Word: neos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...SATURDAY PRITZWALK, GERMANY Andy Gaschler, a 16-year-old high school student, was walking with friends in the pedestrian marketplace of this small town north of Berlin. Gaschler was wearing a Palestinian scarf and a backpack with the slogan nazis out written on it. (The day before, a neo-Nazi gang had firebombed a Vietnamese snack-bar in town.) Now a group of neo-Nazis, obvious by their shaved heads, stopped him. "Didn't I see you before?" one of the skinheads asked Gaschler, before allegedly hitting him in the face and setting his scarf on fire. Gaschler called...
...Neo is now unplugged, lost in a nightmare realm between the Matrix and the machine world. He's pursued by Smith, who has gone free-lance and has become a fatal computer virus. Neo's friends Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) can't count on him, so they must plan the defense of Zion with the help of only the fractious rebel commanders. Their immediate obstacle: the pruny, petulant, dangerous Merovingian (Lambert Wilson). Their possible key to Neo's location: the Oracle (Mary Alice), who, we learned in M2, is a computer program and not always trustworthy...
...Zion debates drone on, and much of the acting and dialogue is stilted, perfunctory, at a level somewhere between a Star Trek TV episode and a Star Trek convention. But the ass kicking starts early, when Morpheus and Trinity have a cool fight with the Merovingian's goons. Meanwhile, Neo is being dogged by a "human" whose voice sounds ... strangely ... familiar. Our hero's lids are seared shut, and through the hot coals of his X-ray eyes, he sees Smith, grimacing triumphantly. It's one of the epiphanies of the movie year...
...Wizard of Oz. That's the touchstone here, not just in the war of a few good guys against a vicious aerial host but in Neo's trip to the Machine (Emerald) City to meet its virtual vizier--who, as seen on a giant screen, looks a bit like the Oz wiz in the 1939 movie--and learn how to get home...
Somehow, though, you knew that the fate of the universe would hang on the outcome of a kung-fu fight between Neo and Smith. It comes at the end on and above city streets in a slow, heavy rain. The trilogy ascends and soars with the two combatants and ends not with a whimper but with a blast of light...