i can say that if you are trying to experience enter the matrix with reloaded you should do game first then movie because otherwise the movie will be temporarily erased from your brain
it’s kind of wild how enter the matrix implies that the monica belluci kiss scene happens at least twice and the seraph fight test happens like 3 times during these events but it’s definitely okay if you just think to yourself that they are programs so they are just acting programatically
also if you happen to be experiencing all of this media in order it is absolutely wild how niobe/ghost’s ridiculously over the top action movie setpieces are just kind of shit that happens in the background
niobe is punching agents out of planes in hand to hand combat and personally dodging the swarm of smiths. agents in ETM are to agents in the matrix as the borg in tng are to the borg in voyager i guess
found it interesting that even through static and distorted ETM uses footage from flight of the osiris and kevin michael richardson as the actor for thaddeus. just this weird little element where these out of date graphics are supposed to straight up be real people who the flesh and blood actors know.
you have to accept the old squaresoft cg layer, the polished hollywood filmmaking layer, and the ancient ps2 graphics layer as all “real” to the story and it’s kind of wild.
sparks the operator of the logos, who appears to be natural born human, talks about having a death wish as going “full bronson” which is just another of the wachowskis wild 20th century tough guy idioms that these things are full of
ghost and trinity being brother and sister (freed the same day) and how their personalities are kinda both weirdly aloof is maybe my favorite weird little character bit from ETM and is just another thing that makes me think everything after the first movie should have been a tv show (an animatrix short about it at least woulda been nice)
funniest part of ETM is all the vampires and goblins and shit u gotta fight
some weird person should definitely extract all the dialogue from that and just make it cg animated and fanedit it into and unwatchable 4 hour version of reloaded
watching reloaded you can really see some of the early hints of what would come from a cinematography standpoint with speed racer. everyone talks about the burly brawl as weird cg effect, but the highway chase has wildly complex compositing including a lot of early “impossible shots” of cameras going under trucks and whatnot. during the motorcycle chase part it is out of control and i remember in theaters being mesmerized by it.
also the speed racer editing style of weird exposition while going backwards and forwards in time, like a heist movie in somebody’s dream, has sort of a prototype version in the whole attack in the power plant sequence
it’s interesting how detective story from the animatrix seems to take place in the matrix but wants to use the weird terry-gilliam/dark city esque steampunk tech from zion
the haunted house short is still the best animatrix short, but “matriculated” where they plug in a sentinel to a construct and have designed their own weird creative psychadelic vr landscape is way, way more interesting conceptually than a lot of what the movies offer
that vr zone, combined with the zion air traffic control white space, and the implied hot babe interface of the zion archive in the second renaissance make for a very complex and fascinating view of UI of real worlders?
