Matrix similarity
(This post is best read using your “movie trailer guy” voice.)
Almost a decade after The Matrix… comes Wanted.
It’s the story of an insignificant man working his life away in a windowless cubicle in faceless corporation. Constantly berated by his boss and having no real friends, he searches for something meaningful in life. His life suddenly changes when he narrowly avoids death at the hands of a gun-toting assassin with the help of a hot babe with a fondness for PCV dresses and semiautomatic weapons. She takes a dank secret lair, where he meets an enigmatic black man who pontificates on the nature of reality and dreams before telling him that he has the power to affect the fate of all mankind.
He learns to fight through a series of battle montages, where he finds he has the superhuman abilities to jump across buildings and bend the paths of bullets in midair. He makes new allies in his fight, including a black dude, a blonde, and a creepy mouse guy. Eventually our hero learns that the universe around him is encoded in the language of 0s and 1s through machines, and that it is his role alone to save humanity from the forces of evil.
But he is betrayed…
Betrayed by someone he trusted, who uses the machines in his favor, and this deception kills most of our hero’s allies, leading him to wage a one-man battle for redemption. So he fights! He takes on a lobby full of well-armed assassins, and kills them all! He shoots at bad guys through office windows! He fights at a train station!
Yes, it’s the action-packed tale of an ordinary man who becomes an extraordinary hero, with lots of slow-motion battle sequences and everything filmed through a green filter.
If you see only one version of The Matrix this decade, make it Wanted.
It’s just like the Matrix,* but with word “fuck” every two minutes.
Actually, on second thought, go see The Matrix again.
* In all fairness, Wanted is a little different than The Matrix. For example, in the Matrix, the secret nature of the universe is encoded in the lines of a massive, immersive computer program created by sentient artificial intelligence in the far future. In Wanted, the secrets of the universe are revealed by a haunted sewing machine. Really.
I think that says about all there needs to be said.
Matrix inverse
Just finished watching the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. In it, Keanu Reeves plays a super-powered being who descends to earth from the sky, sheds his powers to become more and more human-like while teeming up with a intelligent machine to wipe human beings off the face of the earth, before disappearing into obscurity while a cute chick watches his every move.
It’s kind of like watching The Matrix backwards.
