Time off between Christmas and New Year has been relaxing and we’ve caught up on a couple of movies on both small and big screen.
Matrix Resurrection was released cinematically on Boxing Day. It follows on from the original story 60 years on, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity, still relatively young due to having been ‘resurrected’ and reinserted into the Matrix by new architect program the Analyst. Much has changed in both worlds but the skies are still scorched and the struggle remains between human and machine. As a follow on this movie could hardly be as groundbreaking as the original movie, but there were some enjoyable developments and thought provoking commentary on our modern interaction with technology and social media.
Final Cut is a movie with Robyn Williams set in a time not too far in the future where the technology exists for a chip to record every moment of a person’s life once inserted into their body. This is for the sole purpose of creating a post-death memorial tribute of that person’s life for their grieving family. The effect of the chip makes a normal authentic life impossible and there is a resistance movement who protest at every memorial. Robyn Williams plays the part of a ‘cutter’ Alan, who has the job of sifting through the lifetime of footage to create a suitable tribute, editing out the unpalatable parts and adhering to a ‘cutter’s code’. One of the primary tenets of the code is that a cutter does not have a chip themself (since they are privy to personal footage of others). Things get interesting when Alan finds out that unbeknownst to him his parents had a chip inserted when he was a child.
Shanghai is a movie set in WW2 China, just before Japan and America enter the conflict. John Cusack plays a spy who is trying to solve the murder of a friend, seemingly around wartime machinations which play into Japanese ambitions to annex strategic posts in China.