30 Day Movie Challenge: Day 17

            I decided to do the 30 day movie challenge as a blog series as it ties into my blog activities rather easily and I am once again not blogging my usual series with regularity in spite of saying that I would.

            Today is "A Movie that I used to love, and now Hate".  And this entry is a stretch.  I very rarely start out loving a movie and then get to the point where I hate it.  Even when I don't watch a movie anymore because I have seen it too many times, or because the jokes have become dated, I still understand why I liked it at the time I saw it and I adjust my personal view of the movie accordingly.  So what movie did I used to really like, and now like less but still consider it to be alright?  "The Matrix".

Need more Dakka!

            I have talked about the incredibly pointless sequels that were done for this movie, how they had a lot of pointless characters and sub plots, and made the humans look so far gone by living underground that they might as well be morlocks.  Truth be told the first "Matrix" was a revolutionary film for the time.  It used CGI and camera tricks that were done over and over again by every studio film for ages afterword.  It had a tight script with creepy at the start and exaltation at the end, a complete hero's journey from start to finish.  Sad thing is I have grown to understand how little sense this movie makes.

In "Dark City" the reason the creepy guys are messing with people makes a lot more sense, go watch that instead.

            Humans are used as batteries.  Let that idea role about your mind for a moment.  Humans are farmed for power.  Has it occurred to anyone that the energy in a human body is created by eating plants and animals and processing out the stored chemical energy?  If all you feed the humans are dead humans then the energy gets lost in the transfer, you will have less and less energy with each generation.  So the very premise of the movie makes no sense.  I can buy the massive mass hypnosis by a super computer angle, but the reason for doing so is silly.  Motivation is important, and the motivation here is shit.

Nice C'Thulhu design though.

            Here is another problem with the outside world.  How would blotting out the sun stop machines?  Plants and animals can't turn off, they are either alive and consuming sunlight or stored chemical energy (mentioned above), without the sun they die, but machines aren't limited by that.  The machines could have just turned off all but one of them ("Wall-E") who would hang out and wait for the sky to clear again, he could maintenance things, run on minimal power drain from geothermal energy, and when the sky finally cleared he would just wake up the rest of the computers and off they go.  Or what is more, Machines can be designed to survive in space off of solar wind and power, so why not just leave the planet altogether and fly through space using metal from asteroids to make more drones?  Or how about atomic power?  Really, it makes no sense that they would need the humans.  It's like nobody put any real thought into this.

I'll at some point have to go over why Droid soldiers are better than Clones.

            Lastly, seeing this in my early teens, I was very forgiving of poor acting, but Jesus Christ in a wheel barrel, Keanu Reeves is in this and is a disaster.  His presence stings even more when you find out that Neo was supposed to have been played by Will Smith, who only passed on it because he wanted to do a down to earth science fiction adventure movie that was a planed franchise... "Wild, Wild West".  *Sigh...*  Other people are fine picks though, especially Cowboy Curtis and Elrond.

            So yeah, it is infinitely quotable ("There is no spoon", "Stop trying to hit me and hit me!", "Mr. Anderson", "He's beginning to believe", "Woah..."), stylish as all hell and rather fun.  I just don't love it like a I did when I was less jaded.

Not that kind of Jade!