TM2YC said:
I write a review, then go watch a couple of documentaries about European Art and American Rock and come back to 2 pages of discussion :shock:
I actually watched your edit as soon as I got it 4 days ago but knowing it was the first review and would be partly critical I thought "I'll wait and write it tomorrow when some other, hopefully fully positive reviews have come in to offset it". But since nobody had and I was in danger of forgetting my impressions I posted it (Maybe I should have waited longer ). Sorry if it came across as overly harsh, I didn't mean it to. As I said...
"I'd highly recommend this edit and it will probably be forever replacing the Theatrical Cut of M1 for me"
But I couldn't give it a perfect score (That it probably deserves) because it didn't live up the billing by a long chalk. I've been caught out in the past by "Mis-selling" certain aspects of my own edits. You live you learn. If the community thinks this scoring is unfair I'll gladly change it all to 10/10s.
In my defence...
You'll note that I said "12 minutes" of footage was used in my review. I said that because I looked up all the running times of the trilogy, fed them into my calculator and worked it out. If you say it was "15 minutes" then perhaps you cut 3 minutes of Matrix1? The point is that I had to work it out for myself after viewing the edit. Before watching the edit I had no idea how much the 3 films had been mixed. You could of used 15 minutes of Matrix1 and used 133 minutes of M1&M2 for all I knew? If you'd included just this small bit of info, my expectations would have been fully managed.
And if you tied up the whole Matrix story, I'm sorry I must have missed it. Unless I'm mistaken, all the Squiddy machines were still alive (They just retreated), all the agents (Except smith) were still alive, all the humans were still enslaved in the powerplant, the Matrix was still fully functional and the machines still ruled the planet. As I said in my review, your ending was better than the original but it wasn't the ending promised IMO.
If you want to add a response to my review, IFDB allows you too. I've added some responses to reviews of my own edits but I don't think anybody goes back to read them though .
(Added spoiler warning to review as requested )
Finally can I make it clear...
GO WATCH THIS EDIT. IT'S FANTASTIC! (and is better and more complex than the original cut of Matrix1).
Thanks TMY2C,
and please don't change your score. You should always stand by your impression. It was my fault to not have made things very clear in the first place.
And besides there should always be a controversial score to make things more interesting.
As to the ending: That's the whole point of the story about the prophecy, that the one would end the war and free humanity, and that's what he does. He doesn't need to actually kill all agents and the machines. The machines are all interconnected, all he needed was to break their code and that's what he did when he became the one and saw through the code.
The very thing that was used by the machines to enslave humanity, the matrix, became then the very tool through which Neo saves humanity, because the machines are interconnected with the matrix and when Neo woke up from the dead, saw through the code, jumped into the agent and bended the reality of the matrix, that was the end of the machine's rule.
His telephone call with the screen's message "System freeze" further underlined. What happens thereafter can be left to the imagination.
The thing is to really enjoy this version, one needs to forget a bit the sequels and the original's version of the story and take it for itself as a fresh story.
The very thing that was used by the machines to enslave humanity, the matrix, became then the very tool through which Neo saves humanity, because the machines are interconnected with the matrix and when Neo woke up from the dead, saw through the code, jumped into the agent and bended the reality of the matrix, that was the end of the machine's rule.
His telephone call with the screen's message "System freeze" further underlined. What happens thereafter can be left to the imagination.
The thing is to really enjoy this version, one needs to forget a bit the sequels and the original's version of the story and take it for itself as a fresh story.