From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 18:23:40 MDT
I enjoyed watching it - I didn't expect anything profound, but still
found many enjoyable things. Mostly they were about visual design; note
the many isolated headshots with an off-center speaker? Somehow they
were all leading up to the discussion in the White Room, where the
off-center speaker image was united using the fractal panopticon
screens.
Another interesting thing was how the first movie dealt with the issue
of real vs. virtual and hyperreality, and this was about control and
determinism - very postmodernist. Practically all the main characters
demonstrated their unwillingness to be controlled in different ways; the
only beings that were controlled were machines. Maybe the third movie
will be centered on some other pet postmodernist area, like the body?
My friend Alexander remarked that it was all a big fight between Jung
and Freud. On one side the divine planner Freud with his vision of a
perfect and civilized Matrix that unfortunately has to contain a
"subconscious" Zion. On the other Neo struggling together with his
anima Trinity against his shadow Smith and all the heavy symbolism of
death-rebirth, underground centers and wise teachers.
The nice thing about the Matrix matrix of movies, games, essays, anime,
cartoons and stories is that is open and extensible. One can always dig
and explore, there is always things that can be re-interpreted. Compare
this with (say) the Terminator movies, where the amount of extra juice
that can be sucked out from the movie and spin-offs is rather limited
and strongly constrained. The Matrix may not be high literature, but it
is far better than most sf movies through its attention to detail and
complexity.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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