Blogtrek

What's all this about Matrix?

In 1999 I was in a group of two men and two women who wanted to decide what movie to watch one night. The two movies that were offered were Sleepless in Seattle and Matrix. The women were interested in Sleepless in Seattle and it seemed intriguing to me. Matrix, though, was based on an intriguing idea. Look at the world you see. Hear it. Feel it. This is not the real world. It is enough like the real world so you can maneuver in it, get meals, find friends, read and understand integral calculus and so forth. But it is not the real world, but rather, what your brain perceives of as the world. If something could go in there and change the references of your brain cells, might not your brain think it is in an office building in a dot com in 1999 whereas the real world is a burnt-out hulk in 2199? That is the theme of Matrix and that is exactly how it starts out. However, after seeing the movie, I began to feel the women were right. This movie, although it was based on an excellent idea, was far, far too violent. Every time you turn out someone is threatening someone, or pointing a gun at someone, or shooting someone, and one scene shows someone shooting a gun and shows zillions of gun shells falling to the ground. I therefore rated it a bomb.

Now here comes Matrix Unloaded. Unloaded? That's gun talk. It seems to me as though this new movie is just as violent as the predecessor. And I hear lots of excitement about it. But I hear most of it coming from the movie industry and the media. They are really hyping this movie up good. No matter where you turn to, you get matrix. You turn on the news, you get matrix. You turn on Larry King, you get matrix. You turn on Phil, you get matrix. Even if you turn on sports, you get matrix. Matrix, matrix, matrix. And people are lapping it up good, as can be told by the box office figures and the predicted lines to get in the theater. So this movie is going to attract crowds far beyond what one would expect from a movie of this type. Already, the local newspaper rates the story plot a dud. I can predict by how the previous movie turned out and by the hype necessary to carry this movie to the movie fans, that almost certainly this movie is just as much a bomb as Number 1 was. I feel that on a scale of 0-10, it rates 0.8; i.e., a shade less than 1. If I see it, it will be while I have time to kill and it will be from a video tape, not in a movie theater. Matrix indeed. I'd like to invert this matrix and extract its eigenvector.