This is an archived article from my now-defunct NeonReviews website. Any qualities and/or information provided about the reviewed item must be seen in context of when it was originally published.

Distributor: Warner Bros. / Village Roadshow Pictures
Genre: Action / Science-Fiction / Animation
Availability: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Related links: Official website
Additional information: The Matrix Revolutions (review), Internet Movie Database (IMDb) entry

This is actually a collection of nine animated short stories based on the universe of The Matrix. They all take you further down into the world of The Matrix and present some side stories covering what the three full feature movies couldn’t cover. I think it’s only fair that I divide my review up in that many parts for full coverage.

Segment 1: Final Flight of the Osiris
In The Matrix Reloaded, we were told that the Osiris brought them the information about the several thousands sentinels burrowing their way down to Zion, and here’s their story. We start off in a sparring program similar to the Dojo fight in The Matrix (the original), only with swords. The training is interrupted by a proximity alert, and they discover the sentinels’ dig site. In this segment, we follow the crew aboard the Osiris and their fight to warn the others.
From a technical point of view, I think this one is simply astounding 3D animation. Considering Square USA made this, the same people who created the Final Fantasy game series as well as the Final Fantasy movie, I notice some similarities in the animation. The story sequence is set up as such you’ll benefit from seeing this movie between The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded. Directed by Andy Jones and written by the Wachowski brothers.

Segment 2: The Second Renaissance Part I
You know the year is no longer 1999, but closer to 2199. You know that the humans marvelled as they gave birth to A.I. You know that it was us who scorched the sky. Here begins the story taken from the Zion archives, further describing what went wrong and how the war started. The machines, after some time of disrespect from the humans, are seperated into their own nation, called 01 (Zero-One), and they create a new and better A.I.
We see that the main reason for the human downfall, was our tendency to vanity and corruption, and with the creation of the machinces, our disrespect of the machines. The Second Renaissance follows the human downfall to the human life, with the result seen in The Matrix triology movies.
The antimation is good, even in our time of 3D animation, and it tells the story well. It’s interesting to see what could start the destruction of mankind. In a way, it tells us what we cannot allow ourselves to do, and what could create our own demise.

Segment 3: The Second Renaissance Part II
The story from the Zion archive continues. We’re told what happened during the beginning of the war against the machines, the destruction of the sky, and exactly how the machines found out how useful the human body could be to the machines in terms of energy supply. In The Matrix (the original movie), we’re told that they found all the energy they needed. In this segment, we’re told how they found it, and the torture of humans for this type of research.
Both parts directed by Mahiro Maeda and written by the Wachowski brothers.

Segment 4: Kid’s Story
If you saw The Matrix Reloaded, you notice upon the return of the Nebuccanezzar crew to Zion, that a kid comes up to Neo, thanking him for freeing him from the Matrix. This is the story of that kid, and you discover why Neo said that the kid saved himself.
The animation looks a bit odd, compared to the animation of today, but it creates the effect The Matrix has; they’re living in a dreamworld. Directed by Shinichirô Watanabe and written by the Wachowski brothers.

Segment 5: Program
Inside a sparring program, Cis is acting out her favorite training simulation, in the age of the Japanese samurais. One of her crewmates, Duo, makes an indecent proposal about going back to The Matrix. Permanently.
Familiar anime-type animation, written and directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri.

Segment 6: World Record
Not everyone who become aware of the capabilities of The Matrix, wants to break free. Some use it for their own personal benefit. We follow an athlete who, by bending the rules of The Matrix system, sets the new world record. Agents are following his every step, attempting to avoid his capabilities from telling others about what’s wrong with the world they’re living in.
Directed by Takeshi Koike, written by Yoshiaki Kawajiri.

Segment 7: Beyond
A girl goes looking for her missing cat, and stumbles across what some kids call a haunted house. To those familiar with The Matrix, it’s a zone where the programming has gone all wrong. These kids explore this zone and what they are able to do within it, until a group of technicians comes to the area and spoils all the fun.
Written and directed by Koji Morimoto.

Segment 8: A Detective Story
We see the world through the eyes of a hard-boiled detective, who currently is out of work. Suddenly, he’s hired for a substantial sum of money to track down a hacker named Trinity. He finds out that several other detectives have tried to find this Trinity and failed, leading them either to insanity or suicide.
Written and directed by Shinichirô Watanabe.

Segment 9: Matriculated
A sentinel-type hunter-killer machine is captured by a group of individuals who seek to turn some of the machines over to their side, fighting for the humans instead of against them. This is a rather difficult and psychedelic process, but we’re taken to a synthetic world, not constructed by the machines, but by humans. A robot is introduced to a virtual world.
Written and directed by Peter Chung.

All of these animation short films presents us with an extension to The Matrix triology, and lets us explore a few other aspects of The Matrix universe either only referenced in the movies or not covered at all. Absolutely recommended to those who seek more information about this alternate universe.

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This is an archived article from my now-defunct NeonReviews website. Any qualities and/or information provided about the reviewed item must be seen in context of when it was originally published.

Distributor: Warner Bros. / Village Roadshow Pictures
Genre: Action / Science-Fiction
Availability: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Related links: Official website (no longer available)
Additional information: The Animatrix (review), Internet Movie Database (IMDb) entry

After seeing The Matrix Reloaded, I had big expectations for the third part of the Matrix triology. But I’m afraid I must agree a little bit with the others. It isn’t quite as good as the two previous ones. However, as a Matrix fan, I say you need to see all three as a whole, and not as their seperate parts. When you’ve come to that, you’ll see that The Matrix Revolutions sorta makes sense. It wasn’t anywhere near what I expected, but it was something that wasn’t bad either.

Zion is still about to be attacked by the 250,000 sentinels waiting at the gates. Smith has taken over the mind of Bane, as well as thousands of citizens inside the Matrix. Neo is in a coma, yet still clinging on to both worlds, as we see in the beginning of Revolutions. The Oracle has gone further in hiding. We don’t get to see much of action inside the Matrix this time around; mainly because the rest of the war is fought on the outside, in Zion. But first of all, they need one more trip to the Matrix, to get Neo back. The Oracle tells them that Neo is trapped in a world between the Matrix and the real world, and is unable to escape without any outside help. He’s stuck in a train station that connects to the Matrix, and as it turns out, this train station is controlled by the trainman, which in turn is controlled by the powerful program named Merovingian.

The final tasks are, as noted in the previous film, to save Zion and stop Agent Smith, who is growing more powerful by the minute.

There’s a lot of the humor previously seen in the other Matrix movies, not to forget the amazing action sequences. Well worth watching, unless you have extremely high expectations from The Matrix Reloaded.

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This is an archived article from my now-defunct NeonReviews website. Any qualities and/or information provided about the reviewed item must be seen in context of when it was originally published.

Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
Genre: Action / Thriller
Availability: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Related links: Official website for the Die Hard Collection (no longer available)
Additional information: Second part of the “Die Hard” triology. Die Hard (review), Internet Movie Database (IMDb) entry

Bruce Willis is back in the role of John McClane in the sequel to the original Die Hard movie, still around Christmas time, this time one year later, at Dulles airport in Washington D.C. For what reason, no-one knows. The thrill is still there, as well as some of the excitement, but the filmmakers didn’t quite get the chemistry right for this follow-up. What could’ve been a good movie had become a mediocre movie.

John McClane has a bad feeling about a couple of guys at the airport and decides to follow them into the airport’s luggage room to see what they’re up to. It ends up in a gunfight where he kills one of them, and as it turns out, this guy is already dead. Two years ago. And he has the record of a mercenary. Following this, the air traffic control tower loses all control of the airport and all contact with the airplanes coming in. Terrorists have taken over, and a known terrorist is on his way from a small (and fictional) country in the Latin America, originally extradited to the USA. As usual in a movie involving terrorists, their demand is the cliché of liberating another terrorist.

I didn’t enjoy this movie as much as the original movie, and from what I remember about the third movie in the triology, this must be the unnecessary one of them all. The blame can be mainly put on the plot and the script writers. All the actors did a fantastic job, but that doesn’t help the movie much when the people who put together the story behind it all did a lousy job. This was confirmed when I had a look at IMDb’s goofs page for this movie, and there are a lot of technology that has been entirely ignored. There are many redundancy options for air traffic controllers and airports in general to avoid situations such as this, even at the time this movie was made. The only ones who’ll believe the situation presented to us, are the ones who also will believe that the gibberish spoken in even older movies truly is in those foreign languages. And I do mean gibberish, no matter what language we’re talking about.

I would only recommend this movie to die hard fans of the Die Hard movies and Bruce Willis.

As a side note, you’ll notice a few faces that has turned up in later well-known movies and TV series. It makes me think that these actors’ careers really must’ve gotten a boost by this movie. Among the terrorists, you’ll notice Robert Patrick (“Terminator 2” as T-1000, “The X-Files” as Agent John Doggett), Vondie Curtis-Hall (“Chicago Hope” as Dr. Dennis Hancock, “Broken Arrow” as Lt. Col. Sam Rhodes) and John Leguizamo (“Moulin Rouge!” as Toulouse Lautrec, “Ice Age” as the voice of Sid). Also recognizable are Dennis Franz (“NYPD Blue” as Andy Sipowicz), Art Evans (“Metro” as Lt. Sam Baffett), John Amos (“The District” as Mayor Ethan Backer) and Fred Dalton Thompson (U.S. Senator for Tennessee 1994-2002).

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This is an archived article from my now-defunct NeonReviews website. Any qualities and/or information provided about the reviewed item must be seen in context of when it was originally published.

Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
Genre: Action / Thriller
Availability: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Related links: Official website for the Die Hard Collection (no longer available)
Additional information: First part of the “Die Hard” triology. Die Hard 2 – Die Harder (review), Internet Movie Database (IMDb) entry

This classic from 1988 can still compare to the action movies of today, with Bruce Willis as the unforgettable New York cop John McClane and Alan Rickman as the German terrorist Hans Gruber. Although the German “stereotype” shines through a tad too much, Rickman manages to tone down the aric, violent-prone tough guy image Hollywood has made the majority of the German population. For which I’m eternally grateful. We have enough stereotypes as it is.

We start off with John McClane coming to Los Angeles to visit his wife and kids for Christmas. His wife works in the skyskraper office building of Nakatomi Corporation, a Japanese firm that works with God-knows-what (we’re never told). All employees are present because of a Christmas party held in the 30th floor. Enter Hans Gruber and his gang, who kill the guards, locks down the building and takes everyone at the Christmas party hostage. McClane, however, isn’t caught because he was in his wife’s office at the time the first shots were fired, and manages to escape to an empty part of the building. The police is unaware of the situation, and this is where McClane has to fight back on his own.

It’s amazing to see that a movie this “old” is still able to stand up to movies in the same genre of today. Both cinematic quality and special effects are good. It’s quite a start of this triology (which is about to become a quadrupology, just like the Alien “triology”).

The copy I had in my hands for review was a “Special Edition” DVD. Despite the fact that it included deleted scenes, I chose to watch it without them because I hadn’t seen the movie for quite a while. I took a closer look on the second disc afterwards, and was a bit disappointed when there was very little behind-the-scenes footage and a huge amount of deleted/alternate scenes and footage. No documentaries, just the unused footage. It sure is a good thing that ever since DVD was introduced, the studios have been making sure there’s a behind-the-scenes documentary of some kind for most movies made (at least with a certain budget). To put it short, I was disappointed with the lack of a documentary with this release.

All in all, a movie worth keeping in your DVD collection, and a must if you like action movies.

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This is an archived article from my now-defunct NeonReviews website. Any qualities and/or information provided about the reviewed item must be seen in context of when it was originally published.

Guest reviewer HeavyJay from Deep 13 – The Web Comic. (Contact information and links no longer available.)

Distributor: New Line Cinema
Genre: Horror
Availability: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Related links: Official website
Additional information: Internet Movie Database (IMDb) entry

As a horror fan, I found myself believing that Freddy vs. Jason would be a huge disappointment. The long-awaited film, which had been in planning for ten years, couldn’t possibly live up to the name of its predecessors. Most horror films made past 1995 have proven to be excruciating to watch, filled with annoying characters and thin plots. After the pure torture of Jason X, I was almost frightened to go see this newest installment. This wasn’t necessary, as I soon found out.

The picture opens with a rare glimpse at Robert Englund without make-up, giving a history of Freddy Krueger’s crimes, and eventually his afterlife. He explains that he’s been forgotten by the people of Springwood, thus rendering him out of the picture. In Hell, he found someone to do the killing for him, to bring back the fear that enabled his return: Jason. Cut to opening credits, and then a classic Voorhees murder at Crystal Lake. A minute and a half into the film, and already a pair of breasts on the screen.

From there, Jason kills enough to bring Freddy back to full power… but he’s tasted murder again, and he likes it. When Jason starts stealing his kills, Freddy’s pissed and everyone knows it. Lots of slaughter ensues on both ends.

One of my favourite scenes in the movie takes place in a corn field. The high school kids of Springwood hold a rave in a giant field, out of which Jason eventually emerges. Two stoned teens set him ablaze with a torch, only angering him. He walks through the rows, burning a nice trail, and into the main party circle in which he slices every teenager who didn’t get away quick enough. As one smashed party-goer put it, “That goalie’s pissed about something…”

The final battle, roughly twenty-five minutes long, is worth the price of the movie ticket alone. It’s filled with action, laughs, gore, and girls and almost makes you excuse the ten-year wait.

In the end, Freddy vs Jason measures up. It’s got everything you could want in a horror and a little bit more. Go give it a look-see; any horror fan will like it.

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