If the plot was terrible, the visual aspects didn't impress me at all (it looked way too shiny and polished, some elements were trite - the snowy-white locations, the red desert ones; or taken from previous movies, for example Spielberg's AI). The music was generic but bombastic. The kung-fu fights completely unnecessary and pointless.
I ended up walking out about halfway through it. I had no problems with the casting (I though Scarlet did a good job), and the visual effects were stunning. It was the writing and plot that weren't good. I found it missing all the implied sub-plots (it was overly simple - as you said - dumbed down).
I also found myself missing the interludes from the animated film. The scenes with the canals, the jet passing overhead between the buildings. They all had a beauty to them and they let you reflect on what happened in the previous scene. This film proceeded too quickly from one scene to another, likely because the studio was afraid people would get bored if something wasn't happening every single moment.
I generally am not a big fan of the CGI-dominated action film catering to international audiences. But I'm mostly not a huge fan of art house fare either.
And despite all that, by the time it was released, it was really not very impressive graphically, which was all it had going for it since it was a terrible film.
That movie turned out an huge disappointment for me; that moon chase could have been the base to develop an interesting subplot (if not a much better main plot), but no, it was just a self contained albeit technically well made, action scene that could give nothing to a terrible movie.
Yeah the faces were alright for the time, but everything else wasn’t great. The environments in particular were pretty bad. The opening scenes of the movie have the characters flying through a burnt out wasteland and it really, effectively looks like a 16x16 texture has been draped over several square kilometers of mountains. Texture filtered, so no giant chunky pixels, but it still looked awful. Absolutely no detail. And this was one of the first things you saw in the movie!
Also it was just dreadfully boring, which is basically the worst thing a piece of entertainment can be, even worse than the visuals.
They are probably not bad movies, and the high-way action scene is amazing, but I'm not really sure there was anything to those movies other than that.
When the first movie was so mind blowing (which it probably isn't today) then some good special effects a great action scene or two and mediocre story is not going to look like decent action movie, but more like an atrocity.
The first hour was entertaining and interesting but as it became more cluttered with fight scenes i found it boring. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t see the appeal of fight scenes where there is no jeopardy or realness.
Back in the day Jackie Chan would do scenes where you knew he would win but the physical impressiveness of what he was doing kept it entertaining. As it’s just a load of CGI that element has gone and it all feels pointless filler. The fact that is in a unreal (matrix) environment just increases the pointlessness.
I don't know about this one. The special effects didn't age well, the plot and characters are generic, the overall message is too much on the nose, there's the word "unobtanium"... it's not great.
I couldn't have imagined that the fourth would be the worst, though. Not only silly and pointless (I don't care if Neo and Trinity are together, I care about the nature of reality and the fate of humanity), but without Yuen Woo Ping, even the action was trash. I can't stand the parade of superhero movies, but I'd be hard put to think of one I wouldn't have preferred to this. I fell asleep an hour in, tried it again the next day and bailed with 15mins left.
This movie wasn't successfully either smart or dumb.
The dominant theory is that Wachowski intentionally sabotaged the film to spite the studio for some reason.
It wasn't really for me. While definitely funny at times, the movie (and especially the fights) dragged on for too long, and the plot was so ridiculous that it was tough for me to care about the details or connect with any of the characters, making the emotional finale fall pretty flat. It just didn't really seem like a movie with anything interesting to say IMO, it was more of a visual spectacle than anything. But that's just me - a bunch of people I watched it with thought it was fantastic. What did you think?
yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that.
I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensated for by the technology/visuals. I found the "noble savages" idea and infantile hippy politics and preaching tiresome too.
For some of us lesser mortals good graphics/special effects is just one element of a good Scifi/fantasy movie, and then not the most important aspect.
(from the review) " what it really felt like to me was a fourth movie in the Shrek franchise, pipping the yet-to-be-released Shrek Forever After to extrapolate that series' twin curves of rising technical achievement and plumetting wit to their logical endpoint: a near-immaculate feat of visualisation, accompanied by a staggeringly awful plot in which clunky genre conventions triumph completely over plausibility and originality. Avatar even boasts its very own love story where societal expectations and superficial barriers of size and pastelicity are overcome by generous helpings of pixie dust."
This expresses my feelings perfectly, but I wouldn't be so polite. I think Avatar is a terrible movie with gorgeous visuals and nothing else.
Aliens != Red Indians in fancy dress. The movie insults my intelligence on multiple levels. Yes I know, Caveat Emptor and all that, but I guess it must be because I am one of "these people"?
I wouldn't consider myself part of the lower denominator of action movie fans. I like a wide range of movies and I look for positive things in even the worst movies. I am generally along for the ride no matter the premise or film quality or even acting depending on the situation. I just like stories.
The last two movies just aren't that great. They aren't terrible, but they leave a lot to be desired. The second movie is fine, it gives us a lot of cool ideas, but the pacing is a bit off. It tries hard to manage being a cool sci-fi movie all about the concepts and an action movie. They just don't nail the balance, but it's not a complete miss as a blockbuster movie.
The third movie is where things really fall off. Everything setup in the second movie is ruined with this movie. They are balancing too many things; The Matrix world and the real world all with multiple subplots, and the concepts with the characters and action. They try to force in new characters that don't have any time to really develop, so we don't really care. And the last fight scene is just a bit dumb and the CGI is pretty bad. It's really just a lazy ending and fan pandering trying to capture the fight scene from the first movie. And because this is tying up the stuff we get in the second movie, it just makes all the cool stuff of that one sort of lackluster.
I won't flame you for liking all three, that's the joy of art. But I think people also have reasonable criticisms of the trilogy overall.
Look, they're just shitty movies. Shitty movies with one dimensional characters. If this was a masterpiece I might be willing to debate--but the second movie in particular was illogical nonsense full of groan-worthy action sequences and a few tits.
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