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Hiro Pendragon
bye bye f0rums!
Join date: 22 Jan 2004
Posts: 5,905
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03-11-2005 02:39
From: Eggy Lippmann Hiro, you need a spell checker man. Also, you seriously need to lay off the crack pipe. Sorry, after writing those exhausting posts, I didn't feel like spell checking.  From: someone The Matrix is a popcorn movie. A really good piece of entertainment. At least the first one.
It's not a way of life, or a big fancy message. Again, my thread is not about the movies themselves, but the philosophy that the Wachowski Brothers intended in them. But, no popcorn movie I've ever seen has 15 minute dialogues in them about reality and truth. From: someone The Wachowski brothers aren't enlightened philosophers, they are a couple of ex-carpenter hippies who like Anime and sci-fi. Have you even SEEN them? They're the "40 years old and still teenagers" type...  That may well be true, but it doesn't mean they were not trying to be philosophers. From: someone The Matrix sucked after the first movie, and it presented nothing really original. Granted, see first comment. From: someone You can find its central themes in many, many, MANY anime series ... I agree. Can you name one that dealt with modernity and postmodernity on such a deliberate method? I'd be interested in that. From: someone Heck, the concept of "uploading" yourself into a computer is rather old, and you can find the exact same kind of spinny-rotatey "zero-G" fight scenes in the "Hong Kong Action" genre of movies dating back to at least the 70s. See "Hero", "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for some recent examples.
Actually, some scenes from The Matrix seem to have exact parallels to "Ghost in the Shell" scenes. Other movies I've enjoyed, for sure. But the style is almost entirely seperate to the philosophy... I think it's just a pretext, really... there's no reason kung-fu had to be in the movie other than kung-fu is cool.
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Hiro Pendragon
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http://www.involve3d.com - Involve - Metaverse / Emerging Media Studio
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Cienna Samiam
Bah.
Join date: 13 Mar 2005
Posts: 1,316
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04-09-2005 12:32
From: Hiro Ah, so it becomes clear. The Merovignon was the first The One, who chose to preserve the system rather than go for love, and has through the iterations of the matrix lost his humanity, as Penelope has lamented. His floor number - 101 - or five, is the iterations of the matrix, and he is threatened by Neo who seeks to replace him.
Because that's what The Matrix movies are about - escape from this cycular reinvention of culture and religion by our reliance on science and technology, and coming to a true synthesis of body/mind, spirit/science, modern/postmodern. Ironically, if this was indeed the goal, they failed terribly. The oldest and most insidious mythos of all is that of the cycles of nature -- birth, death, rebirth -- which humans generally play out in the process of daughters overthrowing mothers, sons overthrowing fathers, the endless replacements that represent the closest thing to 'rebirth' that humans can know. The first movie had potential. The second was a confirmation that they didn't grok things well enough to meet that potential. The third was purely vapid. It would have been much more entertaining and interesting had the second movie confirmed the existance of an 'uber matrix' (which was heavily implied at the end) and left it to the third movie to reveal the now 'required' interdependency between humans and machines. The attempt at making the transition from thesis to antithesis to synthesis failed in this movie series, mostly because in the end, the writers and producers did not seem to really have much of a grasp on the ideologies and philosophies they were attempting to present. With that said, the effects and advances in lighting, film, and CGI techniques alone more than excuse the failures in epistemology and philosophy.
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Just remember, they only care about you when you're buying sims.
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