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The Matrix 2: Animatrix | Part #2

Posted by Psychopath - January 10th, 2015


Title: Matriculated

Summary: Easily the only truly intelligent segment of the film, and even then, it's still not very smart. The story surrounds a crew of freedom fighters who's goal is to convert individual drones to fight in favor of Zion rather than against it. I like this idea a lot, making your enemy your friend, especially since the majority of the machines won't be expecting such a tactic, expecting all drones to be on their side this tactic can balloon into mass conversion if done correctly. The segment starts off with a woman wearing what I can only guess is a biohazard suit and her... yellow, infant sized monkey in a jar named "Baby". Yeah, this is gonna be a long ass ride. In any case, she's sitting next to the ocean waiting to be spotted by some drones so she can attract them back to their base to undergo the brainwashing process. They get spotted by two cockroach lookin' things called "walkers" and they follow her up until the point where they reach the base which is... not underground, but rather above ground where the two drones can easily broadcast their location to other drones in case of their capture or demise, which they do. Why is it that every time the Matrix comes up with a smart idea, that smart idea is immediately superseded with stupidity? This is the thing that actually gets everyone killed by the end of this segment. Fuck. I really, truly do feel like that I'm watching Alert.

In any case, the two drones eventually enter the base only to stumble upon another drone who's already been brainwashed which makes them confused, so instead of the three drones communicating like you would expect considering how they're already on trusting grounds, the brainwashed unit decides that diplomacy is for faggots and pussies so he's just gonna get into a melee fight with the two drones that they want as bodyguards. You know, I'm pretty sure that damaged goods is the last thing you want in a potential ally. This fight results in two out of three units getting destroyed up until the woman from earlier uses the Zeus cannon to deactivate the power core of the remaining walker. Consider this, if using this lightning bolt gun is the method that they typically use to capture these drones with, why didn't they just do it this way from the beginning? You could do it right when they walk through the door, just zap, boom, done. I mean, you would have had two extra units on deck for Christ's sake, now you've only got one which compensates for the one you just lost. Not only that but now you have to go through the trouble of converting it to your side of the battle field before you can reactivate it, I mean it seems to me that this little venture wasn't worth it and I somehow get the idea that these guys never experience a surplus in their numbers, which is your goal by the way. Jesus, how did such a smart idea become so stupid so quickly?

In any case, she's greeted and congratulated, although I can't see why, by the other crew members. These crew members consist of a stereotypical Asian guy, a sloth with white hair, Sloth from the Gooneys, a blond woman and the love child between Marilyn Manson and Dr. Frankenstein. The woman who's name I still don't know and Marilyn Frankenstein have a moral discussion on why they simply can't reprogram the machines to side with them, even though what they are doing is the very basic equivalency, because it wouldn't be their choice and they'd be robbing them of their identities in doing so, something of which they actually do indeed do during the conversion process. I'll elaborate.

Once they're all injected into their version of the Construct, they get the walker to stick it's neck into a neck brace where it's skin is stripped off it's body and flushed down a toilet, after that they reconfigure it's appearance to make it resemble a human. What was that about not robbing these machines of their identities? Last I checked, the avatar a person displays in the Matrix directly portrays the way that person perceives themself, meaning that they just forcedly changed this particular drone's identity to befit a specific self image. That's one of the first thing that Morpheus notes when he introduces Neo to the Construct; he noted that in the Matrix, Neo had a full head of hair and he had no outlets on his body because that's how he viewed himself subconsciously. What a load of bullshit. "They need to make the decision for themselves" my ass. They do all kinds of other shit to manipulate it too, there's a scene after it's self image is forcedly changed where it inserts a multicolored cube into a slot that befits it's shape. The room is then filled with darkness that causes the machine great fear, this is followed by one of the freedom fighters forcing open the door to the room and waving his arm at the machine as if he's trying to save it; this is meant to make the machine believe that they'd totally stick their necks out for it, which as demonstrated by the fight scene from earlier, no, they wouldn't. You know, if there's one thing that Animatrix accomplishes, it makes me not give a shit about the human rebellion and root for the villains.

As you can imagine, all the manipulation gets to the machine and it's converted to their side, but then, what a surprise, they're under attack from an army of sentinels. Yeah, having your base be above ground, not such a good idea, especially when you have easily breakable glass windows installed instead of steel walls. These idiots deserve what happens to them. I mean come on, don't they have an electromagnetic pulse weapon in the base like the other crews have in their ships? This kind of invasion is very likely to happen given the circumstances, don't tell me that they don't have contingency plans for this kind of thing, they're practically asking for it. But no, instead of shutting off every sentinel within the blast radius, as in, inside the building, they decide to activate all of their converted drones to let them duke it out. Eventually, all but two survive; the newly converted sentinel and the main protagonist. The protagonist is dying from sadness I guess; she has no open wounds and she never actually gets hurt during the conflict so I have no idea. During her last breath, the walker decides to inject both of them back into the Construct and he offers her refuge inside his body. What follows is the woman clenching her head between her hands and screaming her head off before her avatar disappears. The segment ends on the walker sitting on the beach where the woman was sitting, implying that the two minds have converged and now inhabit the one body. Since everyone's dead, one wonders how this one walker was released from the construct considering how an operator has to release them from it before anybody can leave. So I guess that means that not everybody is dead, well, probably none of them now that I think of it, the only injuries anybody sustains are being tossed around and most of them, save for Marilyn Frankenstein and Baby, show no open wounds or physical indications of being seriously injured, so my guess is that the majority of the crew survived.

The End.

So, that concludes my review of Animatrix. How does it hold up? With a pair of crutches, that's how. I still like it a lot better than the first Matrix movie, but not by leaps and bounds. It should go without saying, but I had to fight my way through this movie, not only are the segments lackluster in their story arcs, but even more irritating is that they're arranged out of chronological order, setting the earliest Matrix story arch right up next to the latest one which takes place just before Reloaded. Even people who don't like the Matrix trilogy like this movie and I can't really understand why, it's twenty different flavors of retarded and it's insulting to my intelligence. Where in the trilogy, the topics conveyed here, such as the android rebellion in "The Second Renaissance", were barely touched upon and you never really get to go indepth to those topics so those plot elements are too vague to judge, but when you explain those things step by step as they were here, it just reinforces all the reasons why the Matrix is monumentally and fundamentally stupid. Next I'll be reviewing Reloaded.


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