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May 19, 2003
Surreal letdown?
With a huge deadline looming over one's head, what is the best possible means to procrastinate? Why, goto a new movie of course! With that in mind, I saw the Matrix Reloaded.
The movie on the whole was mediocre, and left me rather annoyed really. The constant re-use of bullet time effects for fight sequences became tiresome. The bits of the story that I enjoyed from the first were almost completely destroyed, but I do believe that was the point. It leaves the third and final installment to build a new world, which is fairly likely to happen.
The highway scene was fun, but as far as story elements went seemed rather useless. Much of the fighting seemed to become really unnecessary at times.
The real let down of the movie? The Burley Man scene. The scenario is seen in all the trailers. You know, the one with Neo fighting a mob scene's worth of Agent Smiths. The animation actually began to look too cartoonish for me, with motion blurs that stood out tremendously. Things that also didn't fit: at times facial mappings just seemed to be off by a few pixels, making each participants face look long and extended, or disconnected from the body. I think the scene would have flowed better with less bullet time as well, but each slowed down smack to a cranium caused the interactive theater experience to spring to life so I guess it did it's job. All in all the scene felt like it was a video game (the kind with repeating villains), not a movie clip.
Posted by Dan at May 19, 2003 10:10 PM
Comments
While I wasn't really dissapointed in MR, I agree completely with your last paragraph. Theo had an interesting take on it though: he said 'well, you know anytime animation goes faster than you can render you strat dropping textures and losing frames, right?' which I said was the whole problem I had with it. 'Well, the matrix is just a computer system right.....'
Not sure if I buy the 'shitty graphics were intentional' argument, but it's a neat spin.
Posted by: George Schlossnagle at May 29, 2003 12:00 PM