Dear Hollywood, Just Stop, Please.
The Matrix Resurrections, Warner Bros. (2021), Photo from IGN.com
By C.A. Ramirez
Bad meat or really good cheese, if The Matrix Resurrections had an odor- it would be somewhere between those two putrid scents. I have a good mind to inquire about Lana Wachowski's inspiration for this “interpretation” of the Matrix canon, as I’m worried an immediate family member was kidnapped. That is the only explanation I will begin to entertain. Kidnappers stole a family member, and the ransom was for Wachowski to shit all over the Matrix Trilogy by producing a remarkably bland re-boot. Otherwise, we can no longer ignore the sad truth that the Pandemic laid bare: Hollywood is out of ideas.
There is no possible way I can spoil this movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it because it doesn’t make sense. Telling people who are waiting in line to see The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader is Luke’s father as you leave the auditorium is how you ruin a great movie by being a fantastic ass, but I couldn’t do that with The Matrix Resurrections even if I tried. I can’t ruin it for you because I can’t explain it to you. Worst of all, none of it was entertaining because throughout the entirety of the film, we’re peppered with constant flashbacks and cutaway shots of the original trilogy. It’s as if the writers wrote a script that was chopped to bits, and in order to fill it up, they simply shot a bunch of sequences that were reminiscent of the events that took place in the trilogy, but slightly different. Every scene is put on nostalgia crutches and can’t stand on its own two feet for even a minute of screen time. Action sequences are half-baked regurgitations of the intense combat we witnessed in the first and second films with the majority of the third being used as a callback to make sure the audience doesn’t mistake Niobe for a talking prune, which begs the question: why did a movie with a 150 million dollar budget have such bad effects (and makeup)?
A total and complete disaster is the only way I can sum up The Matrix Resurrections, as it desperately tries to take one of the most beloved cyberpunk franchises of the millennia and turn it into a love story. I don’t know if writers Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksandar Hemon were ever told this, but no one cared about Neo’s relationship with Trinity back then, so why should we care about it now? It was NOT the center of the trilogy. It was a mechanism. A means to an end. The trilogy was always about ‘one’ character, Neo. We first met him as a disillusioned programmer/hacker, leading a double life while he tirelessly searched for Morpheus and the Matrix. We didn’t know what was wrong with their world as the audience, but we knew Neo did, and we had to root for him in order to understand what the Matrix actually was, a prison for your mind. Resurrections is so convoluted in its story that I cannot believe it was written by any Wachowski unless under duress.
They are an iconic duo, but The Matirx isn’t a love story. Photo from Complex.com
The fight scenes are jarring and filled with weird shaky cam moments that make it hard to track who is attacking whom. When fights break out, it's like a flash mob springing out in song and dance in the middle of a mall food court. Everyone starts moving in all different directions, and the camera pulls back for a moment before it rockets to oddly angled close-ups, obscuring the scope of the action taking place and leaving it lackluster and without any weight behind the punches the actors throw. The choreography of the first Matrix film is far superior and much more realistic looking when compared to Resurrections, and that is an absolute crime. Films like John Wick have fantastic fight choreography, and I would wager that their budget paled in comparison to this Titanic Title and still, The Matrix Resurrections falters on one of its bedrock foundations – dynamic fight scenes. For shame, I was not excited or wowed by a single action sequence, although the scene where The Analyst bombards Neo and Trinity with humans throwing themselves out of high-rise buildings was impressive…until I realized it was completely stolen. The same idea is shown to us in Netflix’s Castlevania series when the Magician begins hurling enslaved people like cannon fodder at Isaac and his army of forsaken demons.
Time travel needs to be invented in my lifetime, so I can go back and smash my Wi-Fi with a Louisville Slugger. The Matrix Resurrections introduces us to a flurry of characters and situations that never hang around long enough for the audience to care about. There was a blonde-haired ally with a Swedish accent that appeared out of nowhere towards the end of the film, and I could not find him anywhere else in the movie. I tried to place him in earlier shots, and it seems it was a character named “Shepard'', but his accent is totally different between his role in the middle of the film and his appearance in the end. That stupid hiccup was more fun to unravel than the movie’s plot, which is nothing more than everyone needs to rush to save a chosen one or the whole system will go down…again. This is a significant problem for the film; its obsession with Deja-vu as some sort of ham-handed explanation for the instability of the current Matrix simulation. The problem doesn’t matter because the solution is that Neo and Trinity must be brought together, again. I saw this same movie twenty years ago, except it was good in 1999.
The Matrix Resurrections is pure, unadulterated garbage. Keanu Reeves had more of a pulse as Johnny Silverhand in CyberPunk 2077 than he does in this ridiculous reboot. On top of that heap of trash, the credits roll to one of the absolute worst renditions of Rage Against the Machine’s iconic song, “Wake Up”, by a band called, Brass Against. Listen below and decide for yourself. I honestly don’t know which is worse, the movie or the song, but I know for certain that I will never play either willingly again.
