amorpheus

To start off, I'm experimenting with a new user name. Do you like it? Did you like the old one better? Do you even care? Let me know. Now, on with the mindless babbling:

I saw V for Vendetta last week. I don't have much to say about it. 1984 with Thatcher instead of Stalin. It was pretty good. The book was better. Yes, I know that film has its own merit as a medium, but the fact is there was no reason this needed to be made into a movie. Still, if you hate reading, then you should definitely see this movie, because they did a pretty good job with it.

Going in, I was afraid that it was going to suck unbelievably. Alan Moore has a long-standing tradition of writing really great comics that are made into really awful movies. This movie was an adaptation of an Alan Moore book made by the Wachowski brothers, who made a really, really awful movie called The Matrix Reloaded. I heard the third in the Matrix series was even worse, but I refused to see it, so I will make no judgement on it. My point is that if I were to make a list of the five worst movies I've ever seen, it would have to include Manos: The Hands of Fate, at least two Alan Moore adaptations, and The Matrix Reloaded. However, I realized halfway through V for Vendetta that what was bad about the Matrix movies was that the story was incredibly stupid, so in this movie, they were able to do a good job with it because there was a good story already written for them. After the movie, I brought this up with the friends with whom I had seen it, and they said that, actually, the original Matrix was a good movie.

I don't believe I have to explain why The Matrix wasn't a good movie. I would say that it was half of a good movie, or that it might have been a decent movie had it happened in a different order. To start off with, yes, the visual effects were very well done and very entertaining, but it didn't really distract enough from the plot. I hope everyone is already aware of how unimpressive the philosophy behind it is. The big message is, "Perception is not necessarily the same as reality."



If they had shown you the above picture and told you that those men are all the same height, but that robots had plugged into your brain and made you think that the one on the left was shorter, it would have been the same message in less than a minute, and they could have used the rest of the time they saved for fight scenes.

The biggest problem with the story is that once Neo found out that the world had been taken over by robots, the story is over. But then they have another half of that movie and a whole sequel without advancing the plot in any significant way. They blew their wad WAY too early. I would have been happier if they had done all of the training and the spectacular fight scenes and the gibberish about there not being a spoon before he left the computer-simulated world and then found out that robots had taken over the real world towards the end of the movie. Then, having mastered the simulated world, he could go on to fighting giant killer robots in the real world.

As it was, we just had half of a movie for it to sink in that he was fighting people who didn't really exist using a body that didn't really exist and it didn't really make any difference who the pretend winner was. They tried to make it seem like the fights really mattered, because if he died in the simulation, he would die in real life, but even if that were true, he could control reality. When you can bend reality to your will, running and jumping around like Superman is a fantastic waste of that power. If he had actually used his powers, he would never have been in any life-threatening situation. Like, for instance, why the fuck would you ever dodge bullets when you have the capability to turn bullets into sunshine and marshmallows? For that matter, did you notice that he had hair in the simulation but not real life, and they explained that was because what you were in the simulation didn't have to be what you were in reality, and that could have really come in handy had he used it on anything besides his hair? If he ever was spotted by the agents, he could turn into a sentient photon and zip at light speed to the nearest phone booth. Hell, since the laws of physics don't apply, he could turn into a spoon and zip at light speed to the nearest phone booth. If the agents catch him, so what? What are they going to do? How do you kill a spoon?


I can sort of forgive Neo for never thinking to use his god-like powers, because the movie made it abundantly clear that he was more than a little dim. The ones who really pissed me off were those damn robots. Really, how could robots that stupid have ever managed to take over the world? I know that karate battles look really cool, but they're sort of pointless when you can make a gun materialize at any time, plus you can replicate yourself and your duplicates can make guns appear at any time. Then again, even shooting at someone is pretty stupid when you control reality. Remember that scene where Neo was going to make a phone call, but then he had no mouth? That was pretty cool, right? Well, the agents could have done that at any time. Neo could be walking around, feeling all badass, then, suddenly, he has no legs. Or arms. Or eyes. And he's on fire. There, Neo's neutralized, and you didn't even have to land a single punch. Every time I saw a fight scene in which Neo had all of his limbs and wasn't on fire, it struck me that the robots weren't taking this world domination thing very seriously. Honestly, if they were doing their job, Neo would never have even found out that he was in a computer simulation. They could have killed him at any time, but they wouldn't have to. They could have just kept him busy so he wouldn't be seeking out the secrets of the universe. They could have created any number of scenarios to keep him occupied - running a business, a messy divorce, indictment, an attempt on his life - and he would never question it. They could even create a scenario in which he had escaped from the computer simulation to fight evil robots in a dystopian future world. Then again, maybe they did. That would make a lot more sense.