Movie Moments XLII: August 2020 (The Matrix Edition)

I am sorry to have reminded you all that Revolutions exists.



The Matrix, 17 August 2020, DVD
I should note, I think this DVD is the first one my family ever purchased. Like, before we even had a DVD player.

• ”No lieutenant, your men are already dead.” As I’ve stated previously, I expect this to be the first line Hugo Weaving says, regardless of the role. Agent Smith, Elrond, the Red Skull, whatever. YOUR MEN ARE ALREADY DEAD.
• It’s only after you’ve seen it once before that all the “Jesus Christ” expletives throughout the narrative start to seem alarmingly heavy-handed. And his fake book is about simulacrum? His company is Metacortex? Lordy.
• ”I know my rights.” Aw, the good ol’ days when DHS and ICE didn’t yet exist and we could pretend people had some modicum of rights whilst in detention.
• With the disappearing mouth and the robot bug, this interrogation scene is just chock-full of body horror and I don’t think I ever recovered.
• Y’all, I cannot get over how gorgeous this movie is.
  
  
• ”Why do my eyes hurt?” “Because you’ve never used them before.”
• The Neb’s crew mobbing up to watch Neo and Morpheus spar in the dojo remains adorable. Even funnier: It’s basically a bunch of people staring at poorly translated code on a few monitors.
• How great is my affection for this film? The “woman in the red dress” scene is literally the first page of my dissertation proper.
  
  
  
• I dig how much the Oracle is just straight-up messing with Neo. Like, all she had to do was say clearly, “You’re not the One yet.”
• Twenty years later and moments of deja vu still freak me out more than they really should.
• Man, at least Mouse went out fighting. Seeing Switch and Apoc just drop like that is horrifying.
• Agent Smith sure has a lot of feelings for a sentient app.
• I’m sure the machine gun and the helicopter seemed like a good idea at the time, Neo, but the thing is, Morpheus is in that room too, so WTF dude?
• I kind of buy Trinity being in love with Neo, largely because she’s apparently been watching him from afar for a while. I am less sure about Neo’s feelings for Trinity at this point in time. I mean, he’s certainly extremely interested, but don’t try to sell me on an epic love story right now.
• Honestly, this doesn’t seem any more egregious than most action movies set after, like, the industrial age. That said, the repeated slow-motion cascade of bullet casings seems way too much.
• I really like how they switch between bullet time, “real” time, and occasional shots of Neo and the agents at super-speed. It gives the whole thing a pretty cool feeling of elasticity. (It’s what makes Neo saying no to the bullets especially cool. He saw the code as it was writing itself.)
• Neo confused and on the run never fails to make me cackle. “The door!” “Your other left!”
• Oh man, I’d forgotten they cut out all the sound but the gunshots and the ringing phone when Agent Smith kills Neo. OOF. Well done.
• I know Keanu was criticized for being kind of a blank, but rewatching it--the more he falls into the saviour role, the blanker he gets. Which is a really, really, really interesting choice.

WHEW. This movie has been one of my top five favorites for twenty years, and it’s just never going to get knocked out, y’all. (The other four, currently: LOTR: The Two Towers, Playing By Heart, Edge of Tomorrow, The Last Jedi.)

Okay. Okay. Let’s hit the sequels. *deep breath*

The Matrix Reloaded, 18 August 2020, streamed via Amazon
I remember zero things about this movie. Wait, is this the one with the Zion orgy?

• ”I wish I knew what I’m supposed to do.” 1) Neo looks so YOUNG, and 2) Did the prophecy not go any further than that he exists?
• Holy crap, Harold Perrineau and Jada Pinkett-Smith? GINA TORRES? Why did my brain not remember this?
• So, like, all of Our Heroes are tailored to be as badass and smoothly monotone as possible, but it’s hard to dispute Morpheus is reigning badass, if only because he has Trinity and Neo flanking him. (Trinity is always so SHINY, guys. And Neo’s gone full cybergoth monk.)
• Okay, it’s kind of neat that Neo only seems unbearably innocent when he’s with Trinity or Morpheus. For everyone else, he’s got no time.
• Neo’s superfan is straight out of anime. Like, this entire film is straight up mecha anime.
• All Neo wants is to get laid, and instead he has to wade through a sea of petitioners asking for his blessing. Sorry, my dude. It’s hard being the saviour of humanity.
• Yup, Zion orgy. No wonder everybody was rushing to the temple. For real, though--this scene is Too Too Much with the electronica and the slow-motion revelry, but I can kind of see how they’re trying to show how humanity manifests through sex. It’s just such a tonal shift that it’s mostly awkward, instead of actually sexy.
• Smith infecting someone before they leave the Matrix and then infiltrating the real world is some fucked-up horror movie shit.
• That hallway of doors, though, is a gorgeous bit of portal fantasy. It's an unstated invocation of all the stories that presage this one.
• The Oracle being a retired bit of programming makes a lot of sense. Vampires being programs due for deletion, not so much.
• ”We can never see past the choices we don’t understand.”
• Yeah, totally anime.
  
  
• The emphasis on how nobody really has a choice in anything--maybe???--is kind of neat if you think of it as recursive programming, but having a vague idea of where the movie is heading makes all of this Wow, Way to be Obvious, Guys.
• The Merovignian and Persephone are 100% Bond villains.
• Despite an overreliance on slo-mo shots, the entire highway chase scene is frickin’ boss, y’all.
  
  
  
• If we didn’t know Morpheus is right (kind of), he’d be a pretty terrifying charismatic cult leader.
• I love how Trinity’s just, like, “Give me five minutes and I will destroy everything that might harm the mission.” And then she does. Girrrrrrrl.
• Wait, so what makes this Neo different is love? Hm.
• NEO CAN RAISE THE DEAD. WITH THE POWER OF LOVE.
• Neo stopping the sentinels in the real world is also a badass way to end. And y’all...I do not remember how he was able to do it. It’s a thing about Agent Smith, I think?
• This isn’t disappointing as a sequel--it just couldn’t mimic the surprise of the first movie. The destiny loop is interesting, but compared to “hey, humans are actually batteries for the singularity,” it just doesn’t feel as heavy.

So if Reloaded wasn’t awful...oh no. Oh no, it’s Revolutions that’s awful. All I know about this is that I seem to have deliberately wiped it from my mind.

The Matrix Revolutions, 19 August 2020, streamed via Amazon

• Wait, Neo’s brain is in AI purgatory? But, wait, how did he...he was in the real world, but then he stopped the machines because his brain can hop from one plane to another? We left the “science” part of this science fiction very long ago, didn’t we?
• It’s such a bummer that Gloria Foster (the original Oracle) passed away before the third movie. No offense to the new actor, Mary Alice, of course. Foster was just so good.
• Is it weird that Neo’s AI purgatory is the place where Harry Potter meets Dumbledore when he dies? Like, flayed baby Voldemort must be around there somewhere.
• How good a dude is Neo? He offers to carry the metaphysical baggage of a metaphorical family in an existential subway station.
• Whoever constructed Monica Bellucci’s corset is an architectural genius.
• Trinity’s such a fun contrast to Neo--he constantly doubts himself, whereas she picks a thing and then it’s as if she’s been all-in since the beginning of time.
• Seriously, if they were so suspicious of Bane-AKA-Smith, why didn’t they put that dude in restraints? (The actor is extremely good at emulating Smith’s speech patterns.)
• Wait, Lock’s plan to protect Zion is to put everybody in the temple in order to force a bottleneck of the army of self-replicating machines? Who put this dude in charge?
• Aghhhhh they went the full Tiresias with Neo. (Hilariously, he has Daredevil vision.)
• Given the war and all, why wasn’t Zion churning out EMPs 24/7? Too busy with the orgies? ALSO, why don’t their mecha suits have any shielding for their pilots? Whoever is in charge of Zion defense industry is a dumbass.
• Like, it’s a straightforwardly good battle sequence! But does it matter, given I have little emotional investment in Zion?
• How much do I love Neo Jedi-exploding the sentinels? This whole movie could just be that, and I’d be fine with it. I mean, that, and Trinity seeing the sky for the first time.
• NOOOOOOOO TRINITY NOOOOOO YOU MONSTERS. Well, now I know why I wiped this entire movie from my memory.
• Neo-vision of the machine city is pretty cool, though.
  
  
• I remember, way back when this came out, reading a discussion about how it wasn’t Neo that changed the destiny loop--he’d tried before and it didn’t change much. But Smith, quite literally a self-replicating virus, was too anomalous not to unbalance things. (How creeptastic was it, when Neo went back into the Matrix and found it populated only by Agent Smiths?) Which is kind of a neat take? But it does not make this movie any less nonsensical.
• Listen, Zion, I’d probably wait more than eighty seconds before telling everybody the war with the machines is totally done. BUT WHATEVER.

Okay, so, I am never watching Revolutions again, but it’s nice to know I’d enjoy another rewatch of Reloaded. One movie, salvaged! AND IT WAS THE ONLY SEQUEL, OKAY, THERE WERE ONLY TWO.