The Matrix Resurrections - Where to Even Begin

Well at the risk of turning into a movie site, here’s a post about The Matrix 4. Hold on to your butts!

A few things:

1. I’ve not written anything lately. Life has gotten the better of me and I’m trying to change that. So if I seem a bit rusty, that’s why.

2. This post is FULL OF SPOILERS. Thank you for the clicks but turn away now if you’ve not seen this movie yet and don’t want to read what I have to say. I’ve written this with the assumption that you’ve seen the movie though it’s an amusing read regardless if you've seen the movie or have the desire to.

3. This is a new and innovative Choose-Your-Own-Adventure post. Here’s how it works. After the introduction, I’m going to start the post by listing off what I felt the Matrix 4 got right—positive stuff that will make fans of the franchise feel all warm and fuzzy inside, as they stew in their human-pod, jacked-in to the illusion of truth…

   And after all the unicorns and rainbows, I am going to lay out the train-wreck that was The Matrix 4. So if you’re into controversy then by all means choose the train-wreck segment first, then come back and read the positive, massage-parlour with all it’s incense and body oils segment. And if you need to ease into your hate-read of your favourite movie by hearing some good points, that will abruptly go into a brutal casting of stones, then start up at the top. Choose Your Own Adventure. Got it? Good.

Introduction:

The Matrix Resurrections, or the Matrix 4, or M4—if you want to get all Mission Impossible about it, is a continuation of the story of [Paul] Thomas Anderson, aka NEO, aka The One, aka “Ted”, on his Kung-Fu quest to save humanity from the great lie that is the un-tellable…<pause for dramatic effect> …Matrix. This time around, Tommy A is an oblivious video game designer, completely unaware of his adventures in the past three movies, due to memory suppression helped on by his therapists and The Machines—the primary antagonists of the franchise. But for all their hyper-intelligent machine ways, they foolishly allowed Anderson Thomas 360 to design the very game based on his real-life adventures. So when A. Tommy Vercetti starts remembering who he was, it should come as no surprise to anyone. Enter Trinity, I mean Tiffany, and hilarity ensues.

The Fuzzy Good Stuff

These are the things I really liked about M4 Resurrections:

A Young New Cast

Believe it or not I liked the new crew, the young cast of Redpills who somehow figure out who Tommy Two-Guns is, helping him once again get out of the Matrix. This reminded me of my exploits back in The Matrix Online, back in good-ole 2005. I was fresh out of college and MMORPGs were new and janky. The game worked off the premise of the end of the third and presumably final movie: The Truce that Neo had brokered with the Machines was in effect, and Redpills were allowed to leave the Matrix for their own adventures. The players in the game were those Redpills and many an adventure was had. For all the snark and sarcasm of this post I truly have many fond memories of my time playing MXO, and the friends I made both In and Out of Character. Much of what I’m writing now has its roots in those RP sessions with fellow redpills. And the new cast is totally in line with that time of my video game life. They felt fresh, new and exciting. It was unfortunate they were overshadowed by the great and mighty ReHash Machine.

So without getting into the whole backstory of the game, the movie’s young cast was a great callback for MXO fans. It showed that the Truce was still in place. That Redpills were still active and that other adventures not centred around Neo, Trinity, etc had the potential for happening.

Their style, though still very leathery and goth-lite, had more of an upbeat edge, between the bright hair, the bright suits and the intricate ink-work.

The young cast and their style was a reflection of how different the Matrix had become. Keep in mind, the Matrix of the previous movies, up until the very end of Matrix 3, didn’t have a sun. Daytime was a white sky over a green filter. Sunlight only came from the program, Sati, who Neo had helped in M3.

I would have liked to see more of the younger cast, but we’ll get to that in the Negative Nancy section of the post.

The Tech

Both the movie tech and the tech within the movie were amazing. The Matrix came out in 1999. I was a young adult back then, in college, fresh out of High School. The tech they used back then was ground-braking. What we have now is so much better and so overused that we don’t even realise that the majority of what we see on the screen is computer generated. Visually, the scenes both in and out of the Matrix were amazing, clean and awesome to behold. I would have sat through two hours of Real World machine vs machine fights with no story just to see the visual mayhem. Those special effects folks really did a good job.

Tech in the universe of the movie brought in elements from The Animatrix, specifically Matriculated. In the pre-truce setting of the animated short, humans ‘trick’ the Machines into joining the cause to fight other machines. The result is a band of redpills who work together with machines.

In the post-Truce era, machines, like humans have the free-will to not be subjects of the system. So we see the redpills and the machines working side-by-side for their own purposes. Programs, not part of the system have also joined the cause, and manifest themselves in the real world using nano-tech and lots of cool grey bubbles that take the shape of humans, though I could very easily see them as dragons or hobbits or talking cars, like from that cars movie…called, Cars.

Because of the Truce, we get to see a human city that isn’t underground and isn’t called Zion. There’s an artificial sun, but everyone still seems to dress in homeless-chic.

"There are some things in this world… that will never change."

…like the way we dress in the real world.

A New Generation of Programs and Callbacks that Worked—as Opposed to ALL the Callbacks that Didn’t.

The Purge. The Matrix was rebooted sometime after the Truce and before the start of the M4Rez. During this time a lot of old-movie baggage was thrown out like yesterdays jam—the Oracle, the Architect, Morpheus, and Zion. There were two purges—one carried out in the Matrix by the Machines, and another by humans due to their own stubborn need to live in the past. Morpheus is not with us in this new movie because he, and much of Zion’s hierarchy couldn’t make the transition from war to peace. It was important to have this moment in the movie because it made Morpheus less of an icon and more of a human. His hubris was that he couldn’t let go when peace had finally been achieved. Taking Morpheus and Zion out of the equation had the potential of moving forward and not getting stuck in the past. It could have closed the door on an endless cycle of rehashing what happened in the previous movies.

From a story-telling standpoint it was good to not make a movie that was full of callbacks to the original trilogy. Unfortunately, the movie couldn’t get out of its own damn way in that regard. More on that later.

The Merovingian. I was so happy to see that he did not get purged. It goes to show just how powerful a program he is, who was able to survive such an ordeal. And that he’s reduced to a raving lunatic shows that even survival did not come without a price. That he left the movie without getting judo-chopped by Neo makes me think that there’s a story in the works…if only in my dreams.

Neil Patrick Harris as Architect 2.0 was great. He’s known as the Analyst and masquerade as Ander & Son’s shrink, and I thought he was a lot more animated than the dry Architect. His reason for being such a heavy hitter in the Machine hierarchy reminded me of a reverse Monsters Inc. “We can get more energy from you humans if we scare and manipulate the shit out of you, rather then just let you live your lives.”

That’s about it for what I liked. Onward to infamy and queue up the nerd-rage!

Train-Wreck Time, Kids!

In the echoing words of Our Lord and Saviour, Barack Obama—let me be clear: I am a huge Matrix fan. I watch the Trilogy on the regular and I went through great lengths to acquire a FanEdit of M2&M3 that is truly the best telling of those two movies. My love for the franchise is littered throughout this site and I’ll refute anyone who tries to say that my love for The Matrix is nothing but pure, and consensual and made from the first snowfall in the North Pole.

That being said…

What the ever-loving fuck was wrong with this movie?

Hard as it is to consider, as a fan I really didn’t want another Matrix movie. In this climate of reboots I knew it would’t be genuine. In the movie there is this out-of-place meta-commentary that happens during a series of game-dev meetings, which sums this sentiment up nicely—Warner Bros. wanted a sequel and the creatives did not. But Hollywood Legal eventually got their way. So here we have hot-garbage on a 190 million dollar budget. Money well spent!

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

Agent Smith

After all these years, to be going back to where it started... back to the Matrix.

Agent Smith is back and he’s young and is Tom AnderNeo’s boss? What? No. The whole point of the Truce was that Smith had gotten so powerful that The Machines needed Neo to stop him. And stop him he did. That Smith is back in M4 is moronic. It completely nullifies the Truce and lessens Neo's importance to the Machines. And it seemed like he was only meant to be there to fill time and create a big reveal that was so utterly unnecessary. And then he comes back at the end to suddenly be a good guy who helps Neo and Trinity escape, with literally no explanation as to why. Really movie?!?!

At some point after the first movie, the creative minds behind the franchise decided that it just had to be Smith—there couldn’t be another bad guy. And the Smith-arch worked and was played out in the first three movies. To bring him back made me tired and further enforces the idea of the movie industry being unwilling to take risks. And because they couldn’t decide who was the big baddie, Smith or the Analyst, it all fell flat at the end. Though they made it abundantly clear who I should be rooting for, they left it vague as to who I should be rooting against. The entire arch collapsed into absurdity when Smith turned face. It truly was a bad pro-wrestling angle, again, on a 190 million digital crypto budget of Monopoly Mario Coins.

And speaking of Smith—while we’re still on the subject—what was the deal with Morpheus-Smith program?

Guys, seriously, I’m Morpheus…only I’m not…or something.

Subconsciously, Anderson T. Chesterton the Third, created this fail-safe designed specifically to get him out of the Matrix in case something like this were to happen. And yet, we see an Anderson & Thomas who is so far removed from his past life that when it’s literally staring him in the face in the form of a video game, he has no idea. Don’t get me wrong, the Morpheus program was cool and did a great job at rounding out the cast of redpills, but his backstory sucked and was just thrown at us in the first five minutes of the movie. One second he thinks he’s Agent Smith and the next after this bizarro internal life-reevaluation, he suddenly thinks he’s Cowboy Curtis.

Callbacks: Dude, the movie opens up with a re-shoot of the opening to The Matrix. And it’s lame. I’m sorry, but it is. And the info dump that follows was too much for the start of the freaking movie. And speaking of re-shoots, what the hell was with all the footage from the previous movies used not as flashbacks but as video game content for the video game T. A. The One created. Why? Just why?

Don't even get me started on the rehash of the Dojo scene and the terrible fight sequences peppered throughout the film. This was a franchise built on westernised Kung Fu. What M4 gave us was a geriatric Hulk Hogan and Ric Flare slapping each other in a lackluster main event.

Trinity and Neo

I love Reeves and Moss, but…

…I saw tired actors working in an industry hell-bent on reboots …

I love Reeves and Moss, both professionally and sexually. I think Keanu is a great actor, I think he’s a wonderful human being. I will binge-watch all of his movies including A Walk in the Clouds and Point Break. But damnit I really didn’t want to see an old Neo in another Matrix movie. When I saw the stills for Bill and Ted Face the Music, I saw tired actors working in an industry hell-bent on reboots, an industry too afraid to take chances on something new. Tired Neo is a reflection of a stale and sad Hollywood, which is ironic because in 1999 The Matrix was a movie hailed for innovation, taking chances and doing something new while telling an original story. M4 with Reeves and Moss just felt tired to me. And I don’t want that to sound like a knock on them. I’m really glad to see the two of them in movies, just not movies like the Matrix, where the characters are meant to be an idealised self, video game characters come-to-life. No one plays video games to play as their mom or an old man. It just doesn’t happen.

Here’s a radical thought: Make a Matrix movie with a cast of young redpills where there’s no Neo or Trinity. Have it set, oh I don’t know, in the Matrix, and the antagonist is not a Machine Agent that goes rogue, but some other entity—maybe a rouge human captain that’s trying to bring down the Matrix at the expense of so many lost lives—maybe a sentient program that creates a religious following based on the ‘teachings’ of The One—maybe a really evil rubber ducky that has decided it no longer wants to be a ducky anymore.

Any of those ideas would have been better than the rehash we got. Personally I’m liking the duck idea the best.

Let’s not forget the elephant in the room here. Since The Matrix, the Wachowski’s have historically made terrible movies. So I went into M4 with no expectations whatsoever—the same way I went into Ant Man. But unlike Ant Man, the expectation needle did not rise much above the first big line. There was a lot of great potential and ideas here, but the execution was off, and it relied too much on what had come before. The risk-takers of 1999 had been replaced by the industry hacks of today.

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