SPOILER ALERT
This is my review of The Matrix: Resurrections, so if you haven’t seen it, and plan on seeing it, the next sentence/rating is my shorthand review, and don’t read anything below that. @dt79 I don’t know if you’ll read my review or not, but you should watch the movie, I think you’d give a hilarious review of it as well.
The Matrix: Resurrections was a dismal sequel and a disastrous finale to a series that could have began and ended 21 years ago. 2.5/10.
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The 2.5 points that this movie garnered to raise its rating from a deserved 0 to the generous 2.5 I bestowed on it is based solely on the neat, repackaged idea of Neo reliving his life in the Matrix as a blue pill-er. I’m serious – that’s a great idea. The execution, on the other hand, is almost indescribably bad. I honestly don’t know where to start, but I guess we could kick this off with Keanu’s performance. It was abysmal, and yet it’s hard to tell if it’s anything to do with Keanu, strangely enough. He’s notoriously hard-working and skilled, but anyone who’s seen enough of his movies knows that he’s basically always just Keanu, and the story or the mood usually fits him perfectly. From Bill and Ted to Constantine, when a movie is built properly around Keanu, it all runs smoothly.
It doesn’t, here. Every single line sounds forced. It was difficult to watch at times, with how bad it was. The movie felt so forced that even Keanu couldn’t keep up. But wait, you say – if the dialogue is poor and Keanu can’t keep up, then doesn’t he at least kick ass with glorious CGI and choreography that suggest that we’re nearly a quarter century out from the CGI and choreography that captured the minds of the audience so long ago? I mean, that’s what Keanu DOES, right? John Wick and all that? Sure, it’s what Keanu does – just not in this movie. He’s a force field. He stops an absolute crap ton of bullets. Not like the first movie – I mean thousands, maybe even a million plus bullets. He can only redirect a rocket, which seems like less of a big deal than stopping a minigun on a chopper, but it’s still something. Of course, he can’t fly anymore, he can only do these totally normal things. OTHER people fight, but the fight scenes suck, so hard. They bring back a ton of the old-school moves that you remember from the original movies, but none of it feels organic and it’s all a jumbled mess.
The next thing to touch on is the real world. Jada Pinkett Smith looks ridiculous. I couldn’t put my finger on what she looked like until I read something on reddit describing her as Jack Sparrow’s grandmother, and that’s exactly what she looked like. She’s not bad or anything in the role she was given, but she just looks…dumb. Not as dumb, of course, as her friendly sentinel friends that look like giant Pokemon. No, I’m not making this up, if you’re reading this without having seen the movie, she has robot Pokemon friends that are friendly, but speak robot beep-speak instead of something else, like fucking English, because we already know the robots in this series speak it better than I do.
Gosh, there’s so much more, but I would need to watch the movie again to go more in-depth about other scenes, so we’ll just hit on the big picture of the movie – the point that Lana Wachowski was trying to make about Neo, and Trinity, and the Matrix, and according to @ins, about the left-wing propaganda machine:
SPOILER ALERT AGAIN:
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Trinity is the One. She’s the one who can fly. She’s the one who stops Neo from falling. She’s the one who, along with Neo, at the end of the movie, puts on sunglasses in her trenchcoat while Neo stands near her, putting on his sunglasses in HIS trenchcoat, and they fly away HOLDING HANDS (no fucking joke, again) to a brass horns cover of RATM’s “Wake Up” that is so fucking laughably bad that I hope whoever wrote that song is driven out of the music industry for the rest of their miserable lives.
Again, according to the guy who brought my attention to this, apparently that’s Lana Wachowski’s realization that the left wing propaganda machine is bad? OR, since again, both Lana and Lilly have talked about the Matrix now being about trans identity, it’s a metaphor for a guy realizing that the girl inside of him was the one who would give him, and ultimately her, the power to be all she could be. That’s the much more obvious metaphor for the movie, and it’s fucking lame. How did this come about? Well, a bunch of fans of the movie came up with a conspiracy theory that the Matrix was about trans identity years ago, and tied it in with the red pill, since estrogen pills in the ‘90s were red. This is just my opinion, but it seems to ME like Lana and Lilly, or Larry and Andy, whoever they identified as when they jumped on this, liked this idea, convinced themselves that that’s what the Matrix movies had been about all along, and then created this disaster of a movie to ram that narrative down our throats. That conspiracy theory, in my opinion, is as dumb as the alt-right red-pill conspiracy theory on the other side of the aisle.
Let’s be clear – I have absolutely nothing against any trans person, and I don’t give a crap who Lana and Lilly identify as, when they did it, how they did it, or anything like that. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But when you watch the movie, and see Neo and Trinity flying away holding fucking hands, and the climax of the movie talks about Neo “needing to realize who he was to become the hero he could be”, it’s just so not clever at all – yes, Lana may have needed to realize who she was to be the person she always knew she could be, but I flat out refuse to believe the original Matrix, or even the 2 after it, had anything to do with that.
I have a my own take: Lana Wachowski is full of crap, and if Neo needs Trinity to be the one, then Lana needs Lilly, because her first installation of this series without her sister was horrible, and it made Revolutions look like a fucking masterpiece. The 3 movies were never about trans identity. That’s a conspiracy theory that they both have convinced themselves since reading about it that it must have been what they subconsciously made the movies about, it was a beautifully repackaged Allegory of the Cave with commentary on corporate slavery, and it was APOLITICAL, so however you choose to interpret this dumpster fire, if you agree it has political undertones then it’s a failure, no matter what side you believe it to be on. Again, that’s my take – the movie was clearly about everything she said it was going to be about in the lead-up, I just reject the idea that any of that crap applies to any of the previous 3 movies, ESPECIALLY the first.
I’m now off to watch the original Matrix to wash the taste of that piece of shit out of my mouth.