Send a techno-angel in black leather
I was trying to fight the gloom and sleepiness of a rainy day, because I actually needed to get things done and there's nothing like a downpour and a thunderstorm to make me gaze out the window, hypnotized and forget everything else I was supposed to be doing. So I put on an old movie, where old here means The Matrix Trilogy. I love and hate these movies. I love them for their worldbuilding (or unbuilding,) I love them for stylized violence, and I love them for Trinity. I hate them because the premise of The Matrix is the kind of premise that you don't ever really want to see followed to its logical end: robots use humans as batteries, and only The One can save us. It's a great premise! However, follow it too far and it can never pan out to it's potential as a series of "what if" imaginings. If this guy saves us, do we defeat the robots? Do we re-farm earth? Do we live happily ever after? They are questions you can't ever really answer without your mythology falling apart, and unfortunately, The Matrix Trilogy tries to answer them anyway.
I can't believe I'm actually getting myself all worked up about the Matrix movies again. Reloaded works so well! It starts with Neo seeing in a dream-vision the climatic scene of the movie, but, like all prophesies, he misunderstands what he's seeing. It's well paced! It has some tasteless scenes with the Merovingian, and a silly battle in a car in the middle of a freeway chase where one person has a straight razor and the other has a seatbelt, but it also has Trinity on a motorcycle. It ends with Neo's love saving Trinity the way her love saved him in the first movie! It's how they roll! But it all falls apart in the final part of the trilogy, which is especially heart-breaking after you get your hopes all raised by the general awesomness up until that point, and I should remember how angry that makes me the next time I decide to randomly put it on in the background on a rainy day.
Even though I own all three movies, I rarely watch past the first 30 minutes of Revolutions, which is a shame, because Niobe is completely kickass in the last half of the movie. I usually watch just up until Trinity rescues Neo from the train station, because I am fond of the fetish club fight and the Mexican standoff but pretty much nothing else. If I could select out the best scenes of Niobe and her mad flying skills without having to fast forward through 15 minute chunks of Men in Giant Robot Chairs, I would watch them more often. It makes me so angry that the Wachowski Brothers pushed their story to its very edges so that the seams started to show, and thus ended up with a movie that's 45% gun fire, and involves two major character deaths because those characters had no arc beyond the completion of the plot.
I feel like that's something else they should teach in writing school: not only how to start your story, but how to fucking end it. (Hint: don't kill the women!)
Sorry, did I say I loved these movies? It's hard to tell through all that rant. Let's talk about my absolute favorite moment: A bad guy blows up a ship, effectively killing 1/3 of the heist team who was supposed to be setting up a chain reaction to help Neo save the day. Trinity, disregarding her promise to Neo to stay out of the Matrix during their big heist (because of his prophesy dream) insists Link jack her into the Matrix because she knows something's gone wrong and she knows everyone's lives depend on fixing it:
Link: Trinity, we're talking less then 5 minutes here.
Trinity: In five minutes, I'll tear that whole goddamn building down.
Seriously, I believe her, every time.
I can't believe I'm actually getting myself all worked up about the Matrix movies again. Reloaded works so well! It starts with Neo seeing in a dream-vision the climatic scene of the movie, but, like all prophesies, he misunderstands what he's seeing. It's well paced! It has some tasteless scenes with the Merovingian, and a silly battle in a car in the middle of a freeway chase where one person has a straight razor and the other has a seatbelt, but it also has Trinity on a motorcycle. It ends with Neo's love saving Trinity the way her love saved him in the first movie! It's how they roll! But it all falls apart in the final part of the trilogy, which is especially heart-breaking after you get your hopes all raised by the general awesomness up until that point, and I should remember how angry that makes me the next time I decide to randomly put it on in the background on a rainy day.
Even though I own all three movies, I rarely watch past the first 30 minutes of Revolutions, which is a shame, because Niobe is completely kickass in the last half of the movie. I usually watch just up until Trinity rescues Neo from the train station, because I am fond of the fetish club fight and the Mexican standoff but pretty much nothing else. If I could select out the best scenes of Niobe and her mad flying skills without having to fast forward through 15 minute chunks of Men in Giant Robot Chairs, I would watch them more often. It makes me so angry that the Wachowski Brothers pushed their story to its very edges so that the seams started to show, and thus ended up with a movie that's 45% gun fire, and involves two major character deaths because those characters had no arc beyond the completion of the plot.
I feel like that's something else they should teach in writing school: not only how to start your story, but how to fucking end it. (Hint: don't kill the women!)
Sorry, did I say I loved these movies? It's hard to tell through all that rant. Let's talk about my absolute favorite moment: A bad guy blows up a ship, effectively killing 1/3 of the heist team who was supposed to be setting up a chain reaction to help Neo save the day. Trinity, disregarding her promise to Neo to stay out of the Matrix during their big heist (because of his prophesy dream) insists Link jack her into the Matrix because she knows something's gone wrong and she knows everyone's lives depend on fixing it:
Link: Trinity, we're talking less then 5 minutes here.
Trinity: In five minutes, I'll tear that whole goddamn building down.
Seriously, I believe her, every time.