Yeah, sometimes I'm no fun.

[mikailborg]

Saw "The Matrix Reloaded" again last night. Like a lot of modern action movies, there's parts of it I just can't enjoy as much as the filmmakers intended me to.

In the Matrix trilogy, both the good guys and the bad go through a lot of bystanders. We do get a pious little speech from Morpheus in the first film discussing that some of the village may have to be burned down to save it, but I don't think that improves the freedom fighters' moral ground much. From the perspective of the ordinary, unknowing inhabitant of the Matrix, those from Zion would indeed seem like terrorists in a lot of their actions.

But the freeway scene is the bit that always gets me. True, most of the random destruction in that scene is caused by the "bad guys", but it doesn't make it much better for me. Live though one near-fatal car accident in real life, and one's attention moves from the cool kung-fu move that Agent did off the hood of a car, to the poor driver who was just trying to get home from work and is now chunky salsa all over the road. Boom - the sequence is not fun for me anymore, and now I just want it over. :(

You know, the Machines seem disorganized and barely in control of their own creation in these movies. We saw in Mouse's death how the Machines can hack the Matrix for their own use. Why not just make the small tweak [set ZION_VEHICLE_GAS to "0"] in that sequence? There'd be a lot less mass destruction, ghostly apparitions, and Agent possessions to explain away later.

Even better - don't want to fight Morpheus and Trinity, who've gone through a lot of your Agents as it is? [set ZION_VEHICLE_FUEL_TYPE to "fighter aircraft fuel"] - as soon as a little of that hits the spark plugs, the KeyMaker and the Zion rebels won't be a problem. Maybe the Machines just aren't very creative on their own.

Comments

[mikailborg.livejournal.com]

Quite true, though the squids' combat software seems to need some work. When I saw hundreds, if not thousands of squids pour into Zion's Dock in Revolutions, it was amazing that the defenders weren't overwhelmed in mere minutes.

There are possibilities, of course. Perhaps the squids' software really wasn't suited to the job because they were sentinels and hunters, not assault soldiers. Since the trilogy hints at some dissension in the Machine realm, maybe a pro-Zion group of the Machines was crippling the squids. We just have to guess :)

[epawtows.livejournal.com]

Given the defensive capabilities of Zion as depicted in the movie, I can think of very few things *LESS* effective (in terms of results per resources expended) for the machines to have sent down that hole than squid-bots, particularly given the idiotic combat programs they seemed to be running. (Let's see, they're using high-ROF automatic weapons. Why don't we *BUNCH UP*, that way we don't have to worry about any of the bullets missing us!)

Those squid-things looked like they could operate underwater a lot better than the battlesuits. How about diverting a river into that hole and having the bots *swim* in?