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In the Flesh: The Matrix Resurrections
🕑 Added 2021-12-28 01:40:34 +0000 UTCThe act of having a cake and the act of eating said cake are, at an existential level, famously and fundamentally at odds. It’s a narrative dilemma which has plagued thirty years of blockbuster action franchises, saddling the entire enterprise with the overinflated tension of debating whether it’s going to be a safe retread or, at the risk of alienating viewers who want only what they’ve seen before recreated in a slightly different key, a departure. The Matrix Resurrections tries to split the difference and in the process fumbles both possibilities, its inquisitive and uneasy first act calving into a sludgy, by-the-numbers second and third weighted down by interminable scenes of exposition. Neil Patrick Harris explains the story. Jada Pinkett Smith explains it. Then Jonathan Groff, doing what I sincerely hope is not his best Hugo Weaving impression, explains it again for good measure. The structure of the movie, we’re told again and again, is itself a commentary on the story within a story that is the Matrix itself, a yearning, endless separation from the beloved and familiar packaged and held in stasis to support a new generation of machine overlords.
There is, to director Lana Wachowski’s credit, some tension and meat to the film’s early attempts to grapple with the issue of whether the movie should exist at all. She skewers corporate culture’s heartlessness, winks at the financial incentive for Warner Bros to churn out another Matrix flick, even pokes fun at herself for kick-starting what might well lead to even more movies. Our guide through this netherworld of falsehood and reality, a natural update to the original film’s take on stagnant office work and compulsory conformity, is again Neo himself (Keanu Reeves, lion in winter), here reimagined as a tortured game designer brainwashed and trapped in a brand-new iteration of the titular Matrix as he pines for Tiffany/Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss, who has aged like some liquor no one who isn’t the pope even knows exists), an unhappily married woman drawn again and again to a coffee shop where it turns out the repressed chemistry between her and Neo is the juice that keeps the new Matrix pumping and the reason both of them were painstakingly rebuilt and slotted back into the virtual world.
The problem is that once we get through this intriguing premise, all that’s left is to experience The Matrix again, except this time there’s no Lawrence Fishburne or Hugo Weaving and the thrills and imagery are all twenty years old and recreated with sometimes limp and unconvincing CGI. At its best Resurrections has the kind of painterly beauty so many Wachowski joints display, a soft-edged visual style somewhere between noir and watercolor, but at its worst it’s far too close to the sludgy corporate grays of Disney’s last decade of filmmaking. Everything we see in the film’s agonizingly overlong second and third acts is just a reprocessed version of something from an earlier movie. A subterranean fight with the recast Agent Smith, present for unclear reasons and with none of Weaving’s force or intensity. Another kung fu sparring session with the recreated Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), but this time in a poorly CGI-ed waterbound dojo. More of the Merovingian’s (Lambert Wilson) creepy minions, except now they’re nondescript and undifferentiated clown-samurai rather than the iconic albino vampire twins from Reloaded. It’s a buffet of familiar dishes, all lukewarm and wilting under the heat lamps.
Comments
Jerna Van Vooren
It's funny. I really liked this film despite all its shortcomings that you listed (which are on point as always). I think it's because it fell neatly into what (or at least slightly below) I expected. I wasn't hoping for something good or bad, but something interesting that might or might not be a mess. Albeit that the mess is a bit too bland for my liking. I was also thinking about our (or at least mine) relationship with blockbusters and why we still keep it as some thing of value. The best films I've seen this year where mostly indie- and foreign films, and the worst were mainstream films. And this isn't even the best Matrix film, nor the Wachowskis'. So I wonder why I really liked this one so much. Is it because the main films we got this year were mostly garbage?
Gretchen Felker-Martin
yeah there was this gesture toward the idea of community as a real thing, but no follow through at all
Eve Harms
Astute as always. I found the beginning hilarious but then the rest was mushy and forgettable. I thought the idea that some of the squids/bots joined the side of the humans could have been interesting if explored, like the humans had to voluntarily sacrifice some of their energy to keep the renegades alive or something.
