Contradicting Popular Opinion
A.K.A.
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks: The Matrix Edition
We’ll get to the sequel lists next week. Still time to send in your nominees.
Okay, so some people were upset by last week’s column, but that’s why I’m here baby. It is my job to upset you.
We here at CPO have two follow up notes for y’all:
Memo 1: If you went out to see Bubba Ho-Tep or Kung Fu Hustle or whatever and skipped Meet the Fockers it does not prove me wrong, quite the opposite. You see, why complain about a lack of originality in movies when you go out and see movies with an abundance of originality? You are watching unique movies. People are making unconventional movies. Why are you bitching?
Are the Hollywood police showing up at your door and forcing you into the theater to watch the War of the Worlds remake? Does Universal studios employ Gestapo tactics to make you watch their latest sequel? No? Then quit your bitching.
The movie industry is a business. They produce what they think will make money. Often they are right. Your whining doesn’t hurt them. It will not stop the production of I Dream of Jeannie the movie. And I’d bet that a ton of you out there are dying to see what they do with Voltron as a movie.
Memo 2: Some loyal IP readers have inferred from my last column that I like Pumpkinhead better than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is actually true.
Mostly because Pumpkinhead is a better film.
Pumpkinhead is a story about the futility of combating violence with more violence. It portrays revenge as not only hollow, but as this self-destructing, humanity-killing thing. It also features a great monster that really seems to both excel at and enjoy his job as a vengeance demon.
Eternal Sunshine is just another romantic comedy with the distinction of having quite a long title.
Anyways, let’s get on with it, and disassemble one of geekdom’s sacred cows.
The Matrix
It is universally accepted that the second Matrix movie sucked out loud, and that the third one sucked like it meant it, but a little known fact in all this is that the first one isn’t very good either.
Let’s think about this a couple of little pieces at a time, then gradually move on to the bigger picture. It may be that none of these quibbles taken individually serve as a fatal flaw to the film, but together, well, their powers combine and magnify to form that green mulleted lesbian Captain Planet! Gonna bring pollution down to zero! That song is gonna be in my f*cking head all day.
First quibble: Have you ever met a hacker? A cracker? A computer geek of any sort? I’m going to say a strong plurality of computer types look less like Keanu and more like Comic Book Guy. This is a movie tradition I don’t understand. Movies tend to think hackers look like Hugh Jackman, Angelina Jolie, Johnny Lee Miller, etc. In movie world, computer geeks are svelte types who smell pretty good, don’t have any dandruff, and are completely comfortable in social situations.
The Matrix offers us a very Hollywood team of computer geeks. Let’s face it, Keanu looks like he can’t quite figure out spider solitaire. I’m just saying. Cowboy Curtis doesn’t seem too bright either. To be fair though, the computer skills of the characters are only vaguely important to the plot of the film. C++ programming doesn’t ever seem to come in too handy when dodging bullets.
Second quibble: So, you have a martial arts movie. So, natural you hire… wait for it… non-martial artists. Now, I could see this if you were casting based on acting ability, but let’s face it, only Hugo and Joey Pants have any business calling themselves actors. Keanu and Larry, you’re not very good at the whole acting thing. As for Carrie, she’s not even good looking in shiny pants.
(Seriously, why cast Carrie Anne Moss? She isn’t particularly skilled at acting or martial arts, she isn’t particularly attractive. She doesn’t have any chemistry with Keanu. She doesn’t have the screen presence of her male counterparts. The mind boggles. Oh, and that f*cking sex scene between her and Keanu in the third movie. It looked like Keanu was f*cking himself. They look like so much the goddamn same person, I would say to them, “you want ice cream cone?” and they both say yes.)
Back to the martial arts. Don’t email me about all their f*cking training. 2 whole months?! Wow, give ’em a f*cking black belt! Jackie Chan spent 10 years of his childhood at the Peking Opera training for 19 hours a day. The cast of The Matrix went through training similar to J. Peterman’s on that ABC celebrity dance show.
It might be a forgivable offense, you know, if the leads fought differently. That is to say, Morpheus is a badass Hapkido man, Trinity does Muay Thai, Neo does southern style Praying Mantis, the Agents use Tae Bo, etc. In Drunken Master, the styles clash between the hero and the main villain is a big part of what makes the final fight scene work. Here we get nothing so interesting.
As yet another aside, I’m not a really big fan of wire fu, anyway. If it’s really old colorful Hong Kong stuff, sure. Then it works. But in this modern world, Jet Li is the only person I’ve seen not look silly on wires. I’m pretty sure Jet Li was born with wires attached to him. He waits on line in the supermarket hovering, all that jazz.
Third quibble: The physics of The Matrix is, well, just silly. Inside the matrix, go ahead and run up walls, dive in slow mo, ignore action/reaction and conservation of momentum, do whatever the f*ck you want. Maybe it would be nice if their was some sort of consistency in how the physics work in the machine world, but we can forgive that, right?
In The Matrix‘s real world, things don’t make any more sense. For instance, the ships and sentinels fly. They hover somehow. How? No friggin’ clue, no friggin’ hint, no plausible means. It get’s even worse in the second and third movies, but we’re trying to ignore them.
Intuitor runs a site of “insultingly stupid movie physics.” Let’s see what he has to say about people as batteries:
The food fed to humans would have far more energy content than the meager power available from humans. It would require even more energy to run the food delivery system not to mention maintain the slime tubs. Why would the machines bother? Surely there’d be a more effective way to extract energy from the food. But wait! It gets worse. Liquefied dead humans are fed back to the living ones. The movie comes dangerously close to implying that the computer/energy system is a giant perpetual motion machine. This is clearly impossible according to the second law of thermodynamics and likewise impossible for us to dismiss lightly.
To cover itself, the movie throws in a quick mention that the human energy source powering the machines is combined with a source of fusion. This is like getting on a 747 and having the captain explain in great detail that the plane is rubber band powered, then add that it also has four jet engines.
To reiterate: coppertops > people.
Fourth quibble: the characters. Let’s see, we don’t really know about their family or friends. They don’t seem to have much of an existence outside of the movie. Half of them are killed off without the lead characters giving two shits. As previously mentioned, they all fight about the same.
The central characters? We basically have the bare bones version of Reluctant Hero, Protective Figure, Love Interest. Utterly boring, bland, humorless characters that wear raincoats and sunglasses at the same time. C’mon now is it sunny or rainy? They are virtually mutually exclusive.
Fifth quibble: The plot. Well, it is pretty much the standard Joseph Campbell model (which may contribute to its popularity). It skips the third section but pretty faithfully follows parts 1 and 2.
Let’s compare Part 1 and Part 2 Campbell Model to the Matrix:
Call to Adventure (taken in by Smith),
Supernatural Aid (going to Morpheus),
Crossing of the First Threshold (taking the pill),
Belly of the Whale (in this case the whale is Neo’s battery case),
Road of Trials (we get both a “real world” and “matrix” road!),
Meeting with the Goddess (oracle),
Atonement with Father (that is to say rescuing Morpheus),
Apotheosis (getting his magic super-powers on in the climax),
Master of both worlds (everything post climax).
But, Campbell’s model didn’t end with heavy metal. I will give them that.
Enough with the quibbles, lets talk major problems here.
Mostly what bothers me, is how incredibly short-sighted all of the characters are. In the Matrix you can make stuff out of nothing. They create thousands of things from nowhere. They can upload kung fu and driving manuals and Betty Crocker recipes. How do they defeat the bad guys?
Guns and punching.
You’re coding shit. You’re making it up. Fuck having lots of extra guns! Give me Iron Man’s suit. Give me a tank to attack the Agents. Give me shoes with wings, a rocket pack, adamantium, one of those guitar things from Kung Fu Hustle, a jive-talking velociraptor, anything.
And the thing is, as the movies progress, they get less and less creative! At the end of the first movie, Neo is so powerful that he can stop bullets in midair. He can jump inside agents and explode them. In the sequels? He can pretty much fly and do kung fu. Dude, you are supposed to be Matrix god. At least show me heat vision or lightning bolts or something. C’mon.
But I’m not here to talk about 2 and 3.
Actually, I lied; what bothers me most about The Matrix is its utter lack of humanity. Neo is freed from a life that is a lie. He never stops to say, “Hey, can we save my mom too?” He doesn’t care about his childhood friends who are being exploited. He doesn’t care about ex-girlfriends being used as batteries. (must avoid joke) He doesn’t express concern for any possible loved ones. And neither do any of this film’s heroes.
Instead, they seem to have contempt for the people for whom they profess to fight. Humans living within the matrix are cannon fodder for them. They express no remorse in killing, whether it’s cops or civilians being possessed by agents. The machines treat these people better. Morpheus, Neo and company are a bunch of cold, fascist Ubermensch wannabes.
Bottom line is: The Matrix is a scam. It is a normal dumb action movie, who seems smarter than his dumb friends because it once read a chapter of Descartes and half a chapter of Nietzsche. It is a bunch of flat characters killing other flat characters because “violence is awesome.”
Over-rated crap.
What to watch instead:
eXistenZ which has a leaner budget, better acting, a story that actually makes sense when given thought, and a more relevant philosophy lesson. Okay, so to some it comes off like a gay porn, but it’s still a better movie.
If you want a martial arts movie, well there is a metric f*ck ton of those. You can watch plenty of amazing films out there that feature people who actually know Kung Fu. If you want spectacle and realistic fights, there is always Enter the Dragon.
Actually, there is a movie that is similar to The Matrix but provides a lot more fun and imagination: Big Trouble in Little China.
