The Animatrix

As many of you know, I really didn’t care for the Matrix: Reloaded. I still don’t think it is nearly as good as it could have been, but as I focus more and more on what I know about the movie, and realizing that it is the middle movie in a trilogy, I can see why some of the plot was written the way it was. There is one condition to my actually rescinding my scathing review of this movie, and that is the Matrix: Revisited has to be a perfect movie. It will need to fill in all the holes introduced in Reloaded and give us a competent end to the story. If it doesn’t somehow do that, Reloaded will truly have been a failure in my mind.

Why this talk of the Matrix again? Simple—the Animatrix. I had been waiting and waiting for this to finally come out and as of yesterday it hit the streets here in the US. I went out at my lunch break and picked it up and I couldn’t wait until work was over to break the shrink-wrap and reenter the world of the matrix. However, with Reloaded being the tremendous letdown that it was to me, my enthusiasm for the Animatrix had somewhat waned from a month or two ago.

After work I went right from the parking lot to the studio academy where I’d be having improv practice in a couple of hours. I popped the dvd into my nifty, little, portable dvd player and proceeded to watch with heightened anticipation. Now I only got a chance to watch 7 of the 9 episodes on the disc before improv, but from what I saw, this collection of small stories is leaps and bounds beyond how good Reloaded was.

I think the reason that these episodes are so good is that they pack more story into each of their 10-15 minute time slots than Reloaded did in over two hours. Unlike the movie, these stories are not based around special effects (well, one is, but it was good nonetheless), but instead focus on story, which Reloaded needed a lot more of. Out of the 7 I watched only 1 was not that great, mainly because it really didn’t add anything to the Matrix universe.

I have to say that I have been thoroughly impressed with what I have seen in the Animatrix, and if the point of this dvd was to spark even more interest in Revisited (or relight that spark, in my case), they have succeeded. I can’t wait to watch the last two episodes when I get home tonight. I’m going to keep my fingers crossed in the hope that the last two are as good as all the others.

On another note, I was reading the BBC online and came across this article about soldiers that served in the war in Iraq being offered free sex at a Nevada brothel. Ummm……what? If this is not a blatant sign that the apocalypse is upon us, then I don’t know what is. You know, I can see giving soldier’s a tax break, or a monetary gift, or a nice banquet, but giving them free sex? That just turns my stomach.

Think about it, the only soldiers who will really be able to take advantage of this offer are single men with low morals, or married men looking to become single real fast. I honestly thought that this was an Onion article, but after rubbing my eyes and slapping myself, I looked at the article again and, sure enough, it still read that it was from the BBC. Well, I’ve got nothing else to say about it, except that I’m really sad that this wasn’t some kind of joke…………only in America………