Hollywood Hullabaloo
2004-09-14 13:36 - Opinion
I finally rented and watched Matrix Revolutions yesterday. Relatively good movie overall. The great effects and action you expect from The Matrix, but not so much of the story like the original. There was one massive sore thumb of a bad point though. It's a mistake Hollywood often makes.
So, the scene (don't complain about spoilers, this is an old movie!) is Smith having invaded the real world in some guy's body. Everyone thinks he's going crazy, they don't know the truth. So a lady is helping him in some kind of hospital setting, when he brandishes the medical scalpel he's holding, jabs it into her stomach, and "Aaaagggh" she falls over dead, instantly. Couldn't be a 1 inch blade.
Then, quite a bit later in the movie, Neo and Trinity are flying around in their space ship when they crash. Trinity ends up impaled on four or five 1 inch thick, 3 foot long steel spikes, straight through her. She, of course, goes on for over five minutes with a touchy feely death scene with Neo.
If it wasn't so trite and obviously constructed for the story line, it almost would have been good. Dying from one tiny cut is as bad as being knocked out from one simple punch, another favorite Hollywood thing that just doesn't work in real life. The movie Reservoir Dogs from Quentin Tarantino at least mostly gets it right. Guy gets shot in the gut at the beginning, and the whole movie has him in the background, slowly dying, unconscious for most of it. It seems only gory movies manage to ever get death right, though of course plenty gory movies get it just as bad as the rest.
