This weekend I completed my stalled reviewing of the Matrix Trilogy. The gap of time between one and two measured in weeks, if not months. The gap between two and three only a few days. If you’ve seen them you’ll not be surprised.
Turns out that the second and third movies improved with the gap. Directors shoot for the best perception possible for their movies but I doubt they factor aging into that equation. It worked for me in this case. They still didn’t excel, but they didn’t bomb the way they did when I first saw them.
All this is a clunky lead in to what I really wanted to highlight. In the third movie there is a tertiary storyline with Tank and Dozer’s sister—Link’s wife—and an incidental woman with a shaved head. The second scene with them together has one asking the other if the other is scared. Dressed in homespun garments they crouch in a mechanical access line waiting with the other newly volunteered infantry members. These ground troops wait in line to die.
I recognized this scene as similar to how I like to start much of what I do here at 1000 Days. If I can, I really enjoy starting just a little late in a story so the reader is already missing out on what’s gone before. In the Shanty arc I’ve significantly written on here I have one character coming in for a landing, another about to board a gondola, and a third hitching a ride in the middle of the desert. Elsewhere I’ve dropped in on hunters atop a perch watching prey approach. Soldiers being shot at. Voyageurs dragging a frozen body through marshland. Old teachers overlooking the gathering of the tribe to safety. I rarely start with a wideshot—an establishing shot. I almost never start out describing scenery then follow with placing characters in that set. I guess this is my style.
Day 279