Things don’t happen all that fast in the world of the Matrix. At one point Morpheus was in the act of drawing his sword so I knew I had time to go to the bathroom and then spend twenty minutes waiting in line to buy popcorn. When I got back, the sword was still only halfway out of the scabbard and the audience was being listlessly “entertained” by Morpheus’ perpetually cool and anguished scowl presented in super slow-motion, frame by frame format. During this extended and pseudo-art house tedious interlude, I found myself wondering how it is that the characters of the Matrix, who have limitless virtual warehouses of portable super-technological armaments to chose from, are always getting into situations where they have to finish off the bad guys with swords and knives? The next time Keanu Reeves, rather than picking up his double barreled flame-thrower with the laser sight, should just go with a slingshot and a hand-full of rocks. I’d just love to sit there and see a whole bunch of slow-motion frame-by-frame Keanu Reeves facial agony photos as he pulls back the rubber band of the ten cent weapon while cutting loose with an inaudible primal yell.
The only times that things happen quickly in the Matrix Regurgitated are when, yup, you guessed it, all the characters are digitally rendered, and poorly. As soon as the flesh “actors” (which is a loosely applied term for any ensemble including Mr. Reeves) step out the whole thing speeds up, which would be a cue to see if you can spot the computer images if they weren’t so blatantly obvious. It’s like playing where’s Waldo when the picture of Waldo is as big as the head of the Mona Lisa. Back in the good old days of film, Jackie Chan used to leap from one building to another, and even though that moment never looked nearly as cool or was a tenth as complex as the scenes of the Matrix, you got a brief surge of excitement due to the fact that you knew that Jackie Chan was really leaping from one building to another. Your excitement at this scene was, of course, compounded during the closing credits when they showed a brief documentary of Jackie Chan being taken from the building in an ambulance and further footage detailing how hard it was to complete the rest of the movie shooting around Jackie with the serious injury he had sustained. That’s cool. Ones and zeroes are not and will never be.
The worst of it is that every single movie these days has to do all of its action scenes in irritating slow motion. I can’t even hardly sit through the adds anymore. It’s all girls in bikinis jumping off exploding bridges in slow motion, or big green monsters leaping over each other in slow motion, or whatever else, but always in slow motion and from fifty different angles. And yes, I’ll admit, it was cool in the original Matrix just because it was something I had never seen before. But I’ll tell you this, there was a time when the neon blue special effects background of “Tron” was the coolest thing I’d ever seen too. It’s cool to eat blueberry pancakes every now and then but that doesn’t mean I want them three meals a day and as snacks with nothing but liquefied blueberry pancakes to drink.
Now I’m not saying that using super-slow motion from every angle is a bad idea, it’s just that every movie does it in the exact same way. People doing the splits, people jumping up in the air, etc., etc. Why don’t they make it fun and educational? Why don’t they show bullets crashing into people’s heads and then put little arrows and little pieces of text in there to label every part of the brain just before the searing hot bullet tears it to bits? That would be cool. Or maybe they could make a movie about accountants and show some fat, balding guy sitting in an office with sweat stains under his arms signing a document in slow motion from thirty angles. That would be cool just because I’m sick of seeing high-priced morons who don’t know anything about their craft being shoved down my face all the time in fifteen foot silver screen splendor just because some idiots in the world find them attractive. Screw it, where would they be without accountants? Let’s test the real power of film and see if we can get society to believe that it is the accountants of the world and not the Keanu Reeves types that are truly hot.
Now don’t get me wrong there were parts of “Regurgitated” that I liked. I liked the “celebration of raw humanity” dance sequence, I liked the weird French quarter interlude with that kind of fat chick from “Tears of the Sun” with her white leather dress that kept trying to poke her nipples at you yet never quite succeeded. But I think the best part was that highly romantic scene at the end where Neo fist-fucks his girlfriend back to life. That brought a tear to my eye because I was in a similar situation one time, but when I did it, it was from fifty different angles and in super slow motion. Regrettably, my girlfriend didn’t make it, but that’s just the sad difference between the movies and real life.
The End