  Or why wouldn’t you just not address it?

Brad: In Revolutions the Oracle was a different actress but your point stays the same. Why even address it if the reason for just looking like just another elderly African-American didn’t change? She should’ve changed her appearance as a fat, greasy hot dog street vendor.

If I was Neo I would fart away my enemies. That was my number one gripe against the whole trilogy is that at the end of the first one he was basically a god of the Matrix and could control his surroundings but in the sequels he basically does nothing but fly around and saves Trinity. That’s how you suspect the Wachkowski’s didn’t plan the Matrix with sequels in mind. However, if they did they failed even more miserably than just lackluster sequels. I like the highway chase scene with those goofy twin ghosts but the rest of the two sequels suck hard compared to the first one.

Another dumb thing about the whole trilogy is that humans could be downloaded to do anything “learn Kung-Fu” “Hot-wire a motorcycle” etc. But even when they are downloaded with all the knowledge and know-how to fight, they still have to train. That doesn’t make any sense. When we as human’s learn to do something we learn by practice, repetition, memory and even making mistakes. A computer is programmed to never make mistakes and doesn’t need to practice to be a master at what it’s programmed to do. So if a human in the Matrix is plugged in and programmed to learn Kung-Fu he should automatically be very skilled at it. Why bother training? Why bother even fighting when your opponent is programmed to do exactly what you can do?  Are there kung-fu programs that are better than others? Perhaps but explain that if it wasn’t explained already [I haven’t seen The Matrix in a long time].

Brian: I honestly have a hard time remembering what scenes were in which movie.

Yeah they had to be thinking, “How do we make a kung fu action picture with a protagonist who can basically destroy or create anything he wants?”  “Screw it, let’s just not explain that at all and go back to him being above average at kung fu, but now he can fly at the speed of sound and pull bullets out of people’s hearts.”  “Ok, good idea, but even though he can do that, the other computer program should still be more powerful than him, for some reason.”

Yeah the learning thing is another plot device that changes with the situation.  You either know something completely or you don’t.  Everyone in Zion should know everything about everything, right?  Although I guess the naturally born people without the plugs in their heads would still have to train.

Another thing that drove me nuts that was mostly in Revolutions I think is the military commander who has beef with Morpheus and Neo’s tactics but never really reveals his own plan for beating the machines besides shooting a lot of bullets at them, even though they’ll eventually run out of bullets but the machines will never run out of machines.

And this is yet another movie where exploding a nuclear device could have ended it easily and made the most sense.  Instead of dropping a thousand squiddies in that hole into Zion, why not an atom bomb?  “Yeah, go ahead, try to shoot this sh*t!”

LATER THE NEXT DAY…

Brad: I wasted another 2 hours watching Revolutions last night.

I totally forgot about the most hysterically bad CGI slo-mo punch to the face. That again amounted to nothing.

 

Hey, how could we make this fight look worse?  I got it!

Brian: So Agent Smith takes over The Matrix, fills it with clones and makes it stormy.  So then what?  What’s his long-term plan?  I thought his whole agenda in the first picture was to get out of The Matrix?

Brad: And he took over the Oracle [yeah great hiding in a new shell as another kindly chain-smoking old African-American lady…say if you went through the trouble changing shells why did you not bother leaving your apartment?] gaining her precognitive powers yet still did not see Neo siding with the machines to defeat him. If you’re psychic then you’re fully psychic—Fate HAS TO stay the same for one to be psychic. It’s dumb if you only see half the future.

But re-watching the Matrix sequels [I only saw them once in the theatres] it looked so dated now. Hey remember e-music? Yeah like 15 years ago. The look and style of these flicks are laughable now. From everyone wearing sunglasses in a world that the sun never shines to Trinity’s plastic wrap vinyl outfit, these films couldn’t look any more 1990s gay. And I don’t mean gay as in stupid or lowly I mean gay as in homosexual. Everyone in these films look like what badly represented gay culture looked like in 1998. If these films were made in 1981, then it would be Mega-Force.

 

 

Besides the hand-to-hand combat problem I expressed yesterday the other thing I had a problem with was how pointless and extraneous guns were in these movies. Again, Neo should never need any weapon much less a firearm but the Wachowski’s have fetishes up the wazoo especially with guns. I think every 15 minutes there’s a gun shown or fired. I’m not sure if it’s me just nit-picking but I’m not 100% sure why this bothers me. But I think it has to do with the fact that most people in the Matrix firing a weapon is a terrible shot. Is aiming not part of the training? Do they have a program they can upload to people to be better marksmen? Sheesh, how many rounds go absolutely nowhere in this franchise? The pivitol scene in Reloaded when Trinity is falling out the window firing two guns at the agent who is also shooting at her in very long slo-motion in bullet time they both shoot dozens of times for about 2 minutes practically at point black range and only one shot connects. It’s boring and unbelievable that two people with extraordinary matrix powers can’t hit a broadside of a barn with an automatic weapon. And now I know why they call it bullet time, its because the time wasted watching bullets fly nowhere in these movies is ridiculous.

Back to the firing range, everyone.

Brian: Come to think of it, did anyone ever actually get shot between the agents and Neo’s group?  And since Neo is the only one who can dodge bullets, why don’t the agents just shoot everyone else?
 
But Neo only shoots security guards in the first movie, who, according to the movie’s logic, were just normal people who were hooked up to the Matrix pods and didn’t have anything to do with the agents.  But then, why were they protecting that building?

Brad: No one in the matrix except hired goons protecting office buildings gets shot dead in all three movies. Trinity is the only one and she gets saved moments later. The logic of these movies should dictate that Neo doesn’t need a group and should destroy Machine City all by himself. And why would machines even NEED A CITY?!?!?!?!?!?!

And I just realized that the actor who plays the older councilman in Zion who is friends with Morpheus is Abner Devereaux from KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

Brian: So what’s kung fu going to do that bullets don’t?  Nothing makes sense.  And how could you be killed in the Matrix anyway if you know it’s a computer program?  I think the scene that makes the least amount of sense in the whole trilogy is when Neo is training and jumps off the building and lands on the street, when he comes out of the Matrix there’s blood in his mouth.  Exactly how does that happen?
 
It seems like the machines don’t have any reason to exist other than to build energy farms out of people, even though they don’t even remotely need people and could just make regular batteries instead, which would solve both their energy and human problems, they wouldn’t have to deal with the Matrix, rogue agents or any of that stuff.
 
And how did humans “scorch the sky”?  What weapon or device was able to make the atmosphere permanently cloudy forever?
 
He created the machines to destroy the machines… and he lost.