Film: The Matrix

[liv]

Reason for watching it: I was starting to feel embarrassed by not having seen it, and missing pop culture references.

Circumstances of watching it: After two weeks together, jack and I had more or less run through our urgent stack of conversations we wanted to have right that minute, so we felt ok about spending a couple of hours watching a DVD instead of chatting.

Verdict: The Matrix is watchable and original.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Matrix. It's not a sophisticated film, nor a flawless one, but it tells a good story. It's atmospheric and emotive and the characterization is strong. Well, apart from the main character who is a bit of a Mary-Sue: brilliant because the plot says he should be brilliant, but not showing any particular signs of ability, intelligence or even independent thought. Though I'm possibly biased because I have never been able to see the point of Keanu Reeves; he's not pretty and he can't act. But I really enjoyed the interactions among Morpheus' crew, and I found myself easily manipulated by all the ways that the film makes Trinity competent and just cool.

The SF background is quite clever, though the film tends to over-explain things and goes into excruciating detail spelling out the philosophical implications. It's unusual for me to have this kind of complaint about a film, cos I'm a very unsophisticated viewer and I generally have a hard time inferring background from hints, but The Matrix goes too far in the opposite direction. (The "science" is stupid, and indeed jack paused the film at one point to calm me down from getting angry at the stupidity, but basically that's not the point.) In spite of the info-dumping, I thought the pace at which the background was revealed to the viewer did a good job of building tension, even if the background itself has some stupid elements. Also, it was doing Christian themes in a way that didn't offend me, because it felt like a retelling of a great myth, rather than heavy-handed propaganda.

It's visually cool, a bit gritty and a bit futuristic. Though some parts of the background look amazingly dated ten years after the film's release. I couldn't quite decide if 1999 really did look like that, or if it was a subtle commentary on the Matrix' imperfect construction of reality. There's quite a lot of violence, but it contributes to the plot and there's enough empathy with the characters to make it not seem gratuitous. The Agents and Sentinels are impressive as monsters, scary and creepy. Also I really liked the soundtrack, but that probably reflects my taste in music as much as anything.

Someone on the internet somewhere has explored the triangle relationship between Morpheus, Trinity and Neo, right? I think the romance plot would have been much more satisfying (and less clichéd) if Morpheus had been given the True Love denouement. Ahem.

Comments

[ewx]

The thing that particularly annoyed me about the background was not just that it was stupid, a fault after all shared with many other films, but that it could have been substantially less stupid with a trivial change: instead of having the AIs using humans as power stations, have the AIs use them as computers. The scene with the batteries would have microchips instead, and it’d be much clearer why humans could break physical rules inside the emulated environment.

[jack]

I'm never sure how to treat removalable singularities in a film's plot. I think it's that a small stupidity can be either "thank goodness it wasn't a lot worse" or "agh, why did they have to put THAT in?"

removalable singularities

[ewx]

*laugh* at linking to an article on complex analysis when discussing the plot of a film.

Re: removalable singularities

[jack]

I do as much as I can :) When I'm talking to Simon, they may help, but otherwise, I'm forced to admit, they normally actually don't...

Although, actually, in this case, I think "removable" is a good description.

[simont]

Yes, I liked this metaphor and will try to remember it. Even if your subject line did have a Homer Simpson-esque spare syllable in it :-)

[jack]

Thank you! That makes me feel good :)

Even if your subject line did have a Homer Simpson-esque spare syllable in it :-)

Oh yeah. I do that too. I don't think there's any especial benefit to that one :)

[liv]

Yeah, that was the bit where jack paused the DVD and explained to me that Morpheus had worked everything out for himself, but got some of the details wrong, and it was really about computing power, not energy. And then I felt a lot less apoplectic and more able to just enjoy the film for what it was.

[simont]

It hadn't occurred to me before to see it as "Morpheus got it wrong" rather than "scriptwriters got it wrong". I'm not sure it helps me all that much: reading it like that now imputes a lack of scientific nous to Morpheus in which it's still pretty hard to suspend disbelief given all the other stuff he's supposed to understand and be competent at!

Even the computing-power hypothesis is pretty unviable, too. For a start, it would be immensely difficult to get things designed as programs for digital computers into a form where they could run at all, let alone reliably or efficiently, on human wetware. It's certainly very hard to imagine that it would be easier, or more resource-efficient, for the machines to enslave the human race and do that than it would be for them to just build an equivalent number of giant piles of silicon. Secondly, for them to be able to use brains as computing power implies that they can trivially get full control over a human brain through their implanted data interface – which is exactly the thing they were trying and failing to do to Morpheus in the time it took him to get rescued by implausible helicopter stunt. (I suppose one could argue that it's all different when Morpheus's physical brain was at the far end of an illicit dialup link rather than conveniently accessible in one of their own pods, but from our own look at the pods it doesn't look as if the data connection was that different between the two cases.)

So I still don't buy it. The way I get round this glitch in my own mind is by totally ignoring the motivation behind the setup: the machines have bundled all of humanity who couldn't run away fast enough into life pods and pervasive VR for reasons never convincingly explained to us, and that just has to be good enough to drive our appreciation of the human characters' motivations to break back out of that setup.

[jack]

totally ignoring the motivation behind the setup

That's essentially what I'm suggesting too, I agree. I didn't mean necessarily that Morpheus himself was mistaken (that's not actually internally consistent, assuming he had any knowledge whatsoever of the wattage of an average human), but that the whole edifice is built on the knowledge of the founders of the city, and we're only told one line about it, so the information given is unreliable in lots of ways.