marrael

On Saturday, I was to meet a group of 8 friends and we would collectively invade an afternoon screening of Matrix Revolutions. Two hour and a half hours later we would be walking toward the restaurant where we'd have dinner, and it was pretty much wisecracks and head-scratching all the way. I thought some of the dialogue reminded me of Attack of the Clones. I must admit I especially hate it when, before a movie opens, there are TV features on "The Making Of..." and the actors and/or directors are talking about the great things accomplished in the story and writing...and then you see the finished product...and all you can think of is, "NO, NO, YOU BASTARDS LIED! WTF were you thinking?" (And "This bad script would be torn apart in a Clarion discussion circle..") And this movie was one of those times.

I came into this series late. I watched The Matrix on VCD, not in the cinema. I thought it was good, but I was also pretty sure at the time that this would probably be, like Star Wars, the most coherent part of the trilogy that could successfully stand on its own, and that the movie didn't particularly need a sequel. I was perplexed at the analyses and deconstructions of the first movie that I found online--I do always think it's possible to read too deeply into any work of literature or art for references to religious/philosophical texts...first of all memes work funny and things could always be coincidence, not to mention meaning can be read in arbitrary places if you want to see them there, and perhaps my ignorance of the Bible gave me problems with the articles that kept expounding on how The Matrix movie was a rewrite of Genesis/New Testament/I ca't remember, maybe both. I still don't agree, and I was reading these hypotheses with a blank slate on the subject.

Well...disappointing in writing as Revolutions was, I thought it was an interesting movie to read meaning into. Especially if one has been busy reading free Buddhist texts and books on eastern philosophy picked up from the bargain bin for the past months. (I told Jason I'm not going to buy fiction for a while and I have been sticking to that....but non-fiction books have been an exception with me, because the same books you intended to get/read will be harder to come by again later.) First of all, I'm inclined to laugh at any paper out there that wants to emphasize the Matrix as a take on the Bible/Christ's story and ignore all else. Just the name "The Matrix" is one of the names some Buddhist texts give to this subjective physical world that we experience with our senses. Transcendence is a big concept, and symbols of transcendence are everywhere to be found in Revolutions, and I wasn't even looking for them. If you've watched Revolutions, I probably won't even need to name which parts of it I mean, and you may figure out that a lot of fun stuff can be read into the losing of eyes too. The hokey dialogue between Neo and Smith when Neo was near death actually seemed extra weighty (I don't want to say profound) if you could see the philosophy the Wachowski Brothers were trying to repackage. I'll also swear I saw a lotus superimposed on a landscape scene near the end of the movie, but no one else noticed it or has mentioned it online as yet, so I may be wrong. This and a few other things and of course the cute references to karma made the movie a little more interesting for me, so I could rant about the bad storyline, but I won't. :)

Just watch this movie for the badass flying machines.