Matrix Resurrections

Originally posted as a mini-thread on Twitter. I may find the time to do a longer review.... one of these days

So. Matrix Resurrections. A mini-thread.

This is a quote is directly from the movie:

I'm sure you can understand why our beloved parent company Warner Brothers has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.

They informed me they are going to do it with or without us. And they made it clear they'll kill our contract if we don't cooperate

If you take it at face value and combine it with "do you think you ever had a choice" repeated throughout the film, then this explains the movie.

Otherwise it's just so, so, so bad. It's amazing how badly Lana Wachowski regressed in the art of movie making in the intervening 22 years.

Everything: casting, visuals, audio, story, characters, ... all has gone down the drain.

Every single character is miscast. None convey any sense of urgency, or gravitas, or the reason a character exists, or... The paltry replacements for iconic characters are just pathetic. The new Morpheus may have worked if he was given any time to actually be in the movie.

No matter how bad Matrix 2 and Matrix 3 were, they tried to thread new ground in terms of visuals. Later even Jupiter Ascending was at least pretty.

Matrix 4 is just... shoddy. There's not a single frame on the movie where you can go "wow, just look at this".

Where the original movies had clear dialog even amidst the most chaotic scenes, now it's the same muddled audio that has plagued Hollywood, where you can't understand half of what characters on screen are saying even in complete silence.

Klimek and Tykwer are talented composers, but in Matrix 4 the score is just... there? Of course, no one can even approach the genius of Don Davis, but you'd think there would be an attempt.

"White Rabbit" cover is amazing, but destroyed by sheer incompetence of cinematographers Wachowski/Massaccesi/Toll.

Sequence on repeat that convey the hamster wheel of existence and the Matrix? It took Ilya Naishuller 1 minute to convey that after the title card to "Nobody", whereas in Matrix Resurrections you'd be hard pressed to empathise between inaudible dialogue and fast cuts that don't maintain visual continuity

And then there's the action sequences.

Yes, Keanu Reeves and Carriq-Anne Moss are 57 and 54. This didn't stop John Wick from having fast-paced complex and clear action sequences. Matrix Resurrections? Shaky cam, quick cuts, none of the actors where even trained for action sequences...

And those that can do action scenes like Reeves? They either had nothing to do because the opponent had zero training (the dojo "fight") or had zero action direction (you can see actors just randomly stand and do nothing in the background in some scenes).

The Matrix cost $63 million top make in 1999. That's ~$105 million in today's money.

In 1999 for that money they produced astounding visual effects, employed unbelievable practical effects (do look it up on YouTube), trained actors for action, had proper audio and more.

Matrix Resurrections hasn't released their costs, but they are sure to be way more than $100 million.

All we got for that money? A simulatte.

There are seeds of a good movie in there somewhere.

Instead Lana Wachowski chose have things like a (thankfully short) shot of a tiny robot high-fiving one of the irrelevant characters, Transformers-style.

I forgot. The final action sequence? It’s Keanu Reeves doing magic with magic fingers.

That’s it. That’s the final action sequence.

Even Matrix 2 and 3 managed to convey a sense of danger even if Neo was God by that time. Here it’s “magic fingers save the day all day"