Friday, December 10, 2004

Obscure Fanboy Rants of Rage - Why I'm Not Buying the New Matrix DVD Box Set

I'm postponing today's Cartoon Chronicle. I want to start a little segment I like to call Obscure Fanboy Rants of Rage. Why I'm Not Buying the New Matrix DVD Box Set Today I'll be talking about the Matrix movie franchise, and how the brilliance of the first movie was nearly ruined by its sequels. Now, The Matrix was a good movie. It had a solid story, and air of mystery, and a philosophical subplot (or two) that allowed you to actually think while watching the mind-blowing action scenes. It had a very open-ended ending, and I think most fans were satisfied with this film even before they knew there were going to be sequels to conclude it. Then came Matrix Reloaded. I can say in all seriousness that Matrix Reloaded is the least coherent sequel I have ever seen in my entire life. By that, I mean that this movie cannot stand on its own two legs. It needs crutches from the other facets of the Matrix franchise to do that. The movie didn't have a beginning-- you actually needed to watch the Animatrix to see the beginning of the movie. The middle of the movie had plot holes that the viewer could only fill in if they bought, played, and beat the Enter the Matrix video game. I'm sure the Wachowskis thought they were damn clever ending this movie on a cliffhanger, but it didn't take some fans more than a week to correctly guess how Neo stopped the sentinels. More than that, the ending had more viewers saying "what the hell?" than any other movie I've seen. Okay, there was David Spade's Joe Dirt movie, but that was an entirely different "what the hell?" Then there's the Architect. To this day, I'm not sure if the Architect was just being a jackass when he spoke to Neo with indirect answers to his questions, cryptic phrasing, and unnecessarily complex buzz words; or if the Wachowski brothers are jackasses for writing dialogue that uses indirect answers to questions, cryptic phrasing, and unnecessarily complex buzz words. Matrix Revolutions wasn't as bad as Reloaded. In fact, I like Revolutions almost as much as the first movie. It's just the unneeded existance of Reloaded that gets to me. My only real gripe with Revolutions (aside from the fight scene that made me want to go home and watch Dragonball Z) is how it ended. The abstract part of the ending works much better than the hard/physical part of the ending. You can analyze the meaning behind Neo's sacrifice all you want-- it makes for good conversation-- but there was one important factor missing from that sacrifice. The thing that made the first movie so popular was that you could enjoy it as both a solid action movie, and an intellectual science fiction film. I'm not going to get into the intellectual level the movie was at, because this isn't about the more intellectual aspects of the movies at all. If it were, this rant would be much longer. Neo's sacrifice was filled with abstract meaning, but lacked the solidity of a plain action film. There are people who saw the first Matrix movie, enjoyed it, weren't confused, and didn't have to look for any kind of deeper meaning. You couldn't do that with Revolutions. People were confused when they saw the end. Neo stood there, Smith did something to him, bingo-bango, everything's back to normal. "What the hell?" Anybody who wanted to see an action film has just become completely lost. Is it a bad thing that they have to go out of their way to think about what just happened? No. Should they have to? They didn't have to when they saw the first movie, so why now? I guess what I'm really saying here is that the first movie was great, the second movie wasn't good for anything except building up suspense for the third movie, and the third movie's ending was inconsistent with the "think if you want to" feeling we were given by the first. Also, Final Flight of the Osiris should've been in Reloaded. So should the scenes from the video game. And if you already own the movies, do you honestly think you should bother buying them again just to watch 900 discs of extras? Think about that. Much Love

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