Went to see the Matrix last night/this morning, and reached a number of tangentially related conclusions:
First, I was the oldest person in the theatre. Part of this, I'm sure, was the fact that I have no problem going to see a movie at 11 pm. Another part of it, I'm afraid, was that this movie isn't going to appeal to too many people over the age of 25.
Second, I'm sorry that I paid full price. I wasn't really one of those who found the original to be all that stellar. It was a great movie visually, but the plot was a mishmash of pseudo-spirituality and art school theorification combined with the black hole of talent that is Keanu. Part of its appeal was its epic-scale novelty, and once the story had been set, the other two installments ended up being pretty average fare.
Third, the mystery really isn't. There was one angle that seemed to me worth pursuing after the second. You'll remember, at the end of the second, that Neo manages to disable the sentinels with his mind and Agent Smith manages to download himself into a Zionling. (Note: it took the other humans way WAY too long to catch onto this, given the actor's very convincing imitation of Hugo Weaving's speech patterns.) Anyhow, the implication of each of these "hangers" is that the founding binary of the whole story, that there is an inside and an outside to the Matrix, is itself false. *That* might have been interesting. Needless to say, it wasn't the case.
Fourth, we get treated to ensemble drama in the third installment, characters who we've known for all of five minutes, and who all of the sudden have the full force of overly dramatic music, long stretches of personal camera time, and whose efforts are largely made minor when Neo arrives at the machine city. Let's not talk about why the machines need to live in a "city." The point is that I wasn't feeling it with these characters I'd just met.
Fifth, the visuals are even more impressive, if that's possible. But they're also so positively overwhelming that, after a while, it just becomes noise.
Finally, why why why why, when Neo can literally reshape the matrix at will, is there still so much damn kung fu? Because this is a movie about looking cool, disguised at the end as a movie about making some sort of grand sense about logic and emotion.
All right. That's enough. Perhaps upon further reflection, I'll have more to say.
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