blackcoffee Posted November 20, 2003 Share Posted November 20, 2003 Well can't wait for the DVD's now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SirCasper6 Posted November 20, 2003 Share Posted November 20, 2003 Whoa man. DEEP. I'm not so well versed in religion or mythology to refute anything you said, so I'll just accept it ;) Can't wait for Shifty's rant.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Animaniac Posted November 20, 2003 Share Posted November 20, 2003 "Whoa" (Neo, M1) ****ing incredible. This is like a huge intellectual orgasm for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
macf13nd Posted November 20, 2003 Share Posted November 20, 2003 "Whoa" (Neo, M1)****ing incredible. This is like a huge intellectual orgasm for me. hmm... i dunno, its a great explanation (Y) , but it doesn't really make the film any better... :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Animaniac Posted November 23, 2003 Share Posted November 23, 2003 "Whoa" (Neo, M1)****ing incredible.? This is like a huge intellectual orgasm for me. hmm... i dunno, its a great explanation(Y)) , but it doesn't really make the film any better... :(( So people say the movie sucks because it doesn't make sense and doesn't answer questions, but then when it's all laid out and explained for you, people say it still sucks. Where's the logic in that? Here are some links that add more insight: http://home.att.net/~sandgryan/writings/matrix01.html http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/051803matrix.htm http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/031109matrix.htm Again, you have to appreciate this kind of stuff. The Matrix trilogy was made for people who like intertwined philosophies, theologies, archetypes, symbolism, and imagery. If you likedEvangelion>, you should like the Matrix. To me, they are the same genre. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oblivion Posted November 24, 2003 Share Posted November 24, 2003 The movie isnt that bad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mirkrim Posted November 25, 2003 Share Posted November 25, 2003 So people say the movie sucks because it doesn't make sense and doesn't answer questions, but then when it's all laid out and explained for you, people say it still sucks. Where's the logic in that? My sentiment EXACTLY. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dafinga Posted November 25, 2003 Share Posted November 25, 2003 I loved the knowledge you have on mythology and religion.....very well done! Was this done for College or lower level of school? I think you said for pleasure, but seems too school oriented. In college I took an existentialism in film class and for extra credit we experimented on Matrix [1]....which just came out on DVD at the time. This sounds like some sort of idea like that, but mostly for a religion/mythology course. Also I was speaking to one of my co-workers about the Hindu background and you were right on....I like when someone actually knows what they are talking about! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Caelamia Posted November 26, 2003 Share Posted November 26, 2003 I thought this was interesting and it made me think about some things in the movie. But I agree with those few people in that no matter how many philosophical explanations or theories or excuses around pieces of the plot there are, it just doesn't make the film any better. I don't *know* why I didn't find it as enjoyable as the last two. I just walked out of the cinema with a friend, and I was disappointed. Perhaps it WAS because everything wasn't explained to me, and that the flow of the film was too fast. We were thrown so many bits and pieces of confusing information that it was at times difficult to know just what was going on. And yes, to the average person who is a fan of the two previous films, it IS confusing. Why should we be required to know all about the various gods and goddesses (Christian, Hindu....whatever), their relationships, spiritual connections, literal meanings and various other theological miscellany just to understand this film?! "The Matrix" was a fantastic sci-fi film, and it didn't need us to know all these things in order to enjoy and understand it. To me, it seemed as if the second and third movies were totally different to the flow of first. I know this is partly because it's first in a trilogy, and to get people interested in it, the Wachowskis have to appeal to a general audience who will take the film at face value - a fresh and cool new sci-fi. To me, and this is just my opinion remember, so no hatred flames, they sat down after the success of the first and said, "Hey, our movie did so much better than we expected it to. Let's put more of all this cool philosophical stuff we love in it. If most people don't understand it, they will just love the flashy special effects and kick-ass action." I would call myself intelligent and my general knowledge good, but I found times whilst watching "Revolutions" when I just clicked my brain off and watched the pretty special effects. I would like to know if there really are people who 100% understood this film, first time they saw it, and never had any questions about it afterwards. Personally, I thought the ending of "Revolutions" was very cheesy. I mean, come on. You could almost say it's a stereotypical ending. A lovely sunset, a few characters looking off into the distance, guessing at what might be in the future and if they will ever "see Neo" again. Ick...not what we expected from the end of a blockbuster sci-fi trilogy? Anyway, I will shush now and give someone else a chance to speak. Though, there is one thing I didn't get in "Reloaded" and that is this: why, when Neo is in the Architect's room, do some of the monitors show scenes of his life from OUTSIDE of the Matrix? :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matt74441 Posted November 26, 2003 Share Posted November 26, 2003 The one thing that I find annoying is how people are going on about how when ******* dies, thats the end of her. The only person who knew was Neo, and the only "people" he could tell were the machines and Smith, and neither of them would have cared. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BananaMan Posted November 26, 2003 Share Posted November 26, 2003 I thought this was interesting and it made me think about some things in the movie. But I agree with those few people in that no matter how many philosophical explanations or theories or excuses around pieces of the plot there are, it just doesn't make the film any better. I don't *know* why I didn't find it as enjoyable as the last two. I just walked out of the cinema with a friend, and I was disappointed. Perhaps it WAS because everything wasn't explained to me, and that the flow of the film was too fast. We were thrown so many bits and pieces of confusing information that it was at times difficult to know just what was going on. And yes, to the average person who is a fan of the two previous films, it IS confusing. Why should we be required to know all about the various gods and goddesses (Christian, Hindu....whatever), their relationships, spiritual connections, literal meanings and various other theological miscellany just to understand this film?! "The Matrix" was a fantastic sci-fi film, and it didn't need us to know all these things in order to enjoy and understand it. To me, it seemed as if the second and third movies were totally different to the flow of first. I know this is partly because it's first in a trilogy, and to get people interested in it, the Wachowskis have to appeal to a general audience who will take the film at face value - a fresh and cool new sci-fi. To me, and this is just my opinion remember, so no hatred flames, they sat down after the success of the first and said, "Hey, our movie did so much better than we expected it to. Let's put more of all this cool philosophical stuff we love in it. If most people don't understand it, they will just love the flashy special effects and kick-ass action." I would call myself intelligent and my general knowledge good, but I found times whilst watching "Revolutions" when I just clicked my brain off and watched the pretty special effects. I would like to know if there really are people who 100% understood this film, first time they saw it, and never had any questions about it afterwards. Personally, I thought the ending of "Revolutions" was very cheesy. I mean, come on. You could almost say it's a stereotypical ending. A lovely sunset, a few characters looking off into the distance, guessing at what might be in the future and if they will ever "see Neo" again. Ick...not what we expected from the end of a blockbuster sci-fi trilogy? Anyway, I will shush now and give someone else a chance to speak. Though, there is one thing I didn't get in "Reloaded" and that is this: why, when Neo is in the Architect's room, do some of the monitors show scenes of his life from OUTSIDE of the Matrix? :) Couldn't have worded it any better. This is exactly how I felt when leaving the cinema and looking back on the trilogy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OrangeSoul Posted November 26, 2003 Author Share Posted November 26, 2003 Updated: Post-mortem First, we have to give up the notion that Neo and Smith can be represented as +1 and -1. That's much too simple. In several email exchanges I likened the final moment between Neo and Smith to the climactic ending of A Wizard of Earthsea, wherein Ged embraces and unites with the personification of his dark side. Ged doesn't disappear at that point. He's still there, only now transcendent. Neo is left at the end too. Instead of saying that Neo and Smith merged, we can say that the Light One and the Dark One merged, just like the annihilation of a proton meeting an antiproton. Neo and Smith could fight each other to a standstill as the Light One and the Dark One, and if that's all there was to it they might have ended up killing each other and that would be that. No elevation, no gifts, no transcendence. But the reality is this: The Dark One Neo The Light One This is why I said that Neo lays his power down. He steps away from his role as the Light One and goes into the middle path between the opposites. Smith cannot go there. Smith cannot (will not!) lay down his power as the Dark One, and so Smith is obliterated in the merging of the Light and the Dark. This is also why everyone who had been absorbed by Smith is restored (we don't see them all, but I believe they are there). It is the Smith-ness that clings to the identity of the Dark One, and so it is the Smith-ness that is destroyed, leaving the remainder behind. I have thought of another way to look at these events too, and I think this explanation is quite appealing. We have to think about the nature of the contest between Neo and Smith at the end of Revolutions. It is possible to say that Neo is fighting everyone in the entire Matrix. Smith has absorbed them all. Neo is fighting against the powers of the Oracle, Seraph, the Merovingian and his henchmen, and all the agents of the system. He is fighting against nearly the entire human race. Now the interesting part is that it's just about an even contest. It does seem, however, that Smith has a slight edge -- and no wonder! Smith is harnessing the abilities of everyone inside him. A critical point to notice is that any individual Smith can command the power of all the other Smiths. Power shifts freely within the horde. Here is the bit that counts: When Smith absorbs Neo, then Neo's powers are also increased by the abilities of everyone on the inside, because now Neo is in direct contact with all of them, and power shifts freely within the horde. At that level of magnitude, Neo wills the destruction of Smith and it is done. That brings us to the last bit of explanation of the merger, and the question of God's involvement. After Neo is absorbed, we see the code view of the real world, and a single pulse of orange light goes into Neo's body. Orange light is code in the real world. (Green light is code in the Matrix.) So some piece of code travels from the machine city, presumably from the Source, into Neo. A lot of people have speculated that this is anti-viral code being implanted into Neo, and that this code deletes Smith. All in all, not a bad theory, considering I have just said something very similar myself. The inevitable question that follows is "Why didn't the DEM [Deus Ex Machina] do this before, and why in the world did the machines need Neo at all?" The answer is that the "DEM" didn't do anything. The destruction of Smith was Neo's doing. At the moment of his sacrifice, Neo is in his divinity. He has claimed the Holy Grail -- the way between the pairs of opposites -- and walked back through the Portal to the Garden. When we see code moving from the Source to Neo, it is the connection between Neo and the ground of all being. It is the taking of the fruit of the Second Tree and the beginning of the ascent into Nirvana. The Buddha, sitting under the World Tree, was challenged by a thousand-armed god of death and his legions. The Buddha reached out his hand and placed his fingertips on the earth, which is the Source, and drew into himself the essence of the Infinite God. The death god and all his armies were shattered. http://wylfing.net/essays/matrix_revolutions.html#ascension The Yin and Yang of Neo[/size] God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness." -- Genesis 1:4 Throughout the trilogy, the theme of tension between pairs of opposites is constant. It underpins everything else, and lack of understanding this theme leads to a basic lack of understanding of the trilogy. It is obvious that Neo and Smith are to be regarded as opposite sides of the same character, but the theme of opposites goes far deeper -- so far as to provide us with a fairly detailed roadmap of the storyline of both Reloaded and Revolutions. The Quest for the Grail Before I get to anything else, it is absolutely critical to understand the symbolism of creation stories. Creation stories are inevitably about splitting things apart. At first there is only singular. I am. Then there is division. Think of it this way: if God was alone at the start, and He was All, and then He created any thing, it would necessarily have to come out of Himself. From one, two. In the beginning, God separated the light from the darkness, and the sea from the sky, and then the land from the sea. He is the wielder of the cosmic sword, cutting what was one into two. There is an Iroquois story about the First Mother getting pregnant from the wind (i.e., a "virgin mother") and giving birth to twins. There it is again, the one becoming two. Creation stories are the key. They are what get you started toward the big picture of the spiritual cycle, which goes like this: Creation Exit from the Garden Quest for the Holy Grail Reunion Then it starts over again. If you imagine a horizontal line between Nos. 2 and 3, that is the mirror line. Exiting from the Garden is the opposite of the Quest; Reunion is the opposite of Creation. Now you can see why I started by explaining that creation is equivalent to division. And perhaps you can also see how deep the pairs of opposites go in these films. Even the plot events themselves are pairs of opposites. (A short aside: This cycle is astonishingly similar to the cycle of the Hero, c.f. Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, although I was not at all thinking about the heroic cycle when I wrote that list of four steps above.) In the previous section, I described how the reunion -- the ascension back into divinity -- happens at the end of Revolutions. The moment of creation is in the first movie, at the point when Neo gets back up after being shot by Smith, runs down the hallway, into Smith, and then shatters him. As Smith informs us in Reloaded, something from Neo imprinted onto what was left of Smith. In other words, the creative act is the dividing of The One -- part continues as Neo, and part continues as Smith. The two middle parts of the cycle are what constitute Reloaded and Revolutions. I described in detail how Reloaded is the story of the exit from the Garden in the Reloaded essay. That leaves the Quest for the Grail. The Grail is not a thing. Among the mountains of email I received, there were a large number of requests for me to identify what object in the movies represents the Grail. (Don't think you are deficient. Symbolic language can be difficult to understand.) In fact, the Grail is the state of being Neo is in when he allows Smith to absorb him. The Grail is a way -- it's the doorway back into the Garden. Christ talks about himself like that: "I am the way." In the Grail legend, the Grail is said to be the cup in which Jesus' blood was caught when he was crucified. There is the same message. The blood of the Christ -- the sacrifice of the Christ -- is the way. A lot has been made of the Grail being a kind of passport to immortality. That is a reference to the Tree of Life. Remember, Adam and Eve didn't eat from that tree, and the idea is that, with the Grail, you can get back into the Garden and chow on some immortality fruit. We need to read this as a story, however -- these are metaphors. The tree and the Grail are both metaphors for a transformation in you. (Don't read metaphors as facts. It's bad for you.) You obtain the Grail (the Royal Blood; your kingship; your divinity) by choosing the way of Christ. That way is the middle way between the pairs of opposites and the reuniting of the divided self. The Quest is the journey to the World Tree, the sacrificial cross, where the sang royale is expressed and gifted to the world. This is Neo's journey to the machine city and to the Source. Neo chooses the way of the Christ when he steps off of the Mjolnir and onto the Logos. Logos is symbol-speak for Christ. (There is another meaning to this transition: it is the laying down of the war-power of Thor's hammer and the choosing of the word-power of Jesus or the Buddha. Before the Buddha was born, his mother was told her son would either be a great warrior-king or a great teacher. Emphasis on or. Likewise, Jesus is offered dominion over the kingdoms of the world, which is taken to be mutually exclusive with continuing as a teacher.) In case we're doubting what kind of journey this will be, Bane attacks. During the ensuing fight, Neo's eyes are scorched out of their sockets. Blind, he is mocked by Bane. This is identical to what happened to Jesus on the way to his crucifixion -- he was blindfolded and beaten by the soldiers, who challenged him to use his second sight to identify his attackers. And we see that this is in fact Neo's full awaking to his second sight. His first words after being blinded are, "I can see you." The spiritual journey, the Quest for the Grail, begins, on the road that can be seen only with the inner eye. The cloak of Christ falls on Neo's shoulders. But didn't I call Neo the Devil? Why, yes I did. http://wylfing.net/essays/matrix_revolutions.html#ascension Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OrangeSoul Posted November 26, 2003 Author Share Posted November 26, 2003 The Serpent and the Christ I have done plenty to talk about Neo as a divided pair, especially as the Light One and the Dark One (i.e., Smith). Neo is divided in another way, too. He "switches sides" for a while -- actually, throughout Reloaded. I managed to irritate some people by suggesting Neo was equivalent to the Devil in Reloaded. I managed to irritate them even more by suggesting a connection, a family tie no less, between the Christ and the Devil. Well, that's unfortunate for them. It's a requirement that these symbols aren't clung to as if they were literal. In the first and third films, Neo acts like a Christ. In the second film, Neo acts like the Serpent. This is exactly what I laid down at the end of the Reloaded essay. At the end of the first movie, we are left with a powerful Messiah. It could have stopped there, and that might have been fine. But we had not been told a story of wholeness. The pairs of opposites remained. Neo had dealt a blow to the machines from within the Matrix, but the machines still ruled the real world. The Bros. W chose to continue this story, and bring it completion, by turning inward on the very nature of the Christ (which is why the second two movies seem so overwhelmingly philosophical). And that story starts with the Serpent. In the heavenly sphere, there is no time and there is no suffering. It is also quite boring. No growth, no emotion. A human being needs to emerge from the Garden and come into the field of time. This introduces a problem. With time, things pass away. Trinity dies in the field of time. That is pain. With time comes suffering. The Serpent is what leads us out of the Garden into the field of time, where invention, love, growth, and...suffering are possible. Neo in Reloaded was the Serpent. He disobeyed God and took the red pill. The consequence was an assault on Zion. Now here is the wonderful part. Suffering awakens us to compassion. There is no compassion without suffering. There is no Christ without the Serpent. Compassion is a complex good that can only exist on Earth. There is the Christ, the compassionate savior, on Earth. There is Neo in Revolutions. He is not the military savior; he is not Lock. Lock has no compassion (Lock is willing to march every inhabitant of Zion into the dock; for him, the ends justify the means). The Christ offers the way back to Heaven by countering suffering with compassion, manifest in selfless, willing sacrifice. Smith becomes suffering for all. Neo becomes compassion for all. The pairs of opposites, the particle and the antiparticle, the yin and the yang of Neo, accelerate toward each other. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darkmark327 Posted November 26, 2003 Share Posted November 26, 2003 Number 1. This should have "SPOILER TAG" If someone is retarded enough to want the movie explained before they see it, they deserve to have it ruined. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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