Which is not to say that pop culture failed instantly. Rather, I have completely failed to spend June 20th waiting in a line to see the Hulk or standing in line waiting for Harry Potter.

I mean, make no mistake. I'll be catching both within the week. And it's not like I'm showing restraint. I was just too lazy to preorder my tickets or my book :).

Instead, I've been experimenting in delayed pop culture. I spent the last few days finishing Enter the Matrix, the truly truly awful videogame tie-in to the Matrix movies. In short, this game beautifully demonstrates why storytelling is about knowing what to leave out. It's true that there are some beautiful graphics (including some amazing faces and Niobe's shiny clothing, and the nice way that tile chips and books fall over during fights). It's true that there are some inspired scenes (including one that beautifully recreates the feel of Morpheus's escape in the first movie). It's true that the kung fu looks kickass (as it were).

Unfortunately, it's also true that the level design is insipid and overly long, large chunks of the plot make no sense or seem unimportant, and that the physics has many more failures than successes (chief among them, a driving level where the other SUVs on the road dance around like smurfs on speed). Also, no matter how pretty the fighting is, it's ultimately devoid of strategy: you just mash the punch and kick buttons until everyone falls down, then you wait for your health to recover, then you repeat.

So why bother? Because I love the movies, and I was determined to squeeze out every bit of possible plot detail I could. That being said, I turned on all the cheat codes about one third of the way through, so that I could essentially just run through the levels and get to the cutscenes.

Lucky for me, I did find the video sequences of interest: in case you missed it, the brothers Wachowski filmed around 40 minutes of extra footage that is presented within the game. Sadly, there is no way to just non-interactively view this story; you have to slog through the game to see it. This seemed like a shame to me, so I took the video files (which are just DivX movies) and strung them together into a little 35 minute movie. Since I am no auteur, I crammed in some titles to give a little context for what you don't see by not playing the game -- which mercifully didn't require much. Happily, this version of the story is actually pretty interesting (if, y'know, you're a giant completist DORK like me) as a companion to the second Matrix movie.

(Obviously, there were some elements to this process that were extremely tedious, and it sucks that our culture of copyright paranoia has made it so difficult to actually DO anything with the media that we've bought and just want to, y'know, geez, WATCH.)

Don't expect to see my little home video project up here; I didn't do this so I could distribute it. I just wanted to have the little extra bit of story depth available in a non-interactive archival backup (which, lest we forget, is perfectly legal) that I could rewatch come November when it's time for the final geekout.  9:46:45 PM  (comments [])