by Flack » Fri Dec 24, 2021 8:08 am
When I first saw The Matrix back in 1999, it blew my mind. The idea of living in a simulation and moving between realms wasn't entirely original (Ghost in the Shell and Neuromancer heavily influenced the film), but The Matrix brought those concepts to the big screen and the general public. It was a cool story with groundbreaking special effects and amazing audio, all of which made the DVD everyone's go to "home theater demo disc" for many years. And then we got two sequels which took the original through some weird twists and turns, moved the action underground, and in the end, killed its two lead characters. The end?
Nope. That brings us to Matrix: Resurrections, a follow-up to the original trilogy that isn't a reboot or a remake and yet seems very familiar. Once again (In one of many intentional parallels), we find Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) in the "real" world working behind a computer. Anderson is a famous game developer who developed a series of games called, what else, The Matrix. Anderson's psychiatrist (Neil Patrick Harris) has convinced Anderson that his "memories" of the Matrix are all in his mind, and regularly prescribes him blue pills (nudge nudge, wink wink) to keep him in check.
It isn't long before a new generation of cyberpunks come looking for "The One" to bust him out of his goo-pod, and soon we're right back to the first film, sort of. Like any good superhero movie, the film explains away the deaths and resurrections of Neo and Trinity while explaining why the new Morpheus and Agent Smith don't look like the old Morpheus and Agent Smith. And there's a new bad guy in town, someone who needs Neo and Trinity to remain alive and close, but not too close. There's a lot (a lot) of explaining about what has changed and who's fighting who, but eventually people will fight in the real world and people will fight in the simulated world and it'll all look very exciting.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I felt like 2/3 of the film's plot made no sense and things were being thrown in off the cuff just to prolong the film. In one scene toward the end, Trinity becomes more powerful than Neo. Why? How? Girl power, I guess. There's a lot of "if only we could get person x to location y then we could..." going on. Fortunately the disproportionally long middle act contains plen-ty of exposition.
The original Matrix was a great film, and the two movies that followed it were largely critiqued for taking the story in a new direction. Matrix: Resurrections does the opposite by taking us back to the beginning and throwing in reference after reference to the original (the psychiatrist's black cat's name is Deja Vu) in an attempt to feel nostalgic toward the original. It worked -- I'd rather re-watch the original than sit through this 2 1/2 hour homage to it.
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNpvWBuTfrc[/media]
When I first saw The Matrix back in 1999, it blew my mind. The idea of living in a simulation and moving between realms wasn't entirely original (Ghost in the Shell and Neuromancer heavily influenced the film), but The Matrix brought those concepts to the big screen and the general public. It was a cool story with groundbreaking special effects and amazing audio, all of which made the DVD everyone's go to "home theater demo disc" for many years. And then we got two sequels which took the original through some weird twists and turns, moved the action underground, and in the end, killed its two lead characters. The end?
Nope. That brings us to Matrix: Resurrections, a follow-up to the original trilogy that isn't a reboot or a remake and yet seems very familiar. Once again (In one of many intentional parallels), we find Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) in the "real" world working behind a computer. Anderson is a famous game developer who developed a series of games called, what else, The Matrix. Anderson's psychiatrist (Neil Patrick Harris) has convinced Anderson that his "memories" of the Matrix are all in his mind, and regularly prescribes him blue pills (nudge nudge, wink wink) to keep him in check.
It isn't long before a new generation of cyberpunks come looking for "The One" to bust him out of his goo-pod, and soon we're right back to the first film, sort of. Like any good superhero movie, the film explains away the deaths and resurrections of Neo and Trinity while explaining why the new Morpheus and Agent Smith don't look like the old Morpheus and Agent Smith. And there's a new bad guy in town, someone who needs Neo and Trinity to remain alive and close, but not too close. There's a lot (a lot) of explaining about what has changed and who's fighting who, but eventually people will fight in the real world and people will fight in the simulated world and it'll all look very exciting.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I felt like 2/3 of the film's plot made no sense and things were being thrown in off the cuff just to prolong the film. In one scene toward the end, Trinity becomes more powerful than Neo. Why? How? Girl power, I guess. There's a lot of "if only we could get person x to location y then we could..." going on. Fortunately the disproportionally long middle act contains plen-ty of exposition.
The original Matrix was a great film, and the two movies that followed it were largely critiqued for taking the story in a new direction. Matrix: Resurrections does the opposite by taking us back to the beginning and throwing in reference after reference to the original (the psychiatrist's black cat's name is Deja Vu) in an attempt to feel nostalgic toward the original. It worked -- I'd rather re-watch the original than sit through this 2 1/2 hour homage to it.