"wheeeeeeee!"

RE-RE-RELOADED

Trekking to the local googol-plex, all showings were sold out until about 1030, so my 2nd viewing of Matrix Reloaded will wait until tomorrow morning at 1130 (a good nerdy time to see a movie for the 2nd time). So over the coming days, I will occasionally post whatever thoughts come to my head about the SWFTNC ("star wars for the next century"). Presumably, this will serve to be one thermonuclear Google-bomb. Fair enough!

--I've read a few dozen reviews of Matrix Reloaded since I saw it on wednesday night, and the one I recommend most is by Salon's Andrew O'Heir.

--I re-watched the first Matrix movie last night, and a couple of things made a little more sense. In particular, pay attention to how the very beginning of the scene where Anderson/Neo is interrogated by the agents is filmed. You'll go, "oh!" And by the way, the first movie is still awesome. But there's a strange revisionist thought process circling right now, that "everyone hailed the original movie when it came out". Right. It didn't make a huge amount of money in its original release, many major reviewers claimed it was moronically melodramatic, stopping here and there to praise the joy of "bullet-time". This is why I get annoyed when critics are hard on Reloaded, all while saying the first movie was celebrated as some sort of vanguard at the time.

--As she falls from the big glass skyscraper, Trinity had better be careful not to bump into Tim Robbins and Eminem. Ok I'm a nerd.

--(the rest contain spoilers, highlight text to read) I find it amusingly ironic that now that he's free, Agent Smith can replicate . . . like . . . a virus!!! Though while it's awesome that he can do that (it provides us with one of the greatest fight scenes ever caught on film/computer, hehe), it's unclear so far as to how that ability will play out in the greater story (which I'm sure it will). Smith now goes from villain to "maverick outcast who will make a difference somehow". He's the Gollum of the Matrix.

---Neo stops the sentinels at the very end of the movie with his Neo-like powers, even though -- huh? -- he's supposedly outside of the Matrix at the time. Yeah yeah, it's the big cliffhanger, and we're gonna spend six months hypothesizing as to what that all means (though I'm sure there's a nerd website out there that has stolen all the answers already, sigh). Possible ideas include:
--By taking the left door (and being a cute young savior in love), Neo is walking a path different from that of his predecessors, and thus has come upon a second layer of defense by the machines: a Matrix within the Matrix. Like a powerful system of ambitious machine A.I. wouldn't give itself a little bit of defensive redundancy?
--The anomaly of Neo is so acute that somehow his abilities have transplanted themselves outside of the Matrix, perhaps? That seems to hack-ish of an explanation, the brothers W don't seem to prone to insulting our intelligence. Or, more likely,
--It will be something that none of us could have forseen. Yeah, that's it Brendan, take the easy way out.

That's enough for now.