Master and Commander.

All through the movie, every few minutes, there were four-foot angle-brackets and/or T's comprised of large, hollow yellow dots flashing off to the middle-left and right off-center.

Would they perhaps be the same dots referred to in the Kill Bil(l) post? If so, why didn't I see them during that movie?

Likely the random flashes of dying neurons in your visual cortex. Happens a lot in people with an accelerated rate of neuronal decay - I suggest doing something to exercize all those little glial cells that are supposed to be protecting your neurons - maybe reading a book rather than looking for angle brackets in movies?

Anti-piracy measure, known as Cap Codes. One more thing to contribute to the death of the cinema-plex (and the rise of the home theater).

I thought that was the swarms of gnats that only I can see and I'm constantly chasing down the street whilst shouting, "No, NO! Thou shalt NOT harm the spicy chipmunk!" and the fish with their little thermos!
Murfle.

I really enjoyed Matrix Revolutions. I also enjoyed the first two. I think, however, that one must look at the first movie and the last two as very different animals. They are about as similar as The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Both set in the same world, but very different themes.

Let me say right now that I am not a connoisseur of film as an art form. I like movies, but that's about the extent of it. If you're interested in hearing about camera work and such, ask our esteemed host; he has an excellent eye for that sort of thing. I just don't tend to notice it.

The Matrix trilogy, for me, has always been about two things: absolute badassery and philosophy/religion. On the former count, Revolutions (and Reloaded) is not as solid as the original. But for me at least, they make up for it with their interesting exploration of Gnosticism.

The R&R manage to both keep the audience entertained and explore a rich world based on a theology that has been essentially dead for a thousand years. I found them fascinating and unique.

I haven't seen Master and Commander yet. It sounds cool though.

Yep, those were indeed the infamous cap codes, and Steve and I both noticed them. Seemed orange/reddish to me though. It's the first time I've noticed them. I imagine it has something to do with their placement in this particular movie. They stood out very visibly against the white fog in the scene they were in.

Revolutions was entertaining, and the big climactic final battle was well-done. Overall, I'd even say it was better than Reloaded, which had a few nice fight scenes but was mostly a disjointed mess. However, both of the sequels fall so far short of the excellence of the first movie that I can't bring myself to think of them as anything more than a few hours of amusement. Whereas the first movie was a cinematic milestone and I daresay even a masterpiece, the second and third felt like standard blockbuster pap. Good blockbuster pap, but dissapointing when compared to the original. I wanted something better, not just bigger and louder.

A few things in particular annoyed me about Revolutions, though. One was the inexplicable directorial choice of framing almost every closeup in such a way that the actors' heads were cut off just above the eyes. When they did this in Reloaded, I thought that perhaps the projectionist had misframed the picture, but they do the same thing in this movie. It's been ages since I've seen the first movie, so I can't remember if they did it there too, but whatever their reasoning is, it's damn annoying.

The second thing that annoyed me was the startling abundance of dialog and settings taken from other great movies -- mostly from the original Star Wars trilogy. At first it seemed like the Wachowskis were just having a little fun, but if that's what it was, they went a little overboard. The most glaring example is when Neo confronts the disguised Agent Smith on the broken down ship. Neo's dialog as he realizes who he's talking to is taken almost word for word from the infamous "I am your father" scene in The Empire Strikes Back: "No! That's impossible! I'll never join you!" (although without Mark Hamill's girly-man wailing). Then, of course, there's Trinity venturing alone into a dark area of the ship to see why the engines aren't working, ala Ripley in Alien, there's a ton of Han Solo/Lando dialog from what's-her-name and Morpheus in the "flying through the maintenance tunnel" scenes, and of course, there's the whole gun turret thing from A New Hope (although without the cool moving gunner's chairs and stuff). Neo even meets the Master Control Program from Tron. And as if stealing from other franchises isn't enough, there's a half-assed rehash of the lobby scene from the first Matrix movie. Shameless!

I'll probably buy the DVDs, but they'll go in the same pile as The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. The "movies with some really cool scenes that I'll sometimes use for testing my home theatre equipment or to waste a few minutes when I'm really really bored" pile.

Huh. Well, I'm probably going to write a review on faerye.net when I have the time, but I think you're kind of reaching on the "stealing settings and dialogue". I respectfully submit that I know the dialogue from all three REAL Star Wars movies quite well, and I didn't catch any of that (and I have caught it before. I wonder whether the people writing the Matthew Broderick Godzilla realized they were doing that?) This stuff all seemed to me a logical and/or integral part of the plot. I mean, if the [noun] that waited in the dark area of the ship had come into the cockpit to attack two stupendous badasses (albeit in their mortal, less badass forms), wouldn't that have made no sense? Is it so ludicrous that Trinity went alone into that part of the ship when there were only two people in the ship and she's the one who knows how the ship works? It is, in fact, quite reasonable for Neo to think it's impossible for Smith to be out of the Matrix -- in fact, it's a more reasonable thing to think impossible than that an old man lied to a farmboy once! If it were a situation and a shot, I might agree with you, but it's just situations -- they didn't use the gun-turret glass-dome view from New Hope, they didn't use any particular shot from Alien. As it is, I think you didn't like the movie and that's about all that can be said.

That said, I thought the room Smith & Neo busted into during the fight had windows just like the room McLeod and Evilguy fought in in Highlander. But I think that's my patented Fangirlvision, not a real thing. Plus, I must acknowledge that almost every industrial building of the early 20th c. had those windows. Too bad, it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Actually, I think that room (that hosted part of the Smith/Neo fight) was supposed to call up images of the training dojo from the first movie. It did for me, at least.

What I didn't like about Matrix Revolutions is that I didn't care about any of the characters. The only characters that I DID feel any attachment to died. I HATED the generals speaches, they were so god damn corny. Then those two girls who were shooting the shoulder missle thing. I could care less if they lived or died because you were only introduced to them 5 mins before.

I know the actor that played the Oracle died so they switched, but in the movie they gave no reason for it. "I'm in a new body, deal with it"-basically.

Another reason I didn't like it was because I was expecting Neo to live and help the rest of humanity/robots to "evolve" like he had. But of course that didn't happen.

I really don't see most of your the Star Wars/Matrix analogs. I admit that I though of the vader-father scene briefly during that particular Smith/Neo fight. But I don't see significant similarity. The situation is totally different:

M: one villian revealed as another
SW: villian revealeds link to hero
M: villian vanquished
SW: villian unharmed
M: hero maimed; new powers revealed
SW: hero maimed; must recover over time
M: hostage situation; later aid from ally
SW: part of long, ongoing fight; no allies
M: villian tries to kill hero
SW: villian tries to convert hero
I'm sure I could think of more.

The "girl in dark room, surprised by villian" thing is hardly original to Alien. It's a staple of suspense everywhere. That both Alien and Matrix both have ships with faulty hardware is hardly noteworthy; this too is a sci-fi staple. "Villian commits minor sabotoge to draw off protagonist" is also pretty common; we've seen it a dozen times at least on Star Trek.

I don't expect originality in the fine structure of plot; nor really in its broad flow; I like to see interesting stuff happen in the middle-sized bits. M:Rev. did reasonably well here.

I truely doubt that the Morpheus/What's her name dialog was in any way influenced by the Han/Lando dialog. The mood for the two scenes was very different, and the relationship between the characters is totally different. I didn't note any similarity while watching the movie, but I wasn't actively looking for it.

Gun turrets are not unique to Star Wars. I think you're reaching.

A great big disembodied head is pretty standard imagery for the Big Boss. We had it in Wizard of Oz. I don't think the tron-parallel is much improved just because technology is involved.

I found the coat-check shootout interesting; to me it demonstrated the degree of power that the Frenchman had over his domain; his mooks get to walk on the ceiling, while our heros don't. It resonated strongly with concepts in an RPG I'm reading; I could even see running the Matrix trilogy as a (slightly modified) Nobilis game.

That is another reason I didn't care for the new Matrix movie. It seemed like another left-wing "whitey is the cause of all our problems". Amost all of the people fighting the Matrix are Black. The family of computer processes getting on the train to be smuggled in are Middle Eastern. The Oracle is Black.

Mr Smith the bad guy is white. The human he takes over that causes alot of trouble is white. The Architect that just doesn't "get it" is white.

The only exception is Neo who is white, but then he has to die fighting to make things right for the mainly Black humans.

I would have been very disappointed if Neo had lived. Given that Neo had to die, I would have killed off Trinity as well; the movie wasn't supposed to be THAT sad.

If you're talking about the general that had been nay-saying Morpheus all along, I don't think you're supposed to like him.

I though they did a reasonably good job with Link and his GF (who, to me at least, represented Humanity in the movie's symbolism). That both played a parts in the final victory was somewhat refreshing. I enjoyed the infantry scenes on many levels: I agreed with the strategic value of deploying agile infantry against enemy behemoths, and I thought it gave a human face to an otherwise mechanized battle.

Given the circumstances, I thought they did well with the Oracle. I liked the old one better, but they didn't have a choice. And they did give a reason; the Oracle was forced to abandon her former body as a result of aiding Humanity in the second movie; not rock-solid, but forgivable in this situation.

That's what I thought too. Especially when Neo did the exact same "get up, brush off, strike a badass pose" move that he did in the dojo after Morpheus knocked the crap out of him (against the same wall, too). I thought it was a nice touch.

Humanity in Zion is mostly black; I see this as a back-to-roots thing. Humanity started out black; we lost most of our melanin only when we moved into high latitudes where we needed the vitamin D and sunburn wasn't such a danger. I also find it realistic that the bulk of the survivors of a global apocalypse would be Africian; there is more human genetic diversity in Africa than all the rest of the world combined. I'm guessing most of the white folk in Zion are decendants of Matrix retrievals.

I don't think you have enough evidence to argue that two white guys wrote an anti-white trilogy.

The thing that annoyed me about the overdose of references to other sci-fi films wasn't that it showed a lack of originality, it was that it was just way overdone. Accidentally using dialog that was used somewhere else is understandable, and it happens. Purposefully using dialog that was used somewhere else can be a great little treat for fans. I love things like that. But there were just so many things in this movie that came straight out of other movies that it eventually started to feel like they were hitting us over the head with it. It was funny and cool at first, but then it got old and annoying.

Maybe someone with lots of free time will sit down and find all the movie references someday. All I know is I saw lots. Just ask Lillis, she was sitting next to me, so she probably heard me groaning every few minutes. ;)

Also, if we posit that the original inhabitants of Zion were of a variety of colors, it seems quite likely that folk's skin tones would kind of blend together over time...