tom moody
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Kudos to the Wachowski Brothers for making the best live-action anime ever. The concluding chapter of the "Matrix" series features a Starship Troopers-quality battle sequence with men in giant Mecha battle suits blasting away at boiling chains of furious robot Squids, and the climactic duke-out between Neo and Agent Smith recalls the never-ending, crater-blasting combat of Goku and Lord Frieza in Dragonball Z. Gluing the whole thing together is a mystical or theological investigation a la Final Fantasy. It's too bad the first episode created expectations the series could never live up to, owing to the late dot com cultural context and what was at the time a cogent social critique of a fake, media created world. As recently as Bush's staged aircraft carrier landing, the Simulacrum still seemed firmly in place. However, since then, news has slipped past our own Machine filters of the hundreds of US dead and wounded in a bloody, ongoing war with the people of Iraq, making a more serious, non-ironic drama about matters worth dying for suddenly relevant. As it turns out, Zion's battle against the Empire of Machines is won or lost depending on what the Empire wants for itself--its own interior conversation. How long will it take the U.S. to realize, as did the Machine City, that its own Agent Smiths (i.e. unelected leaders), growing in power, threaten the stability of the system far more than any struggling band of separatist humans?