Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
That's kind of the point. A leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu probably isn't a costar in an 'inferior execution of a Gnostic parable'. She's probably a costar in a entertaining nerd targeted action flick.
In general it is a mistake to ascribe motives or purpose (Gnostic parable) to something and judge it according to how well it achieves that purpose (inferior execution) when it could be considered more successful by other plausible purposes.
Another thing the Matrix wouldn't be a good execution of, if that is what it were, is a vaguely internally coherent counterfactual reality even at the scene level. FFS Trinity, if you pointed a gun at my head and said 'Dodge This!' then I'd be able to dodge it without any Agent powers. Yes, this paragraph is a rather loosely related tangent but damn. The 'batteries' thing gets a bad rap but I can suspend my disbelief on that if I try. Two second head start on your 'surprise attack' to people who can already dodge bullets is inexcusable.
Inexcusable? :cracks knuckles:
Try to see it from the perspective of the agent. With how close that gun was to his head, and assuming that Trinity was not in fact completely stupid and had the training and hacker-enhanced reflexes to fire as soon as she saw the merest twitch of movement, there was really no realistic scenario where that agent could survive. A human might try to dodge anyway, and die, but for an agent, two seconds spent taunting him was two seconds delay. A miniscule difference in outcome, but still - U(let trinity taunt) > U(try to dodge and die immediately).