What are you watching?

[Dirty Duck]

@Dirty Duck  I'm glad you enjoyed it.  I'm still let down by it, but I'll say that anything to do with Trinity and Neo as characters is well done.

What were you hoping for from it? Obviously I know firsthand that waiting ages for something with baited breath is incredibly different to watching the third film a year ago and then seeing this one now.

Also, can you send me some of the Matrix Online lore/event summaries you mentioned you have before? Please? 

Regarding Resurrections:  I could go on for a long, long while about what disappointed me.  It took me months to unpack it all when the movie came out, and I got it out of my system then.  But here's some stuff off the top of my head:

• Action scenes are lethargic - weak choreography.  Yuen Woo Ping is a high bar to clear, but they didn't even come close.
  
• The musical score was very weak, often monotonous and repetitive.  I'm glad they kept some of Don Davis's music, but the absence of Neo and Trinity's love theme is preposterous.  
  
• Cinematography is often bland, ugly - the original trilogy was almost immaculate, nearly every shot designed for visual splendor.  Not so here.  
  
• Special effects look remarkably worse than what was done 18+ years earlier.  The bullet time effect looks especially blurry and downright ugly.
  
• Pacing is very poor.  The back-and-forth to IO doubled down on the weakest elements of the second and third movies (which I do like more than most).
  
• Some story threads are awkwardly introduced and abandoned.  
  
• For a movie about love and, well, resurrection, the fact that new-Morpheus and Niobe have zero scenes together is inexcusable.
  
• The new Smith sucks.  I don't blame the actor - he was given the impossible task of playing a new version of a classic villain.  One or the other may have worked, but not both.
  
• The Merovingian's return is not well handled - for a villain that once had such screen presence to have him reduced to rambling about how much he hates Facebook and Wikipedia is a real waste.
  
• A lot of character actions and motivations didn't really add up to me at the time.  
  

Regarding MXO:  I'm sitting on a mountain of old content.  Years and years of material.  Is there anything in particular you're interested in hearing about?  Any particular way I should approach sharing this info with you?

Yeah honestly? I agree with everything you said-you'll notice I didn't really mention any of the action or visuals in my ramblings about what I liked about it, and if anything the only allusion was me describing the film as almost disturbingly not like The Matrix. But I think I do have the benefit of being aware of the response to this film before seeing it and that meaning I knew to not expect what people want from a Matrix sequel. I think the film taps into a part of me that enjoys entries in franchises that sometimes feel like they're purposefully not trying to please and are instead weird entities that almost shouldn't exist with the budgets they have, though I'm not going to go as far as saying everything that felt lacklustre was on purpose the way some people argue about, say, The Phantom Pain. I fully get why a lot of people were disappointed, but on some level I think it should be expected that Lana Wachowski making a sequel she said she'd never make could only have been something like this rather than something like The Matrix (which is a 10/10 for me btw, so I do still consider Resurrections considerably worse despite my post being largely made up of positive points.)

As for MXO I'm especially interested in moments where player involvement contributed to deciding the direction the game's world and story went in, as well as anything that especially took advantage of it being an MMO in a similar way. I imagine there aren't really videos chronicling this stuff the way something like the OG FFXIV has a dozen of? Any articles or blog posts or anything of that ilk talking about this stuff I'd be v happy with.