After last week’s euphoric reaction to the second half of Spider–Man: No Way Home, I fell into an unusual state of mind. Almost beatific. I began to consider that maybe, just maybe, I’d allowed myself to judge too harshly when it came to big CG-driven tentpole films. Perhaps I was evolving on some level, I told myself.
That shit is now over and done with. For last night I sat through Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix: Resurrections, and I’m back to hating again. BIG hate. Which is where I belong — where God wants me to be. I’m talking “throwing up on the Persian rug” hate.
Death to putrid corporate cash-grab sequels like this one…death to all absurdly complex, dingle-dangle mind-fuck movies that bury the viewer in awful dialogue and hopelessly complex lotting and feelings of frustration that very quickly lead to “man, I really don’t give a fuck about any of this” and then to prolonged screaming. Death to endless martial-arts fight scenes in which the combatants get punched or kicked 67 or 78 times and don’t weaken or slow down in the slightest.
Fuck this movie for further tarnishing the memory of the original 1999 The Matrix, which I’ll always love. Everything I hated about The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions — the horrible sense that a good idea is being mangled and twisted and then lost in the shuffle…those awful 2003 vibes are delivered in industrial-strength doses in Resurrections. It starts out badly or clumsily or ever-emphatically (less than ten minutes I sat up the couch and said out loud “this is bad”), and then it gets worse and worse and still worse. I was dying by the end. It’s a horrible film.
There’s one good moment in The Matrix: Reloaded…one in which Neo is trying to escape from a subway tunnel. He takes off like a bullet but two seconds later ends up exactly where he started. No elaborate FX, just a simple camera trick that Buster rKeaton could have dreamt up…and it’s the coolest moment in the film.
There’s a similar small pleasure in Resurrections — a line of dialogue spoken by Jonathan Groff‘s “Smith” character, the head of a booming San Francisco video-game company due to a wildly popular Matrix game created by Keanu Reeves‘ Thomas Anderson (aka Neo). In a one-on-one with Anderson, Smith explains that Warner Bros., the parent company, “has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy, with or without us” — presumably the same conditions that led to Wachowski’s involvement in Resurrections. This, at least, was mildly amusing — the only moment in the entire film that worked.
Otherwise I sensed trouble almost immediately. As soon as I glimpsed Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and listened to his half-solemn, half full-of-shit metaphysical patter after he decides that he doesn’t want to kill “Bugs” (Jessica Henwick) and her pallies after all, I muttered “but of course, the new Morpheus…Larry Fishburne’s son or whatever because Fishburne is 60 and probably overweight and unable to handle the martial-arts moves that he performed 20-plus-years ago.”
It turns out that Morpheus II is the same Fishburne and the same old Morpheus — he’s just 25 years younger and looks and sounds like the guy who played Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. But right away — during the obligatory opening action sequence, which films of this sort have to begin with because default Matrix knuckle-draggers are looking for as many bullet-time sequences as possible…bullet time! bullet time!… where was I?…
I was puzzled by Bobby Seale Morpheus looking to shoot “Bugs”, a good-guy protagonist on the anti-Matrix, freedom and liberation side of the equation. Except Morpheus is a good guy also so why the initial hostility? Or is this happening inside the Matrix video game?
Answer: Lana Wachowski wanted a big bullet-time gun battle during the first ten minutes, and I don’t think he cared about the particulars. Because the franchise that invented slow-mo bullet-time has to dispense one of these once-classic but now old-hat action sequences every 10 or 12 minutes. These shoot-outs are so awful, so boring, so numbing to the human soul.
Here are some raggedy-ass notes I tapped out while watching last night:
(a) “75 minutes into The Matrix Resurrections snd there’s no story manifesting. It’s all reboot and recap, reboot and recap, re-performing the strongest sequences from the first three films while explaining this and that…all exposition, all lay-of-the-land stuff. And way too many idiotic gunfights. Remember this, Neo? It’s all real. Neo: “No, it can’t be real.” You’re right, Neo…it’s all in your head. “No, it’s real….unless it isn’t.”
(b) What becomes a legend most? Neo admirer to Neo (actually dialogue): “Is it true you could fly?”
(c) Roughly an hour and 20 minutes in, a story or more precisely a goal kicks in…Neo needs to rescue Trinity. Well, whoop-dee-fucking-doo.
(d) Hold on fellas, I have an idea…Let’s have another bullet-time gunfight!!
(e) This is BORING!!!! I’m dying. Fucking ninja battles!!! “Kill him!” THIS STINKS! This is interminable. I loved Jonathan Goff in Mindhunter. I feel so sorry for him in this thing.
Excellent review excerpt #1: I think I’ve figured this metaphor out. This is an exultation of thoughtless mediocrity: imagine if you, peon that you are, at your computer console in your disenchanted world, were in fact the exiled prince of a distant, doomed land, to which you must return in glory. In this special land, you can fly! You can dodge bullets; you are the messiah. Some other peon who, in other respects, resembles you, scrambles up to you and tells you he’s “such a fanboy.” You will rise again in glory, and you will show everyone, especially your gay therapist, who wants to castrate you. But no. Please. Listen to your gay therapist. Take the blue pill.”
Excellent review excerpt #2: “One practically needs a PhD in Matrixology to parse much of what’s happening in this long-gestating (and, at two-and-a-half hours, long-winded) fourth entry in the franchise that began auspiciously in 1999 but quickly flat-lined in two benighted 2003 sequels. When a character in The Matrix: Resurrections disgustedly remarks ‘What a mess!’ near the close, you may be inclined to nod in agreement.”
Excellent review except #3: “The Matrix Resurrections is an unholy mess. Was there a reason to make another Matrix film after the failures that were The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003)? Maybe a reboot with a new cast and a new creative team might have been warranted more than 20 years after the original. But this sequel directed by original trilogy co-director Lana Wachowski and written by her and her Sense8 co-writers David Mitchel and Aleksander Hemon is just abysmal.”