posted
While neither of the follow ups lived up to expectations. I personally think that while the first one's story worked well as a movie, The other's did not, the problem as I see it is there was far too much area to cover you could have turned the last two in to four movies and had enought material to fill them all. the second two, and the third in particular would have made an very good book, however it makes only a so-so movie. But I digress this is not the point of the post, mearly an aside.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The major attack on Zion that takes place in revolutions if fought by the citizens of Zion with two major weapons. The Large Exoskelatens Tank like things and a Bazooka like weapon. No one would really use weapons like that.
The Bazooka to start with: The weapon itself is far to large it takes two people to load for gods sake. it Shoots two fricken huge shells at a time, you would be better off with smaller guns shooting one shell at a time, you could fire more of them to get the same effect, it would also allow you to have all of your foot soilders arms instead of having some of them just haul crap around. The shell are pretty much fire and forget, assuming that they are heat seakers or track automaticly on something. so training is not an issue.
The Big robot w/ people inside of them things. This is perhaps the stupidest weapon anyone has ever come up with. let think just for a moment about the other technology that we see in the matrix, the people of zion have sufficent bandwith and computing power to run a virtual reality simulation for DOOR OPERATORS. With that kind of bandwith you could put your people inside somewhere out of danger, as trained personell are very expensive to replace so you want to protect them. This still assumes that you would even have people aiming the weapons, why would you? computers today can track full automatic fire back to the source in realtime. If you have the computing power that they demonstrate in the matrix moves having the computer aim for you will result in more accurret fire. This would also allow the people of zion to come up with something better than special purpose carts to manually haul ammunition out to these monsters.
Another problem with their defense of zion, They had no gun emplacements, no fortifications what so ever, If there is no where for you to retreat they already know where you are and where you will be tomorrow, static gun emplacements allow you to take some advantage of this, nothing else helps,
(I know it rambles, and has bad grammer spelling, etc)
Posts: 1458 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
luthe, there's a really cool thread with a bunch of reviews. I can't read yours yet cause I haven't seen the movie but I'm saving all the discussions for this weekend when I finally get to the theater.
Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
"The Large Exoskelatens Tank like things and a Bazooka like weapon. No one would really use weapons like that."
This is true. Of course, it's also worth pointing out that the Sentinels aren't really as useful as they should be, that the diggers should have had nukes on 'em, and that I would personally put some kind of surge protector on the Matrix to prevent people from dying in the real world when they died there.
And don't get me started on the diminishing returns you get from relying on humans for your energy, rather than just building big solar collectors above the cloud line. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
This seems like a good place to put my REM version of Matrix Revolutions (which I have not seen yet) but I dreamed about it last night. REM meaning dream literally, and not "how I wish it would be". I have read a lot of spoilers, so the dreams content may reflect that.
So some little kid is dialing random numbers, and trinity accidentally picks up the phone and gets sucked into the matrix, much in the same way agent smith got out of the matrix. Neo and Morpheus go in after her, but since her body actually vanished when she went, she is stuck in there. They are like "do you best to help the cause".
Neo and Morpheus do some fight training in a square cement tunnel, much like the one that Austin Powers got stuck doing an 89 point turn in.
Then Neo decides he is lonely and lines up with a gal who looks somewhat like "Dark Angel" Jessica Alba, except more voluptuous. For their wedding ceremony, they are going to do massive tumbling flippy handspring runs down the aisle. At this point the dream cuts to being a "making of" featurette where it shows them having amusing but painful accidents with the flywires.
Back in the Matrix, Trinity has managed to get appointed to the Supreme Court and things are going pretty well, when she starts to break out with frightful Ebola like symptoms. I appears that a physical assault on the matrix is causing this to happen to her more than anyone else for some reason.
At this point the dream kind of degraded into an interview with my bishop that I was a little anxious about at the time. I guess in the dream my bishop was an agent.
Trinity is trying to get the little boy who dialed the random numbers to help her out, but it wasn't going so well. Then I was woken up.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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First, the bazooka. Yes, not a graceful weapon well-suited to close-quarters combat and quick manuevering.
Second, the "mech". Maybe the onboard electronics (ie computer) does assist aiming? As a driver you swing the arms around to pick your targets, but the computer provides the fine aim to actually hit the target.
To gather these two points together you need to think about a few things. The residents of Zion had not (to their memory) ever fought a machine invasion force before. Simply put, there was no war experience for them, thus their weapons would not necessarily reflect ideal design to repell the incoming danger. Also, they were clearly (and repeatedly) shown as appalled and surprised by the sheer size of the machine army. While their weapons would have done well against a smaller force they did not appear to even have considered the possibility of attack by a force of that size. Working from limited resources they had to build and maintain the weapons they thought would work best. Without major battlefield engagements to gain experience from they lacked the trial and error necessary to refine their tactics and designs.
As an aside, you forgot the "zappy lightning gun" things. Generally worthless, but still effective if you got really lucky. They also had the advantage of not killing you if used at a close-range target.
Also, they did have turrets. They were on the central control tower structure. They just didn't last very long in the battle. Stationary targets always tend to fall first in combat.
Finally, the matrix'd "door openers": I'd say it would be safe to assume they weren't simply opening and closing doors, but rather performing work comperable to modern day air traffic controllers. Certainly a complex and demanding job.
Great idea of putting all the "mech" users in the matrix and saving the exposure of human life - unless of course you're looking at those people who can use the matrix as the ship crews who would undoubtedly be fighting the enemy from those ships. Remember, the dock workers were mostly (if not virtually exclusively) "homegrown". No matrix jacks. No remote control MechWarrior game for them.
But still, I agree. The third was better than the second, but neither was especially great compared to the first. I've got The Matrix on DVD, but Reloaded and Revolutions won't be on my shelf until I find them on sale cheap.
Visually pretty, competant storyline, but not spectacular.
posted
The thing I can't figure out is about conservation of energy.
If they are useing humans to create energy, how does the energy get produced?
The way I see it the humans would run out of dead people food. so the machines have to have some other source of energy to create food for the people to create energy from the food.
Posts: 2489 | Registered: Jan 2002
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but I'm saving all the discussions for this weekend when I finally get to the theater.
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