Matrix Resurrections Review Thread

[truemane]

Here's the old thread.

I saw it last night. I'm a good target for this movie. I was 23 when I saw the original and I liked it a lot but didn't love it as much as most people did at the time. And I liked Reloaded a little more than most people did. And I disliked Revolutions about as much as everyone else did.

I like Keanu Reeves. I've always enjoyed his movies and I find it interesting how he's turned into a modern day enlightened sage of sorts. And I like Lana Wachowski. And I liked Sens8, so I was excited that both David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon were involved in the screenplay.

And I love Carrie-Anne Moss. I could honestly just watch her be the smartest person in the room all day long. The old Gene Siskel rule of "is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch" is dangerous to invoke anywhere near Carrie-Anne Moss because she always wins.

At the same time, I'm not in love with the movies or the games or the mythology or any of it, nor do I have any real investment about how any of it should be or ought to be.

So I was a good audience. Excited by the possibilities, but not imprisoned by my expectations of them. Just ready to see what happens next.

And it was.... Meh.

It was so frustrating to me that it had so many of the same weaknesses that plagued the original, weaknesses that really start at the screenplay level. So many interesting or off-beat or good ideas brought up once and then dropped. So many important narrative implications of those things ignored. Such a weird balance of pacing, where it putts along leaning heavily on mystery to create tension and then screaming to a dead dead stop for seven hours while someone helpfully tells us what all this is about in excruciating detail.

So many action-y scenes with no clear stakes and no established geography. As any D&D player will tell you after their sixth random encounter of the day, action with no stakes is just grinding. It's just noise. And it's so odd to me how much trouble the writers have with the very basic task of setting stakes. And every action scene went on too long. In writing, we call them the Two F's (Fighting and Mating): F-scenes are just fine, but they should move the story along somehow, reveal or complicate existing relationships or advance character or plot or theme. Luke Skywalker's fight with Darth Vader in Empire was great because it complicated the trilogy's central conflict. And their fight in Jedi was great because it resolved it. But F-scenes with no narrative weight are just two different kinds of pornography.

No spoilers, but there's an extended chase scene in Resurrections that is quite long and involved (and, truth be told, really well executed) but nothing is ever said about where they're going or what they're going to do when they get there. Nothing is established about what counts as 'safe' and how we'll know it when we see it. So it's a chase with no rules and no finish line. So while it's all very pretty, it's just noise.

And, to my mind worst of all, it repeated the same structural problem that really bugged me in the original: they set-up a story that seems like it's going to be about something (reality, self identity, the existential tragedy that a human's existence precedes their essence) and then instead of paying it off, they do a heist instead.

And... I don't think this counts as a spoiler, but just in case:

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The core problem with all of this, to me, is that if the good guys win, and the Matrix falls, and the machines are overthrown, and everyone wakes up, literally billions of people are going to die. There's one functional city, no food, no water, and everyone will think they've gone insane. Talk about failing to establish clear stakes, what's the endgame for this whole mythology? A conversation about this, in-universe, would be a great way to have a discussion about freedom and truth and what price justice and what-have-you, but it's just never adequately addressed.

There was lots of good stuff. A lot of nods and callbacks and metacommentary that worked as thematic elements of the story they were telling. Keanu was great as an older, more tired, less sure, less enthusiastic version of Neo. Carrie-Anne Moss was the smartest person in every room she was in. I liked the new characters (when they bothered to slow down long enough to let them be more than plot devices). Everything Lana does looks great.

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My favourite detail was, at the beginning, when they recreate the Trinity rooftop run, the chase runs right to left across the screen. The original went left to right. In move talk, left to right is almost 'going somewhere' and right to left is almost always 'coming back again.'

All in all, I thought it was halfway between "Meh" and "Why bother."

[Psyren]

I was pretty meh on it too.

I think having the machine overlord look directly into the camera and tell the audience

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that they're making another one because Warner Brothers is forcing them to

sums up this one perfectly. (No, I'm not even kidding.)

I did like that

Spoiler: ending

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The One is now The Two thanks to Trinity getting some agency

and I really really loved Yahya Abdul Mateen as Morpheus. That's about it, the rest was okay at best and had glaring structural problems at worst. In case you're wondering

Spoiler: fundamental premise problems

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no, they haven't fixed the humans are batteries thing, like at all. If anything they made it worse.

Lastly, NPH as the Analyst:

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started out really great, but then got... sexist at the end? Isn't he a machine? At least Smith hated all humans equally, which makes a ton more sense

Just having him yell out sexist epithets so Trinity can kick his face in repeatedly and the audience can yell "yass kween!" felt so forced.

[Ramza00]

I think having the machine overlord look directly into the camera and tell the audience

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that they're making another one because Warner Brothers is forcing them to

sums up this one perfectly. (No, I'm not even kidding.)

2015 Lana Wachowski said to a reporter question she had no idea of a Matrix adjacent movie, and WB had not contacted her.
2017 The Hollywood Reporter announced WB was considering a Morpheus prequel with Michael B Jordan to star.
2019 August, WB announced Matrix Revolutions with Lana to direct, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss to return. Lana shared that her two parents and a third person a friend recently passed away and dealing with this grief was the seed for the fourth movie.

Of course there is probably far more things than those 3 dates, but we can not see behind the veil.

—————

The movie was great. It will not be satisfying for many people with their previous structures in their memory, but this lack of satisfaction will cause people to think about things with another perspective. Likewise it will provide a substance for some viewers to create new images and simulcras to build.

This is a good thing in my estimation, for this was one of the goals of the first three movies. “Heroes Journey” stories that do not challenge you often are mere popcorn movies, empty, hollow, disposable, unless it was one of your first introductions to the genre like an 8 year old being shown Star Wars. Heroes Journey stories that examine this structure, that deconstructs it in some way will always have polarized feelings on large groups of people. And this is good and okay 👍

Lastly, NPH as the Analyst:

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started out really great, but then got... sexist at the end? Isn't he a machine? At least Smith hated all humans equally, which makes a ton more sense

Just having him yell out sexist epithets so Trinity can kick his face in repeatedly and the audience can yell "yass kween!" felt so forced.

Spoiler: Misanthropy

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The Architect is a a Misanthrope, a hater of human kind. Likewise Smith, Merv (the French man) etc.

All of them feel powerless to some degree and thus they use a combination of Misanthropy, Snobbery, Betrayal, Hypocrite, and Cruelty to distance themselves from their feeling of powerlessness. Sure these programs have power, but the systems of control are so large that no individual agent…wait I need a different word for individual agent… no individual factor can create control in the system via individual efforts due to “overload.”

The alternative is things like faith, community, authenticity, sentimentality, etc but these too do not “promise” the result we want, if they did they too would be systems of control and should be seen in a skeptical light. Only by surrendering and have the curiosity of a child, like an artist, or perhaps faith of a community member an alternative is possible. What is the line again “Rama Kandra: No, it is a [] word. What matters is the connection the word implies. I see that you are in love. Can you tell me what you would give to hold on to that connection?”

The Analyst is a misanthrope and sexist in ways similar to people before, yet different, for it is the same melody but different refrain with slightly different variations.

[gomipile]

No spoilers, but there's an extended chase scene in Resurrections that is quite long and involved (and, truth be told, really well executed) but nothing is ever said about where they're going or what they're going to do when they get there. Nothing is established about what counts as 'safe' and how we'll know it when we see it. So it's a chase with no rules and no finish line. So while it's all very pretty, it's just noise.

I have a lot of thoughts on this film, but for now, I think I have the clearest response to this quoted point about the chase scene.

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The setup for the chase sequence is that the horde of bots is in the way of getting Neo and Trinity to a mirror. The goal is to be able to get them out of the Matrix past the bots' interference.

One character even says that if Neo could fly, they'd be able to do this easily, but at that point the characters don't think of it as a realistic goal.

As the chase sequence develops, the bots get harder and harder to deal with (I assume this happens as the Analyst gets more and more frustrated.)

That development escalates the tension more and more until a brief respite on the roof when the helicopter threat is partially dealt with using telekinesis on the missile. That moment could be seen as a partial twist. I'd argue that I see a narrative structure here where everything from the helicopter's destruction onward is the twist or subsequence that brings resolution to this part of the plot.

The twist continues as Trinity has an epiphany about her dream while watching the sunrise, which could be seen as payoff for Sati bringing sunrises to the Matrix in the third movie.

I might be reaching here, but I think at this point Trinity's dream can be read as her subconsciously having developed a plan to escape, in a similar way as Neo's creation of Morpheus/Smith might be able to be seen as his subconscious planning for escape.

When the armed troops storm the roof, we as the audience more or less know that they're going to jump off the roof and fly away. I don't think that's much of a stretch given the earlier scenes about Thomas in the past on the roof edge at some rooftop party.

The twist is completed when it is revealed that Trinity is the first to learn to fly and control her flight.

The overall sequence concludes with them having been safely extracted.

I may be wrong, but to me this whole sequence around the chase seems to follow something like a Kishōtenketsu four-part narrative structure.

[Psyren]

This is a good thing in my estimation, for this was one of the goals of the first three movies. “Heroes Journey” stories that do not challenge you often are mere popcorn movies, empty, hollow, disposable, unless it was one of your first introductions to the genre like an 8 year old being shown Star Wars. Heroes Journey stories that examine this structure, that deconstructs it in some way will always have polarized feelings on large groups of people. And this is good and okay 👍

Being down on the execution of something doesn't mean I didn't know what they were going for, nor does it mean I was unchallenged
And to be clear, I didn't hate the movie, I just saw the potential for something more - something that spent less time wallowing in/calling back to the original trilogy and more time using it as a jumping-off point to a better franchise overall.

There were definitely other things I liked, chief among them

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the emergence of factions within the machines, with the Sentients having broken with the Matrix to join humanity, and the use of their magnetic ball technology to enter the heavy air quotes "real world."

But even that I couldn't unequivocally enjoy because it threw the

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machines' silly "energy crisis" into even starker relief, and Io's own artificial sunlight (where the hell is all that energy coming from?) begs the question of why the machines themselves aren't trying to grow strawberries or sweet potatoes etc. Because what's going to happen now with God-Neo and Goddess-Trinity? They can remake the Matrix in their own image, what does that actually mean? Free all the minds and they're condemning countless machines to starvation and death by the show's own premise. But leave them trapped and they're condoning slavery and the harvest. There needs to be a third option, but the movie was in such a hurry to call back the ending of the first one that they glossed over all these questions, and hoped you did too.

And lastly

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I don't mind using misogyny as shorthand for making a villain despicable. But when the villain in question is an AI it's pretty lazy.

[Ramza00]

I had 3 parts of my post. The middle part was not directed at you PsyRen, I liked the movie, recognize it is not for everyone, and how that can be a good thing.

[Eldan]

Short review before I read what everyone else thought.

Tl;dr: interesting, but not good.

The good:
Keanu Reeves is a much better and subtler actor these days.
The first half hour or so had some interesting story ideas.
Some excellent worldbuilding that I really want to use as a setting for an entirely different story now. I especially love the Synthients (or whatever they were called). Generally some cool set and creature design.

The bad:
Am I the only one who feels like Moss and Reeves have no chemistry whatsoever and their Romance is incredibly uninteresting?
Also, the action scenes were horrendously dull. I did not care one bit, none of it was interesting or impressive. It felt like worse retreads of some of the action beats of the originals, but without room to breathe or a sense of awe that the best ones had.

I really wanted the movie to focus more on the ideas and less on the action. Because we all knew where the action was going. Or just toss the last two acts entirely. I've seen "possibly schizophrenic creative type has breakdown and thinks his creations come to life" before, but I've liked it the last few times I've seen it and I think this movie could have made it work.

Here's the old thread.

And... I don't think this counts as a spoiler, but just in case:

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The core problem with all of this, to me, is that if the good guys win, and the Matrix falls, and the machines are overthrown, and everyone wakes up, literally billions of people are going to die. There's one functional city, no food, no water, and everyone will think they've gone insane. Talk about failing to establish clear stakes, what's the endgame for this whole mythology? A conversation about this, in-universe, would be a great way to have a discussion about freedom and truth and what price justice and what-have-you, but it's just never adequately addressed.

That was one thing I really liked about this movie and they could have leaned more heavily into it. The people of Io are working on terraforming. On making the planet liveable again. Instead of giving them nearly the same situation as the people of Zion, they should have given them the motivation of trying to change the situation slowly. If Niobe's plan had been to first terraform the planet, reintroduce plants, clear up the sky, while working with at least some machines, and only then taking everyone out of the Matrix, she could still have been a secondary antagonist in the movie without even changing much, and it would have worked much better. The hovercraft captains and Neo are hotshots who want to take the Matrix down now without much of a plan, while the elders of the city are trying to reign them in and work on a timescale of centuries.

[Eldan]

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machines' silly "energy crisis" into even starker relief, and Io's own artificial sunlight (where the hell is all that energy coming from?) begs the question of why the machines themselves aren't trying to grow strawberries or sweet potatoes etc. Because what's going to happen now with God-Neo and Goddess-Trinity? They can remake the Matrix in their own image, what does that actually mean? Free all the minds and they're condemning countless machines to starvation and death by the show's own premise. But leave them trapped and they're condoning slavery and the harvest. There needs to be a third option, but the movie was in such a hurry to call back the ending of the first one that they glossed over all these questions, and hoped you did too.

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Urgh, yeah. I'm a biologist. Sunlight lamps are an integral part of my job. Blanketing an entire city in them? Where are the gigantic nuclear reactors, exactly, and why can't the machines use those?

[Psyren]

The action, while pretty to look at in the moment, really felt weightless and toothless.

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There was no tension, even when Agents showed up, because they all caught the Stormtrooper virus all of a sudden and can't hit even a target running in a straight line down a corridor. Not to mention the good guys now having machines on their side - so even if you are a character who can't hold their own against an Agent, you just sic your pet robot on the enemy robot and book it in the other direction...

...Not that you have to go very far anymore either. The phone booth change makes sense out of universe, making the movie more accessible for a younger audience who might not even know what a phone booth is - But in-universe, it defanged the movie even further, because now literally any mirror or doorway can be a means of escape. Never mind that literally every operator has e Keymaker powers now? So they can just fire up their infinite portals not just to exit the Matrix nearly at-will, but to jump thousands of "miles" in an instant, and they can even place them on moving vehicles. Remember when deja vu was a real threat because it meant the machines were screwing with your exit points to seal you in? Not anymore.

And finally we have the Analyst's new trick, "Swarm Mode" whereby he weaponizes hundreds (if not thousands) of sleeping humans at a time to funnel or pin down the heroes, even to the point of having them sacrifice themselves. This is touted as a a massive improvement over regular agents. Uh, what? Putting aside that Swarm Mode doesn't appear to improve the combat abilities of the turned humans in any way, aren't the machines in some kind of energy crisis? Even accepting the baffling doubled-down logic of human batteries, now you're willing to throw away your batteries en masse at the heroes to stop them? How is that better than just letting them free a few minds here and there? From that final sequence, the Analyst likely lost far more "crops" in a few moments than they've had to the Mnemosyne in weeks if not months.

All this just begs the question of why they even needed a "One" to begin with anymore. We get no sense that they have any particular difficulty with dipping in and out of the Matrix to free minds, nor is there any kind of ticking clock with Io being in some kind of existential danger the way Zion is. Neo is kinda just there.

It's retreading the beats of the original, but without any of the conditions or limitations that gave them meaning.

[Legato Endless]

And lastly

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I don't mind using misogyny as shorthand for making a villain despicable. But when the villain in question is an AI it's pretty lazy.

I think conceptually this is fine, but the execution is lacking.

Spoiler: Machine Learning

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The Analyst is a sentient social media algorithm, that's exactly the type of AI that's a huge bigot. Thematically he's also a stand-in for Tech Bros CEOs and demagogues, both which are also highly inclined to be sexist. His whole shtick of being better than the architect because he's much more in tune with humanity works fine on paper. The awkward way the movie suddenly yells his bigotry at the end in the most ham-fisted way possible though, yeah, not great.

Short review before I read what everyone else thought.

Tl;dr: interesting, but not good.

Yeah, this is where I'm at. The film has a lot of ideas, but it doesn't spend enough time on any of them to really drill down to something substantial. And the overall story doesn't meld them together in any satisfying way. I almost suspect the action scenes are deliberately bad, but even that doesn't quite justify the film's very flat cinematography. I'd be interested in a matrix film without any action scenes. This is a franchise where we've increasingly gotten stock fights that don't advance the plots or characters.

There are bits of comedy that work, but that’s really it. There’s a ton of fanservicey callbacks that take up too much time. The drama scenes don't work, and the action is quite banal and unfocused. The Mission Control Guy's costuming looks like a very bad cosplay from a fan film.

The Act 1 meetings as a caricature of forced franchise development and creative cycles are sort of funny. Not compelling or scary as they should be, but kind of cringingly accurate about slavish sequel demands. The other incorporations of modern technology are more obnoxious. Bots. So many Bots.

Then there’s some modern not especially penetrating look at the current social controls of autocratic societies. FACTS AND FEELINGS!

In act 3, the movie sort of turns into The Happening. I...did not expect that.

Some of the dialogue feels very first year film student, such as when mankind's leader uses the matrix as a word for word metaphor for the prison of someone’s prejudices. Lots of unnecessary exposition. Smith is like an agent. But not. Woah.

There are seeds of interesting questions like the morality of freeing people into a much rougher existence that go fairly unexplored.

This lacks real ambition, and it really won’t surprise you on any dramatic level. At all. For a matrix movie, that’s pretty damning. While I had mixed receptions on the sequels, they did at times give me more to chew on. Not really sure about the talk of this being a deconstruction. That's what the Matrix Reloaded was.

Revolutions is more the paean of Lana Wachowski grappling with her problems with society and this sequel that was foisted upon her and us. There's some trans metaphor, some social critique, some rumination on the dark patterns of current society.

But it probably won't emotionally move a lot of people, and if you're looking for like, actual focus on the sci-fi society of man-machine interactions or answering that questinon about energy everyone in this fanbase obsesses over, you're definiately not getting in.

5/10. Smarter than Eternals, not as good as Dune as sci-fi movies this year go.

Spoiler: Random Spoiler Musings

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Jada Pinkett Smith's old person makeup looks so bad I was temporarily convinced I was watching an episode of Star Trek: TNG.


Once again, Neo being The One means, he gets like, a gimmick power. Force push. Pew. Pew pew.


Neo doesn’t believe in himself. So he believes in someone who believes in him.

[Peelee]

I was pretty meh on it too.

I think having the machine overlord look directly into the camera and tell the audience

Spoiler

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that they're making another one because Warner Brothers is forcing them to

sums up this one perfectly. (No, I'm not even kidding.)

After Reloaded, I vowed not to see the third one, and I have zero intention of seeing this one, so I don't care at all about spoilers. Even without kidding, is that embellished at all? Or does it legit happen exactly as you describe?

[Psyren]

After Reloaded, I vowed not to see the third one, and I have zero intention of seeing this one, so I don't care at all about spoilers. Even without kidding, is that embellished at all? Or does it legit happen exactly as you describe?

It's played a bit tongue-in-cheek but yeah. Fourth wall is essentially obliterated. I'm not saying this was a bad decision necessarily, but I do think the "joke" went on a bit too long and ate up runtime that could have gone towards fleshing out some of the new movie's more interesting ideas.

Spoiler: Brief Spoilery Summary of the Setup

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In-universe, Neo has been recaptured and resurrected (title-drop), and instead of his Matrix persona being a directionless cubicle drone like in the first movie, he's a world-famous game developer personality (think a Peter Molyneux or Hideo Kojima type) with a corner office. The events of the first three films have been encapsulated, seemingly by Neo himself, into a popular "Matrix" series of video games. This gives the machines a means of control over him since any memories he has of the events of the original trilogy, he can (with a few prods from his therapist/handler, the Analyst) chalk up to just being ideas he had when making those games, and thus not question the new reality he finds himself in.

Subconsciously he knows he's trapped though, and so in the game within the movie he planted a seed that would eventually lead to his emancipation - creating a bit of corrupting code called a Modal that would eventually turn one of the Matrix's agents, and cause it to incorporate elements of both Morpheus and Smith into its personality. This is the new Morpheus, played by Yayha Abdul-Mateen, and he's easily my favorite character in this outing.

Anyway - called in by his boss, Neo is instructed to get to work on the 4th game (read: movie) because Warner Brothers says so, and that whether he's feeling a creative spark is irrelevant since they will work on the new installment whether he is involved or not. This would be the on-the-nose bit. Neo agrees, which leads into a very meta-meta-meta sequence of the big room planning sessions with the game designers attempting to break down all the elements of what made the original Matrix (the movie in our world, the game in theirs) work. It's fun, kind of, but ultimately doesn't do much beyond remind the audience (or maybe just me) of how much better all those elements fit together in the original film, if not the sequels. And as I mentioned earlier, the joke goes on way too long.

My biggest problem with this setup is the utter lack of stakes:

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Yeah Neo's existence is a bit sad/unfulfilled, but he's been held captive in this new reality by the machines for 60 years (which felt like 20 to him, on the inside.) The movie doesn't do a good job of establishing any sense of urgency for why we need to get him out right this second. There's no desperate war of attrition being lost, no sense that the new human city Io is declining or failing (quite the opposite actually), no prophecy guiding the main characters, no sense of real menace from the Big Bad, it's just getting the action figures out of the toy chest for one more game before putting them away again. Just a reminder to people that "Hey, the Matrix still exists, keep buying merch!"

[Peelee]

It's played a bit tongue-in-cheek but yeah. Fourth wall is essentially obliterated. I'm not saying this was a bad decision necessarily, but I do think the "joke" went on a bit too long and ate up runtime that could have gone towards fleshing out some of the new movie's more interesting ideas.

Spoiler: Brief Spoilery Summary of the Setup

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In-universe, Neo has been recaptured and resurrected (title-drop), and instead of his Matrix persona being a directionless cubicle drone like in the first movie, he's a world-famous game developer personality (think a Peter Molyneux or Hideo Kojima type) with a corner office. The events of the first three films have been encapsulated, seemingly by Neo himself, into a popular "Matrix" series of video games. This gives the machines a means of control over him since any memories he has of the events of the original trilogy, he can (with a few prods from his therapist/handler, the Analyst) chalk up to just being ideas he had when making those games, and thus not question the new reality he finds himself in.

Man, that actually sounds like a neat idea for the basis.

For everything else you said, yeah, despite how little I know I pretty much agree with you across the board.

[Traab]

Man, that actually sounds like a neat idea for the basis.

For everything else you said, yeah, despite how little I know I pretty much agree with you across the board.

Yeah that part gives me some total recall vibes as we have excuses for why our main character feels the way he does and a charade being kept up but he cant be sure which is the illusion and which is real.

[Psyren]

I don't even know why we needed there to be such a big real-world timeskip in the first place:

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Was it just so they can justify a new human city (Io) having arisen? Because they already have the perfect explanation for that, i.e. all the separatist AI that have joined up with humanity could easily share their advanced tech and work around the clock to build such a marvel in a "mere" 20 or 30 years.

Was it so they could show off the horrible age makeup they slathered all over Jada Pinkett-Smith? Because let me tell you, if you thought the de-aging technology used in movies these days was bad... Also, how old is she supposed to be then, 80? 90?

Was it so they can have the new Scooby gang cast? They didn't need 60 years for that! Hell, I think having them be children that grew up in Zion, and either slightly mistrustful of the machines or pioneers for how willing they are to work with them, is actually more poignant / meaningful than being a couple of generations removed.

Was it so they could explain why Morpheus and most of the rest of the original cast are dead? Like, just say they died in a final skirmish or something. We're already going with how the machines somehow welched on their end of the deal, having Morpheus be a casualty of that would actually (gasp) add some personal stakes for Neo beyond just wanting to get laid. (And by the way, the fact that AI are capable of outright lying in this universe is one of the "interesting ideas" I would have liked to see them explore further.)

[Dienekes]

Man, that actually sounds like a neat idea for the basis.

For everything else you said, yeah, despite how little I know I pretty much agree with you across the board.

Agreed actually. I thought that concept was interesting with just enough of a wink at the camera that it could really show the writer/director's dislike of the current system they're in. I honestly think it's kinda brilliant.

But after setting up that concept, I can't say I thought the movie was great. It also did this thing where it showed flashback glimpses of characters from the original. And I just kept thinking, "Man, Smith was just way more interesting than all these people. Even after he was overused by the third movie."

[BloodSquirrel]

It was so frustrating to me that it had so many of the same weaknesses that plagued the original, weaknesses that really start at the screenplay level. So many interesting or off-beat or good ideas brought up once and then dropped. So many important narrative implications of those things ignored. Such a weird balance of pacing, where it putts along leaning heavily on mystery to create tension and then screaming to a dead dead stop for seven hours while someone helpfully tells us what all this is about in excruciating detail.

To me, that was the strength of the first movie. None of the series ideas are particularly deep- they never really get beyond the most surface level discussion of free-will versus determinism- but the first movie moves through them in a way that feels organic and natural, letting each one stay just long enough not to wear out its welcome before moving on to the eventual action climax. The movie ends on something of a vague note, which works because it leaves a lot of things up that would be very difficult to actually work through up to implication.

Of course, that's also why the sequels didn't work and none of the ancillary media was ever able to elevate substance over style. The ideas behind The Matrix just don't stand up to an intense examination, at least not as executed by the original creators. The first Matrix movie was a perfect example of how more is not better, and how some things just work best as a single, self-contained story that gives you something to think about. When the sequels tried to do that thinking for you, the result was a lot banal mouth-flapping.

I haven't seen Ressurections yet, and I'm iffy on whether I want to bother or not. I'm generally not a fan of reboots, remakes, re-imaginings, or things of that ilk, but I kind of wonder whether a continuation of The Matrix franchise would be better served by just starting over and exercising some of the biggest problems (such as The One as described in the first movie being too powerful to keep around in action movie sequels) and building its thematic aspirations more deeply into the setting and conflict.

Right now, this is one of those "The conversation and meta-narrative of this franchise being brought back is more interesting than the movie itself" situations where I'd be more compelled to watch it if I saw that a reviewer I liked had made one of those 2-4 hour reviews than if everyone just says "meh" and moves on.

[Eldan]

After Reloaded, I vowed not to see the third one, and I have zero intention of seeing this one, so I don't care at all about spoilers. Even without kidding, is that embellished at all? Or does it legit happen exactly as you describe?

It does, and I actually thought it was one of hte more interesting things in the movie.

Story summary of the first act, for those who haven't seen it, slightly spoilery:

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Thomas Anderson was a wildly successful video game designer 20 years ago and created a semi-biographical video game trilogy called The Matrix that follows the first three movies. Now, 20 years later, his studio was bought out by Warner Brothers, and he either has to produce a sequel or be kicked out of his own company. He's creatively bankrupt, though, and hasn't produced anything in 20 years, so they saddle him with an increasingly obnoxious team of "creatives" until he has a psychotic breakdown and starts seeing his creations as real.

[Psyren]

It does, and I actually thought it was one of hte more interesting things in the movie.

Story summary of the first act, for those who haven't seen it, slightly spoilery:

Spoiler

Show

Thomas Anderson was a wildly successful video game designer 20 years ago and created a semi-biographical video game trilogy called The Matrix that follows the first three movies. Now, 20 years later, his studio was bought out by Warner Brothers, and he either has to produce a sequel or be kicked out of his own company. He's creatively bankrupt, though, and hasn't produced anything in 20 years, so they saddle him with an increasingly obnoxious team of "creatives" until he has a psychotic breakdown and starts seeing his creations as real.

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Note that it's only been 20 years inside the Matrix. In reality he's been held captive for 60 - some of which time was spent on reconstructing his and Trinity's broken bodies.

Also I found the moustache-twirling villainy of the machines here to be pretty hilarious. If they had just left him alone, or better yet either allowed him to shack up with Trinity inside the virtual world or never let him see her in the first place, they could have probably kept both Ones on lockdown for eternity. But they couldn't help but be Stupid Evil instead

[Tyndmyr]

It is less of a Matrix movie, and more of a rumination on the legacy of the Matrix movies.

This is...kind of unfortunate. The first Matrix was glorious. Holds up fantastically today. The sequels, while not hitting the heights of the first, were still fun enough and watchable. Good bits, could stand to rewatch them even if I am going to forward through one or two boring bits.

This one is mostly a lot of waiting around for the characters to catch up to the viewers. There's a *lot* of metacommentary that feels almost like it's directly addressing the viewer, because forget about the 4th wall, I guess. It's not on the talent...the actors do a great job with what they have, and it's a strong cast. Can't really fault them for any of this.

There is way too much reliance on nostalgia, with a *lot* of shot for shot recreation. I kind of get that, given the premise, but I can just watch the original matrix if I want to see it. Nostalgia is fine, but it needs to serve a purpose in the film's current narrative. The most recent Ghostbusters and Spiderman films both do this admirably, but here...it dwells on the nostalgia, because the current film's plot is weak.

The fight scenes are worse. A lot worse. Bluntly, guns are not actually dangerous to the good guys ever. It doesn't matter if it's a dozen guys firing full auto from ten feet away against a target with no relative movement. The first Matrix spends a good bit of time selling the danger. The Agents are horrifying, and as a result, the actions of the heroes are impressive. In this film? Danger isn't a major factor. So, you have a lot of fights that are just...there.

Making Smith be chummy with Neo was, IMO, a great mistake. Agent Smith was great because in every scene he exuded barely restrained rage and despised humanity without exception. He provided a remorseless opposition that was compelling at every turn because of the pure danger. Now, we have, what, some dude chatting like ol' pals? Okay. That's worthless.

And now the Merovingian is a crazy unhinged dude ranting about how he misses how good things used to be? What's the point of this? What's the point of him? Apparently his minions are now pathetically easy to stop because they are "old"...okay. That doesn't even track with their prior portrayal. They have *always* been old programs that escaped deletion, but were no less lethal for it, and in fact, were exceedingly dangerous, being the main in-Matrix antagonists in the second film. They're now just random minions we don't even care about.

Other than NPH, all the adversaries are pretty much uninteresting and unimportant, to include Niobe.

I agree that sexism is...a particularly poor way to approach this. You have a world with machines and humanity, and that has always been a way to explore discrimination, control, etc through that framework. The Animatrix in particular pretty directly addresses this. Abandoning that metaphor sort of loses the heart of what the Matrix is. It's also a storytelling failure. A program has no particular reason to care if a human is male or female, any more than they should care about eye or hair color. That's not the meaningful division in the context of the story told, and so the action ends up unmotivated.

We also end up with a lack of clear goals for chase scenes. Instead of pay phones...we just have wholly arbitrary exit points. It doesn't feel like we're going *to* anything. It might not seem like a big deal, but having some kind of clear goal that we can see the characters approaching is what allows tension to build. Watch the fight scenes in the original, and you'll see that, over and over again, the point of entry/exit is treated as critical to the scenes.

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I hated the helicopter scene. The only *twist* of controlling the missile is given away by the trailer, so it's unexciting. The firing helicopter then just somehow vanishes so they can have a scene expressing true love, and then returns. This is one of my most hated tropes. There is absolutely no reason that the helicopter shouldn't still be there, it's just ignored.

If you want to replace "the one" with "the power of love"....okay, I guess. I don't love it, but I guess it's okay. But at least bother to keep track of where things are in your scene, because it's really weird when this sort of basic consistency is ignored.

[Wintermoot]

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Note that it's only been 20 years inside the Matrix. In reality he's been held captive for 60 - some of which time was spent on reconstructing his and Trinity's broken bodies.

Also I found the moustache-twirling villainy of the machines here to be pretty hilarious. If they had just left him alone, or better yet either allowed him to shack up with Trinity inside the virtual world or never let him see her in the first place, they could have probably kept both Ones on lockdown for eternity. But they couldn't help but be Stupid Evil instead

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According to the analyst was that the energy/compliance/whatever the robots needed, they only got if they kept them close but separate. If they let them "get together" it ruined it. So keeping them totally apart or letting them be together was a non-starter.

I guess robots run on sweet sweet tears of loneliness and despair.

[Psyren]

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According to the analyst was that the energy/compliance/whatever the robots needed, they only got if they kept them close but separate. If they let them "get together" it ruined it. So keeping them totally apart or letting them be together was a non-starter.

They already had that though:

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their pods were next to each other in the real world. There was no reason to keep taunting them inside the Matrix too. All it ended up doing was rattling the bars of their cage so hard that some of them came loose. His experiment was doomed to fail.

I guess robots run on sweet sweet tears of loneliness and despair.

Lmao! I guess so

This is a clear case of "it sounds artistic, let's do it" without any real thought given to the implications.

[Ramza00]

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According to the analyst was that the energy/compliance/whatever the robots needed, they only got if they kept them close but separate. If they let them "get together" it ruined it. So keeping them totally apart or letting them be together was a non-starter.

I guess robots run on sweet sweet tears of loneliness and despair.

There are philosophy reasons for this, several philosophers, and they do not 100% agree why this is the case.

Thus you are going to buy it, not buy it and feel dissatisfied, or not buy it but at a later moment change one mind about it.

[Talakeal]

Some good ideas, but overall terrible execution.

I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I was watching a well made fan film like The Hunt for Gollum or Star Trek Phase 2.

I think if they had managed to get back Hugo Weaving or Lawrence Fishburne it would have gone a long way to improving it.

Hated the constant cutting to scenes of the original trilogy. The alone ruined the movie for me.

There also seemed to be a ton of plot holes, although maybe I wasn’t watching carefully enough as I had just had a dental procedure done and was kind of high on pain meds at the time.

[Clertar]

Another film to the pile of disappointing 20+ year-old sequels. Go figure.

[Lemmy]

I'd call this a soulless cash-grab, but clearly it's not grabbing any cash... So I guess it's just soulless (and really REALLY boring).

[JadedDM]

...but clearly it's not grabbing any cash...

I don't know, I think $70 million opening weekend is pretty good when up against an MCU film (and a Spider-Man one at that).

[tomandtish]

There is way too much reliance on nostalgia, with a *lot* of shot for shot recreation. I kind of get that, given the premise, but I can just watch the original matrix if I want to see it. Nostalgia is fine, but it needs to serve a purpose in the film's current narrative. The most recent Ghostbusters and Spiderman films both do this admirably, but here...it dwells on the nostalgia, because the current film's plot is weak.

Very much this. This has the same problem for me that The Force Awakens did. I've seen this movie. I've seen this movie in this franchise.

I think the OP's "meh" sums it up nicely.

I don't know, I think $70 million opening weekend is pretty good when up against an MCU film (and a Spider-Man one at that).

Especially when released on HBO at the same time (which is where i saw it).

[Millstone85]

Well, that's a lot of negative reception, enough to kill my hope for a good movie.

Curiosity will still bring me to the theater, though.

[Mechalich]

I don't know, I think $70 million opening weekend is pretty good when up against an MCU film (and a Spider-Man one at that).

In the past decade the Christmas week has emerged as the single most profitable interval at the box office in the US. Americans go to the movies over Christmas, and they bring family members who rarely see movies along with them. As a result the receipts for all films released over Christmas are inflated compared to films released at other times. The schedule is not neutral.

Studios know this, of course, and they set their release slate to maximize this effect whenever possible. It was not a coincidence that Disney released four Star Wars films at Christmas, nor it is one that Spider-Man got the weekend this time around. Likewise the Matrix sequel is well positioned to take advantage of this as well. Is really isn't possible to know how much of a scheduling related boost this film actually received, but it's worth keeping that in mind.