Vice: "The Matrix is Dated and Embarrasing."

Status
Not open for further replies.
Great movie, i watched it last year and that mobile phone is dated as shit now. i remember it looked so cool back then, everyone wanted one.. and i remember taking a bunch of mushrooms before going to the cinema to watch it.. ah, to be young, dumb and full of psilocybin, good times.
matrix-phone.jpg

Interestingly, the phone was released in 1996, so it was already dated by the time the film came out.
 
This:
gzDKJPw.png


And the agent transformation(and death) looks kind of bad, the rest are fine.

Yeah but CG is supposed to age. It always does, allllways. Thats not a good reason to knock the first Matrix. Its a little campy to watch a 90's movie in 2014, but its still a solid movie.
 
Yeah but CG is supposed to age. It always does, allllways. Thats not a good reason to knock the first Matrix. Its a little campy to watch a 90's movie in 2014, but its still a solid movie.

I agree. It's like why people still want the original unaltered versions of Star Wars. If the Wachowskis started releasing The Matrix with improved/changed CG then you know people will start complaining.
 
Yeah but CG is supposed to age. It always does, allllways. Thats not a good reason to knock the first Matrix. Its a little campy to watch a 90's movie in 2014, but its still a solid movie.
I didn't say it isn't a great movie, just pointing out what is really dated and what is not.
 
Need some easy clicks? Grab a [cult] classic and critically acclaimed movie from 20 years ago and write an essay on how dated and embarrassing it is.
 
I know, it's easy to sound edgy in rerospect, but I found those leather coats and sunglasses already extremely tired and dated when I watched the first movie in the cinema back when it was released.

It has some spectacular action scenes, and the concept is amazing, but I I think they are shit movies on several level (acting, casting, dialogue, pacing). I liked the Animatrix much, much better.
 
Dark City is a pale copy of Blade Runner's rainy, industrialized aesthetic nightmare.

Oh no, you didn't! Vice = on my shit list

Dark City is straight up noir. Granted Blade Runner and Dark City share common ancestry in that but they are not very similar at all aesthetically at all.
 
pfft foreal? at least their "click bait" articles are somewhat interesting. at least it's not like "top 10 reasons" or "5 reasons why"

Interesting? Vice makes a quite cheap job at instigating polemic and trying to be... I dunno, edgy, I guess? It's formulaic and predictable as fuck. It's not interesting because it just panders to the already formed opinions of their target audience rather than giving any kind of unique view or perspective, always aiming for the low hanging fruit.

It's as if I start making Neogaf treads like these:

- Inside the drug-fuelled, crassy world of circumcision business
- Why tipping is taking America back into the segregation age
- The shit that Men's Right Activists are smoking: we want it too
- Fedoras: DON'T

Add in some "crude" and "visceral" expressions, sprinkle them with a dash of political commentary in the vein of "oh my gosh, this is so liburl, this is going to get conservatives sooo riled up when they read it" (truthly, an incredibly difficult feat to archieve) and you are then done. Ghah.

Meanlywhile, Cracked has managed to turn the dumb listicle meme into an actually meaningful structure for articles due to its skilled writting staff, go figure.

Vice has done incredible actual journalism in their video section, but their written opinion articles tends to be poor, to put it midly.
 
Vice has been spewing out utter shite recently. They seem to be moving away from the typical controversial issues they cover and creating them out of nothing instead.. all about them hits I guess.
 
I know, it's easy to sound edgy in rerospect, but I found those leather coats and sunglasses already extremely tired and dated when I watched the first movie in the cinema back when it was released.
Oh yeah I can definitely agree. I don't think it was a new look so much as it was seeing a 80s/90s cyberpunk outfit in a movie. Someone had to do it.
 
Eh, Vice is a bunch of hipsters, and this kind of thing is hardly surprising coming from them. I like their video side, so the occasional dumb article isn't changing my opinion of them as a whole.

Watched the Matrix a few years ago and it did feel dated, it's certainly not mind-blowing or deep as some would have me believe. Was still an enjoyable popcorn flick though, and can be enjoyed as such.
 
Article couldn't be any more wrong.
If he took time to look into the universe he would know exactly why the matrix (both inside the matrix and in the "real world") have the settings they do.
 
had pretty much the same reaction when i rewatched it last year. i think it's pretty rubbish - cringey aesthetic and dialogue, lifeless characters, nowhere near as sophisticated as i remembered - with a few great action scenes. weirdly i love basically everything the wachowski's have done post matrix - v for vendetta, speed racer and cloud atlas.
 
recently re-watched the trilogy with my gf and enjoyed it more then the first time around.
meh
Author has an opinion, wants clicks, sensationalist title.
 
Any more different, you hack.

The 1999-isms are actually explained in universe. Fuck this piece.

The Matrix > Blade Runner > Ghost in the Shell > Dark City.

Let take a step back for a second. It goes Ghost>Blade Runner>Matrix >Dark City

Though Matrix does win in re-watchability
 
Embarrasing?

Is Vice attempting to retroactively sweep its 15-year old past of things it liked at one time clean? The comparisons to Limp Bizkit certainly seem to suggest as much. The only embarrasing thing I see is them trying to act like a music fan on any message board or Reddit attempt to pretend they didn't like Limp Bizkit or the like during that era.

They were hype as shit at the time, now they aren't. Shit, better not let anyone find out or they might question my taste and internet cred!
 
wrong wrong wrong wrong. I watched it last summer and the action beats and cinematography are still fucking incredible. That entire helicopter scene at the end of the movie? My roommate and I wanted to stand up and yell at the climax of that scene. What an ignorant, presumptuous, pompous waste of an article.
 
The Matrix is still awesome to this day, I watched it again within the last six months for the first time in many years and its still so good.
 
I agree. It's like why people still want the original unaltered versions of Star Wars. If the Wachowskis started releasing The Matrix with improved/changed CG then you know people will start complaining.

I think they actually did change something with regards to The Matrix though. Something to do with the color-timing or whatever it's called for when they're inside the Matrix and out in the real world. They made it so the world is tinted greener in the former and bluer in the latter, to be consistent with Reloaded and Revolutions. The original DVD doesn't have this change though. Always wanted to nab that for cheap and compare the two.

Speaking of DVDs, I was bummed out that the Blu-ray versions of Reloaded and Revolutions didn't have nearly as much care in the treatment to HD as the first film did. I wonder how much of that was the reliance on way more full-CG scenes in fights with the later films.
 
I liked the first film at the time, but can't watch it now. It's no fault of its own, it was just parodied so much it has become a bit of a cliché. Didn't think much of the second film and never seen the third.
 
What? The Matrix is an awesome film and arguably one of the best sci-fi films in the history of the medium. It also introduced a lot of new elements to western cinema, from the most superficial stuff like bullet time to some deeper sci-fi elements that albeit being around for a lot time in other media had never been present in a commercial film.

By the way, IMO Blade Runner>GitS>Matrix>Dark city
 
I have to agree. I was impressed when I watched the film at launch in my local theater, but in recent years I've typically cited this movie as one of those films you should never rewatch, because you'll only feel foolish for praising it in the first place. It really does not hold up as a Sci-fi classic alongside others.

Putting the awful clothing design and hacker representations aside, the biggest problem is that its one big revelation towards which the entire first act builds anticipation (our reality is a simulation!) is just not that revolutionary or interesting, and I'm not sure it ever was. It's merely one more escape fantasy, a desire to pull back everything about our social lives and reveal its construction so that we can break out in some gesture of pure freedom. It's not a very compelling concept, and reads like a combination of ideas from a philosophy 101 course (what if... brains in vats??) and undergrad enthusiasm over the idea of social reality as arbitrary, constructed, etc. It's hard to take Neo's hero story seriously of pulling back the cover from his failed life to see that his true self is a powerful warrior in some other world, and everyone else he knows as successful is only duped into believing the big lie of society.
 
I disagree. Rewatched the movie a few months ago and I never once felt it was embarrassing. It's still a great movie. Now is it somewhat dated? Sure. But that happens to a lot of movies especially those dealing with technology.
 
For being made in 1999 it holds up really well. I remember when it came out I held a standard against every other movie made after that, saying well if the Matrix can do that in 1999 then the other movies should look just as good if not better. The movie still holds up, what a shitty article. Getting sick of Vice tbh, they're like the non-gaming version of Kotaku
 
But . . . but the green is there to represent that they're in the matrix. Like the old pc screens where the letters were green. It's a visual cue to help separate the matrix from reality. I'm not sure they would ever remove that from the film.

I can't stand the new color scheme of the ultimate edition/blu-ray.

Matrix_screen_compare_1.jpg


It's honestly seriously distracting. It's just too fucking green.
 
Yeah, the article is over sensationalized, but the Matrix is overrated. I hated how every action film that came immediately after used bullet time. So obnoxious. Thank god that died out. And the sequels are hot garbage.
 
There are a few things that sit less well with me the more time goes by. Like all these computer nerds choosing to dress up in tight leather. What's that about. There are things that are dated and unpurposely cheesy since the movie takes itself dead serious.

It will always be an awesome action movie, and I hope for the day when I can watch it in HD without someone having puked green vomit all over the celluloid.
man
i watched the bluray rip recently and couldnt fucking believe how GREEN it was. why would they do that ugh
 
I didn't see it until years later, but it's hard to not like it.

What annoyed me were how many people started wearing leather trench coats and sun glasses in 1999. This mysteriously stopped after the terrible, terrible sequels in 2003.
 
It may look a bit dated but the concept holds up, the Animatrix Second Renaissance pieces prove that. I think the series would hold up well to a second series. The only stuff that is cringe worthy is the cyberpunk stuff (leather and ridiculous Kung fu)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom