RETRO DESTRUCTION CRAZE

It appears that the ban on nuclear weapons development has been repealed in the US, and the way is now clear for a new generation of electromagnetic pulses and birth defects and flattened buildings and bleeding gums and nuclear winters and rains of fallout and the always refreshing activity of wandering across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Cities reduced to ash and broken buildings, plains of glass in place of deserts, and a world restored to the reign of the cockroach. Remember that stuff? Well, thank god we're back to that kind of thing again, because I was beginning to feel as if all the nightmare images of my childhood had been snatched away. The worst thing about it is that supporters of these low-yield 'mini-nukes' are adults - these are people who remember the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. These are people who remember crossing the playground as their teachers ran out to tell them that Kennedy had been shot. Wouldn't they be thoroughly sick of the arguments made for nuclear weapons? Or have they been patiently waiting for their turn at the wheel of history, waiting to make that ugly bargain? What's even more bizarre is that the strategy has shifted from deterrence to actual use. According to the story, these are low-yield weapons intended to destroy "underground stashes of prohibited weapons". Like the ones in Iraq? The administration is calling them 'mini-nukes,' but let's get this straight: you cannot harness a diminutive to a nuclear weapon. Nor can you expect one of those beasts to behave as you want it to. They kill horribly and stick around for the groundwater. What is it about Bush and the bunch that they are so enthusiastic about death and terror by the bucketful? Do Bush and Rumsfeld want to fill their swimming pools with skulls? Perhaps Bush wants to carpet his ranchland with corpses, or better yet, plant them upright in fields like stalks of wheat, a whole harvest of scarecrows offered to vultures.

MOTHER NATURE'S GUARANTEE: YOU'LL HURL!

Poisonous plants of Nova Scotia. Take time to read the text in the Flash intro.

FIRST THERE WAS THE MATRIX, BUT A BUNCH OF TEAMSTERS UNLOADED IT AND BEAT IT WITH SHOVELS AND BURIED IT IN A FIELD OFF THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE¹. BUT THE MATRIX WOULD NOT DIE SO EASILY, AND POPPED UP FROM ITS ERSTWHILE GRAVE, WHERE IT THUMBED A RIDE BACK INTO TOWN AND HIRED A FEW NON-UNION TRUCKERS TO RELOAD IT BACK INTO THEATRES. BUT LO! THE GRAVE HATH WROUGHT A FEARFUL TRANSFORMATION ON THE MATRIX, BLOATING IT OBSCENELY EVEN AS IT EMITS HIDEOUS GASSY DIALOGUE.

I killed three men in honourable hand-to-hand combat last weekend in order to get tickets for The Matrix Reloaded². Before I saw the film, I was prepared to give it four Adornos. Afterward, though, my opinion of the film mellowed, and I now award it with three Adornos, like so:

I'm not saying that The Matrix Reloaded was a particularly good movie. The city of Zion appeared to be a backwater planet from the George Lucas universe, with the main difference being that the Wachowski Bros. use actual humans to portray black people (Wachowskiland also has a good deal more sex than Lucasworld, although in Wachowskiland the white people get to do it in private quarters, while the darker folk have mass tribal orgies). The dialogue is strictly Lucasian as well, with leaden faux-military lines like "Are you questioning my command, captain?" and dialogue that seems written by the Expositron 9000 on economy mode. Just about the only exchange I liked from the first 45 minutes of the film was this: Lock: "Morpheus, not everyone believes what you believe!" Morpheus: "My beliefs do not require that they do". The rest of the time, the actors must have wondered why they'd bothered to show up.

It took me some time to figure Zion out, with all those dreadlocked and beaded tribals wearing burlap and gauze as they hold solemn meetings and manipulate the fantastic machines that keep their underground world together. It soon becomes clear, though, that even the elders of Zion (you wonder if they have protocols) do not understand the technologies that support the city's existence, and then you see the sci-fi cliche beneath all that Phantom Menace dressing: the post-apocalyptic children of humanity leading a tribal existence in the ruins of their ancestors' glory. Yahoo! Throw in the approaching machines of death and you've got On the Beach!

Reloaded is an overly portentous and solemn movie with bad dialogue that rips off a million other films and scavenges the entire corpus of Cold War and cyberpunk sci-fi for its neato-mosquito ideas on reality and social control. In other words, it's pretty much the same as The Matrix without the benefit of novelty, but with a whole lot more money shovelled into its infernal engine. But it could have been much much worse. In a rare move for films these days, it started with a lousy first act and improved from that point. Action sequences are edited well enough to afford the viewer a sense that there really is some action going on. And once again, the Wachowskis have made a movie stuffed full of Keanu Reeves without once stretching his acting or enunciation capabilities. That alone is worth the two beers I bought the guy who bought my ticket to the film.

¹They've all come to look for America.

²Not particularly true.

parode - exode