Reloaded

We had an amazing first quarter at Unisys.  The biggest news is the launch of the ES7000/500, a server that "scales from four to 32 Xeon MP processors and offers the same functions as Unix servers that cost twice the price."  It’s big stuff and all of us within Unisys are excited about it.  Because of that, and also just to foster "the company spirit" as it were, the head of my department (which is roughly the "computer engineering" department) took us all out to see the Matrix Reloaded on Friday morning.  Over a hundred of us went, and we filled the theater.  You just can’t beat watching a cool new movie on the company dime, with free popcorn and soda (iced tea for me) to boot.

So anyway, about that movie, it rocked!  If you haven’t seen it yet, and you plan to, then stop reading here, because I’m going to talk about it.

There were some fantastic special effects that I really liked.  The movie opens with Trinity driving a motorcycle off the top of a building, jumping off and doing some gymnastics in mid-air, and letting the bike crash into the security post of a building.  She ends up diving through a window really high up on this skyscraper, falling down in super slow motion, and shooting at the agent who is falling after her.  My first reaction was "all right, this is cool but sorta too unrealistic and flashy" but it turns out that it’s just a dream that Neo is having.  But what’s REALLY cool is that towards the end of the movie, you find out that it wasn’t actually a dream, it really happened, just... in the future.

Two tractor trailers collided head-on in slow-motion, and from the air you saw their bodies slowly crumple and ripple from front to back, and the cabs eventually exploded.

Neo can fly now, so he flew in and rescued Morpheus and the keymaker from the top of one of the trailers just as they exploded.  "The superman thing" is sort of cheesy, but also sort of cool.  And you can’t say that it isn’t handy as anything.  And when you’re inside of the matrix, life isn’t real anyway, so why not?

The fight scenes were out of control at times.  Neo alone took on about 300 Mr. Smiths simultaneously with nothing more than a pipe and his super flying abilities.  It was cool for a while, but it went on for quite a few minutes, and it got old.  Still it was awesome to see Neo take out the one guy by kicking the pipe into him, and then catching it when it bounces off... just like in stickman battletime.  (I wonder if they watched that?)  Stickman battletime, of course, uses the super slow-mo 360°-camera-view flying kick, in a style taken from the original Matrix movie.

...

Ugh.  I wrote that all on Saturday night and here it is Wednesday.  I’ve meant to finish this post but haven’t had time, in 4 days.  How sad is that.  There was a bunch more I wanted to say but I’m feeling rather tired and uninspired so I’ll just say some of it quickly.

It was really cool how Trinity shut down the power grid using *nix and an ssh exploit that actually exists (well, existed).  And it was really retarded how that whole "rave" or "dance party" or whatever, went on for about half an hour, with all the people’s shirts soaked in sweat and therefore partially see-through, and all the while they’re switching back and forth to Neo and Trinity having sex.  No, it wasn’t really retarded that it went on for half an hour... it was really retarded that they put it in the movie at all.  There wasn’t any "actual" nudity except for the semi-seethough shirts, but even that is totally unnecessary, and the whole thing in general was pointless and added nothing to the movie.