Speculation, Fact and Fiction

Well, we had a couple of nuke the popcorn and pass the DVDs sessions as a family this past weekend to finish up the trilogy. I thought the latter two films were fine and dandy entertainment while not over-taxing the brain - being very much the mixture as before.

Though I'd have preferred a bit more extending/expanding of the originality of the concept to go with the gee-whizzery. As desperance has observed to me elsewhere, they did seem to get stuck on "people really liked Neo fighting 50 agents - let's have him fight 150!"

Sons thought both films were brill, especially all the battles with lots of big bangs and whizzy graphics etc. Elder son is a MechWarrior fan so loved the big roboty things with megamachine guns. The sub-plot-line where the teenage boy jumps into a fallen Mech and saves the day could have been written for him.

Husband, a designer of industrial machinery etc for over 30 years, did later observe quietly that a few bits of armour plating and some sturdy wire mesh would have substantially increased the survival rate of the operators. Also, he wondered, when exactly had humanity abandoned the concept of safety-goggles when metal fragments and sparks are flying all around?

Younger son was thrilled by both films - and he and I have had several breakfast conversations about Neo's ultimate fate, and what exactly the peace terms agreed might mean, and what might happen next... I confidently expect to see the influence of all this in the short story he's currently writing.

One thing that did strike me was how easily both lads understood concepts like there being backdoors in the programming for goodies and baddies alike to exploit, the fact that the Agents were a kind of Trojan programme, while Agent Smith had effectively become a virus. They're reasonably tech-savvy kids but they're not what you would call proto-geeks so I think that's more a reflection of the general currency for those ideas these days. I've been trying - and largely failing - to remember where such concepts were in pop-culture back when the films first came out.

And the other thing I noted was the way the final film in particular falls foul of my mother's stock criticism of SF films.

'They're all in the dark and raining.'

She formulated this theory watching Blade Runner, I think it was. And has stuck to it since, citing such films as Alien, where to her indignation, it was all the dark and raining when they're inside a space ship up in orbit!.