The Matrix Ressurections

[zarius]

Watched this on the 22nd and remember liking it's gutso for being largely a 'protest song' against remake/reboot/rehash culture, while I think time will be kinder to it (it's definitely a film made for an audience of just the author, and the people who understand and appreciate her intent) but this is a sequel that has little rewatch value for the general public or lapsed fan, and it shows in the dismal box office.

It's perfectly fine though,  for something made by someone 'woke', it's barely even that. Neo isn't nerfed other than one line about robbing someone with bright blue hair of their agency, but the blue haired one is'nt seen as superior to him and is a trusty sidekick. The whole story is about how equal man and woman are and are very essential to the other, both half's come together as 'one',

It doesn't really have a 'climatic' fight scene, there's a bike chase with bodies littering the city and that's kind of it really. Everything else about the climax is talking.

[iank]

I can't say I'm a fan anyway. The first one felt like a cool half hour Twilight Zone idea artificially inflated to 2 hours, and I never bothered with the others.

[Deleted]

I confess I was somthing of a fan a long time ago. They were some of the big films when I was young. On rewatching the first holds up pretty well, though though some aspects are rather silly.

While the later two films had good ideas, the films are not as cleaver as they think they are. Important stuff goes unexplained at all, hinting that in reality no thought was really put into it, and some that are explained are just silly.

The entire concept of the One becomes continually silly and convoluted, as dose his relationship to the Matrix and the Machines. The biggest piss take being Neo having powers in the real world. Without any real life super powers, or machine implants what he's doing is functionally impossible the second you give any thought to it. Even the fact he is needed to keep some cycle going makes little sense, shorley the machines would just keep tweeking the Matrix until it runs perfectly. It feels like they keep trying to put these weird supernatural/spiritual element into parts of the film were they have no place in being given that outside of the Matrix nothing supernatural is show besides Neo. Their attempt to apply it to the Matrix also ring hollow when your realise that all anyone is doing is f*cking with the Matrix's code. All the hero avatars are in reality breaking the rules, Neo just happens to have the God Mode cheats hidden in his head. When looked at in this way all that 90s spiritual zen stuff just seems like a backward way of telling people your brain can mess with the Matrix code.

The best thing about the films is Agent Smith, probably on of my faviort movie antagonists.

Yeah so on rewatch it just doesn't do anything me these days and I'll likely not bother with the new one except by chance.

[Bernard Marx]

Jan 3, 2022 21:21:06 GMT @palaeoloxodon said:

The biggest piss take being Neo having powers in the real world. Without any real life super powers, or machine implants what he's doing is functionally impossible the second you give any thought to it. 

The third film absolutely botches any effort to explain that away either. It's introduced at the end of the second film out of the blue, and in a moment intended as an earth-shattering plot-twist, only for the third film to effectively say "Sod it- we can't be arsed to elaborate further on how this is possible, where it comes from or what impact it's supposed to have on Neo's respective development, so we'll pay lip service to it before dropping it entirely". What a mess.

I was a fan of these films as a kid, and the first one, as you say, largely holds up very well (despite some obviously dated 90s iconography and the odd silly moment). The second instalment has two very good individual set pieces (the Chateau sequence and the highway chase), but the actual script is noticeably incoherent and poorly structured. Myriad side-characters are haphazardly introduced, all caricatured and void of any interesting qualities, and the final act delves too far into pseudo-intellectual postering without really justifying it.

The third film, meanwhile, is comparable to The Phantom Menace. A good score, and one or two passable pieces of iconography, laden amidst a truly trite sequel which happens to be just as incoherent as the previous instalment, albeit considerably more dull and even more poorly structured. The protagonists of prior films are relegated to the background for the bulk of the film in order to make headway for said caricatures mentioned earlier, and the battle sequences on Zion are comparable to a Michael Bay film in terms of purpose or substance. 

The new one looks awful, to be honest. I thought the initial trailer was OK, primarily because of the swift editing in conjunction with Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" (not that trailers don't usually benefit from well-edited examples of foley sound anyway), although it looked visibly out of ideas, and what I've seen since has looked progressively worse. Even the gritty aesthetic of the previous films has been junked in favour of a nondescript and uncharacteristic palate, and even the set-pieces don't seem to inspire. Having since heard that it's laden with smart-arse meta-textual gags, despite not having a decent narrative to tell in its own right, it looks like it'll resemble a crap Moffat script. I could be wrong, but my expectations certainly aren't high. 

[henshin]

I saw it recently.

Overall, a dull waste of time, but I did enjoy it more than Revolutions.

The film does exactly what I predicted the film would do, as promised by its trailer. That's why i'm not angry. Instead, I walked away indifferent.
It literally is a waste of time because, not only was the previously trilogy entirely for nothing, but this film also is a waste of its own time since the saga is now (mostly) in the same place it was at the end of Revolutions, but with its two leading protagonists alive.

Things I did enjoy:
- Colour
- CGI (no, nothing new or mind blowing, but it did look really good. Far better than any of the latest Terminator or Jurassic franchise films).
- Meta humour
- Reeves and Moss were terrific

Despite that, a dud.

Making Resurrections as a rom-com is not so far-fetched, because we nearly received that film, and we should have!

Despite my dislike of Resurrections, the first hour is quite good. Yes, I enjoyed the meta-stuff.

How to make it a Rom-Com? Make it somewhere a cross between The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (hell, even cast Jim Carrey as Neo's therapist).

The idea being this:
- Thomas Anderson is reborn

- All his life, Thomas has been having these bizarre flashbacks and fantasies about a past life, along with having died

- Despite contributing to his manic depression, it has also been a significant driving force in his creativity as a computer programmer

- Over a simple coffee, he meets a woman whom he finds attractive and, oddly enough, is somehow familiar despite never having met her

- In the background, we see Bugs and the Zion crew try to "revive" memories into Neo, in effort to wake him up

- Unlike the previous trilogy, however, they are struggling; this version of Neo actually enjoys the fantasy. His career has reinvented itself, he's now dating a totally amazing woman with whom he has fallen in love. All of this makes it significantly difficult for Neo to be woken up

- His therapist, meanwhile, is elated that his patient has fallen in love to such an extent that he encourages Thomas to pursue the relationship AND continue with this new found burst of creativity in his career
- We see The Machines help facilitate this process as they are disguised as regular people who invite him to parties, after work drinks, and other social outings in an effort to further his love of the blue pill existence

- The Ending? After nearly 90 minutes of rom-com back and forth, along with various shenanigans to awake Neo, the very final scene is Morpheus offering Neo the option of the Red & Blue pill. Neo takes the Blue Pill, we see Thomas and his new girlfriend literally ride off into the sunset.

Not only would that be different, it would be fun, along with keeping us in the same place that we were at the end of Revolutions without being a 2.5 hour slamming of the reset switch that substantially consists of a clip show. In this version, we see our two heroes reunited, "living" happily ever after whilst the sacrifice we saw in the original trilogy is essentially in tact. Think of it as a film, and a love letter, to fans who want the option of a more "blue pilled" finale for Neo and Trinity.

Yes, it's the RTD version of The Matrix, but one that has a better chance of making half a billion at the box office; more than the actual dreck that was released.