How do you figure that? In terms of what?
Sorry, I didn't see this.
Well it's difficult to find a place to start to I'll just try to pick one area.
Thought provoking and intelligent.
I find the Original Matrix, when stripped down to it's basic story was very engaging. As almost every green lit movie it's a love story. Thematically, it's man vs machine. It's also so connected to it's sci fi element that it just doesn't work without it. Whereas with inception, it's just a heist movie with a clever twist or layer. But that's just the genre, hardly anyone's fault.
The Matrix is imbued with several threads of real life celebrated philosophical ideas. About the cave we may live in and man vs the computer and various others. Inception... Well none I'm smart enough to know of.
I walk out of the matrix and I look up and I don't know what to think about the world I live in. It's the water cooler talk for months. With inception, many of the discussions revolve around an issue that could simply have been resolved had the film rolled for 6 more seconds.
To be fair there were also discussion about whose dreams were whose and how does limbo work.
Lastly, Inception was very much a self contained thing where the story tellers were just making and breaking and making their own rules as they went along. This is no more prevalent than when Dom has to explain to his own crew why they must now go deeper rather than just wake up. The audience is left to just look at each other and agree to play along as the writers starting designing new rules for the game levels.
With the matrix the rules are also self contained and made up(this is the ilk of dream movies) but they are established early on and never broken(till the pay off). Imagine if you will, that three levels down Dom has to re-explain what is now going on and how they are going to do the damn thing...funny enough,
that actually happens. I don't find that sort of thing clever, it's very much cheating.
In the matrix, the equivalent to the dom scene I described earlier, would be for example when they are double crossed by the weasel and have get out of the building the hard way. And later when Neo has to find an alternate hardline...etc. no cheating or new rule defining necessary. Very clean.
I also thought the Matrix consistently more cinematic. I mean Inception had it's zero gravity elevator scene and it's folding city sequence(that only happened once) but outside of that I mostly remember scenes and sequences ranging from the typical range to the mundane as seen especially in the winter James bond level. And that's not just the writing's fault either. If the W-siblings had directed Inception I have a feeling I wouldn't have had this problem, but that's an assumption.
As fun as the zero g hall fight was the first time I saw it in inception, the "hall fights" in the matrix were just as engaging if not more but without that layer of distraction. Which I suppose has been my running theme in this thread.
I hope that wasn't too incoherent for anyone here(honestly), I apologize for turning this into an inception discussion. Couldn't be helped.
I don't hate Nolan, he's just yet to really get me on his side. He lost me with his take on Batman. After I read year one, he didn't stand a chance.
