Sunday at home and at rest

[elfs]

Today was a sad day for Kouryou-chan. The Dairy Queen, which is just down the street, officially went out of business today. When we went, she was looking forward to having a cotton-candy flavored milkshake, but they'd run out of that flavor by the time we got there. She settled for a sunday with extra chocolate.

I watched Matrix Revolutions. Here's my take: it didn't suck as badly as everyone told me it would. I took it at face value: it's a superhero flick, not a cyberpunk movie. As a superhero movie, it's pretty good, especially with the hero and villain duelling dialog at the same time they're duelling fists.

What I didn't like is the ending. Not because it didn't fit with the expectations raised within the first two movies, but because it wasn't true even to itself. As I understand it, the point of the third movie was to highlight the three factions: the Matrix, the Humans, and the Free Programs, and the way each pursued its own goals. By the end of the film, the Free Programs headed by the Oracle have managed to coerce the Matrix (and its representative, the Architect) to call "a peace" with the humans by creating (without the Matrix's knowledge) a crisis: the Smiths, which threatens the existence of the Matrix and can only be cured by the Humans.

The problem with the ending is that the power imbalance continues: there is no reason for anyone to take the Matrix at its word that it will not once again enslave the human species for its own purposes. Neo is dead; it's unlikely that another One with the capacity to clear out a runaway Free Program like Smith will emerge for another dozen-plus generations, by which time the Matrix will have evolved yet better responses to the whole crisis anyway. Under the terms of the Peace, the nature of the Matrix will be made clear to everyone and more humans will be allowed to leave the Matrix and work to make the "real" Earth liveable to both meat and machine.

Darwin sez: humanity is doomed. Neo was a mere speed bump.

I see that Mari-Tan is making the rounds again in the Japanese learning zeitgeist, although everyone's only got a photo of page 37 and nobody seems to know where it's from.

Well, I happen to have a copy. Mari-Tan is a cute two-comic collection of little military characters teaching English to native Japanese speakers. Their choice of English is highly entertaining, however. Everyone's favorite is volume 2, page 37, where the sample sentence for pronounciation and vocabulary is: "I like you. Come over to my house and fuck my sister!" Even better though are in some of the "alternative use" sentences at the bottom: "You're one smart motherfucker," the translation of which is お前,賢いな!, which translates back into English as, "You, sir, are very wise!" with a sarcastic tone but lacking the, um, color of the English original. The "Meaning of the word [fuck]" box has a big "Before you use this word..." warning section.

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I really don't get how people expected the last two Matrix movies to measure up to the first one. Not only was the first one bloody phenomenal and astoundingly original, it had the enviable position of being the first in the series, and as such that whole "tumbling down the rabbit-hole" feeling could not be reproduced.

But the thing is, that the Matrix trilogy is first and foremost an action movie in the superhero genre. And even though the third movie was nowhere near as great as the first one, (and Trinity's death scene dragged on way too long) it was *still* far and away better than any other movie in its genre.

Oh, and while it was kicking ass as a superhero story, it simultaneously managed to kick ass as a war movie. While the screenplay did lack a little bit, the fight and battle scenes in the last two movies were second to none. And the plot was still exceptional.

[xengar.livejournal.com]

My problem with the third movie was that the second movie implied something (in my opinion at least)that wasn't used in the third. At the end of the second, Neo takes out a bunch of sentinels with some sort of electro-magnetic burst, generated from nowhere. In the third movie, this is just one of his superpowers, one of the things that he can do because he is more than just human.

This idea broke my disbelief suspenders. It simply doesn't make sense for a person who is not noticeably different (at the cellular level at least) to be able to do that. Admittedly, these are humans who are being used as batteries (a notion that strained my disbelief in the first movie) so maybe they're all capable of doing this if they could figure out how, but it still doesn't seem reasonable.

The explanation that had seemed obvious to me was that there was at least one more layer of reality. (à la The Thirteenth Floor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/), although I didn't see that movie until significant;y later) It fits so many loose ends too: Why do the humans know some things about the war but not others? How is it possible to "scorch the sky" in such a permanent fashion? Why didn't the machines, who don't need bulky life support systems, just go above the clouds and into orbit or onto the moon? And most significantly, how can two people revive from complete cessation of brainwave activity? (as reported by the monitors in the 'real' world)

The number of ways that a plot could have gone is vast, but the opening that I feel was best foreshadowed by the other movies is as follows: Out of desperation, Neo 'hacks' what he thought was the real world the same way he does in the Matrix and the shock of succeeding wakes him out of the simulation (his simulated body goes unconscious without his mind to guide it) He finds that in the next layer up (I wouldn't have anything more than wild speculation about anything further up, it wouldn't add anything for this to not be reality) is at least partially under the control of the machines he just left behind. Some or all of humanity has been enslaved roughly the way Bane was by Agent Smith. "I say your civilization, because when we started doing your thinking for you it became our civilization." From here on, it's too open ended for me to really continue. Was the Oracle someone from 'outside' trying to wake Neo up to rescue the rest? Is all of humanity enslaved in a two layer prison, or just a portion of it and everyone but those in Zion are constructs? For that matter, is the reality level necessarily on Earth? This could just as easily be taking place on a colony generation ship, which I would think would be much more vulnerable to such a VR addiction/entrapment.

Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of things I liked about that movie, but it wasn't the movie I thought it could be.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

As clearly stated in the first movie, they aren't the Smiths: they're the Cure.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Ewww... http://xkcd.com/56/

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Wasn't it explicitly stated that this was just another cycle of freedom/enslavement, which had happened uncounted times before?

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention xkcd, considering how maru_mari and I spent yesterday afternoon. (That's her with Bubbles the ball python and me in the Mesopotamians shirt.)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It was explicitly stated that the Matrix had been through this before and was attempting to implement the exact same fix as before. As I understood the conversation between the Architect and the Oracle at the end of the film, the solution this time is different because the two machine sides, the Matrix and its parasites, the Free Programs (which are also dependent upon humanity for their power and computronium base), recognize that humans have something, namely free will, that makes them both inherently incomprehensible to the machine intelligences and infinitely valuable. Neo's comment, "Because I choose to," is the driving theme of the series.