by Mike Shea on 19 May 2003
I am probably too old (thirty on this last Saturday) to have a favorite gun, but Matrix Reloaded gave me a new one. The Glock 18 is a fully automatic 9mm handgun with a 31 round magazine is my new favorite gun. It is the one Morpheus uses to shoot up the twins SUV at the end of the huge car chase in Matrix Reloaded. I saw this gun first in Face Off but thought it was a fake. It looks exactly like a typical automatic handgun but fires up to 1800 rounds a minute. Probably a solid replacement for the Tac 9 and the Mac 10 as the submachine gun of action movies / games.
I saw Matrix Reloaded again and I liked it far better the second time. It is as good if not better than the original. The scenes I didn't like in my original posting fit a lot better and made a lot more sense when put in the context of the entire film. They don't make sense the first time but they will the second. I got a lot more of what I had missed in the original sensory firehose and I was able to pick out a lot of the excellent visuals that got buried under the rest of the original experience. See it twice.
There is a 1000x540 resolution finial Matrix Reloaded trailer available for download. It weighs in at around 100 megs and requires Quicktime, but at that resolution it looks better than a 720x480 resolution DVD. Nice to have once you've seen the film but I think it ruins a lot of the best visuals if you haven't. I wish Quicktime could do full screen video, I hate that grey box.
I'm wondering whether or not anamorphic DVDs and HDTVs need a way to handle higher aspect ratio 2.35 to 1 pictures without losing resolution. Even in 16x9 enhanced mode, a lot of lines are wasted on black bars for a 2.35 to 1 cinemascope picture. Better would be a 1692 x 720 progressive EHDTV resolution built specifically for cinemascope pictures. It could be backward compatible with 1920 x 1080i and 1280 x 720 HDTV. Of course this would require new HDTV standards which would be a problem. I guess I'll have to be happy with my 364 x 854 progressive DVDs for a while yet. Actually, what is the true resolution of a progressive DVD frame?