Matrix Revolutions Review

This is a review I posted on Yahoo Movies with some minor edits. While it wasn't excellent I liked Revolutions, but then again maybe I'm the type who likes war movies. ONLY read on if you've already seen it...

Revolutions is a war movie. About 50% of it must've been spinner guns shooting, pausing only to reload, sentinels getting splattered all over the place, hoverships that must've busted their way through the whole earth while shooting at 10,000 sentinels chasing them.

I was really pleased to discover that the APU's (exoskeletal mechs the humans strap themselves into) have finite ammo, so we get some drama when the reloading crew have to run to the mechs under heavy sentinel fire, kind of like the chopper landing scenes in "We Were Soldiers". And it's obvious why the humans aren't using more of those electric guns with camcorder LCD's attached to them--the humans don't have enough electricity to make more weapons or power them. The movie made it a point to show how defenseless Zion was after the hovership charged in and fried what little electrical weapons they had with its EMP. They could've popped in some batteries into spare guns and... but they didn't have any.

Now some critics have suggested that instead of sentinels the machines should have sent in nukes. But the nuke "bomber" would still have needed to get inside Zion to do any damage, which meant they needed "troops" (sentinels) to protect themselves anyway, and we discover that there is another, protected level inside Zion so they would have been easily stopped by human gunfire unless the humans were vastly outnumbered. No point in doing a half-cooked military assault.

This movie is pretty fun to watch overall, but there are some outstanding questions such as why the machines didn't simply destroy Zion after the Neo-Smith fight, whether it was a coincidence that Neo could still see (ooohh) without eyes like in Frank Herbert's Dune stories, and why the final battle probably reminded many viewers of the much loved and hated "Dragon Ball Z" Japanese anime where characters routinely fly around and taunt each other, dig up a lot of craters, and make giant shockwaves. But this is nitpicking, and overall I recommend even a second viewing, perhaps on DVD.

Posted by dirkpitt2050 at 12:38 PM | Comments (0)

Emu48 Updated

I have updated Emu48 for Mac OS X to 1.25b3. This is a recommended upgrade for users of the HP calculator emulator. On an incidental note, the HP49G+ was quietly released on October 24th.

Posted by dirkpitt2050 at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)