 At first I thought it might be fun to structure this as one of those debates against myself, but then I realized that what I thought was inner conflict was really just confusion. When the first trailer for Oceans 8 dropped back in December of 2017, I remember seeing a tweet or something where some man compared its opening shot of Debbie Ocean having her whole conversation about parole to the opening shot of Steven Soderbergh's 2001 remake of Oceans 11 where Danny Ocean does the same. Now you can look at these two images and understand immediately why they were being compared. The older film setting is highly stylized and doesn't look like any place that would actually exist, let alone where a parole board might meet, but it's cool as hell and sets a tone for a film that is highly stylized and cool as hell. The new one, by contrast, is flat and boring. Realistic in every way that its predecessor was not. I believe the caption was something like, which of these movies would you rather watch? And I was conflicted. On the one hand, I sure do prefer Soderbergh's style, but also this wasn't terribly long after the whole ghostbusters but they're women bullshit and I couldn't tell if this was a genuine critique or if the man on the other side of that screen was just mad that another franchise was being like feminized or whatever because if you continue watching the trailer it is obvious that this opening shot is not really reflective of the movie as a whole. It sure has a much more grounded aesthetic but it's not actually a bunch of flatly lit rooms with no depth or visual interest. The film industry at large moved away from intensely stylized imagery and towards a form of naturalism that's not inherently bad. I would love to read some very smart person discuss how that happened beyond the obvious fact that digital sensors are so much more sensitive than film stock and thus allow for easier use of practical and natural lighting but I am sure that there's a broader societal reason and it's probably related to 9-11 somehow. That's not a joke, by the way. The almost-documentarian approach that Paul Greengrass brought to the later Bourne films and then to United 93 was a key inspiration for the aesthetic of Catherine Bigelow's best picture winner at the Hurt Locker which etc etc and is almost certainly tied up in this. Anyways I hadn't thought about that post in years but then I saw how The Matrix Resurrection called back to one of cinema's most iconic shots. I mean which of these movies would you rather watch? Hello by the way and welcome to the week air review. You can call me not conflicted but deeply unsure because today I am talking about The New Matrix. You all know that it's why you click the video whatever. The Matrix needs no introduction but perhaps my biases do even if they're not particularly interesting. I am a fan of all three of them to different extents. Sure the sequels drag a bit at times and even as a teenager I found the Architects dialogue childish but like I first saw these films on worn VHS tapes rented from Blockbuster and even in that condition the action sequences are incredible and there are numerous moments that stuck with me ever since and not just for cringe. That said I didn't fall into any sort of fandom. I just let it be a thing that I liked and would check in on every so often. So when the announcement came that there would be a Matrix 4 directed by Lana Wachowski in her first solo take on the universe nearly two decades after Revolutions I thought that can be fun. I've generally missed her more critically divisive projects but I know their reputations and so instead of going in with high expectations I went in with high interest. Like you don't go back to the Matrix without reason and indeed she didn't though it was pretty tragic inspiration. While grieving the death of her parents Wachowski found herself returning to Neo and Trinity and conceptualized a new story for them. She brought it to her sister Lily who didn't want to go back to that well and so teamed up with Sense 8 collaborators David Mitchell and Alexander Heyman instead and for its myriad faults the emotional core of this story of Neo and Trinity reuniting feels pretty rock solid and it is a testament to the franchise that she could so easily put those feelings into it. Honestly though the Matrix as both concept and media property is so mind bogglingly complex that it could really be used as a vehicle for meditations of life the universe or gosh damn anything. And to that point Resurrection feels like it contains more ideas than the other three films combined. It doesn't do anything with most of these ideas but it sure does let you know that they're there. Then again some overstuffiness is perhaps inevitable given that this film is forced to acknowledge the decades of discourse that followed its predecessors and therefore must include many of those same ideas that those films raised so that the discourse around them can be acknowledged. And it do mean forced. The original Matrix trilogy took itself perhaps a little too seriously but that shit doesn't fly in 2021. Everything needs to have at least a hint of self-awareness and Resurrections is no exception. But there are different ways to handle it. On the one side you have got big blockbuster jokie jokes as exemplified by literally everything Ryan Reynolds does these days. Pope fun at a movie's construction and limitations because if you comment on how weird a choice is then you don't have to be bothered with making a better one. You can just do the lazy thing make a joke about it and then we'll all just accept it. And I say we because I am not above this. I really like the Deadpool movies sorry not sorry. But it is unfortunate that blockbusters have forgotten that there are other ways to look inward. The most interesting that I've seen recently is Guy Young Jung's 2019 film Heart. At first it seems like a regular old vanity project starring its writer-director telling the story of a woman having a fling with a married man that all of a sudden shifts into said writer-director no longer playing this character who turns out to have actually been herself in the fling but now she's playing herself as a filmmaker trying to get prepped for this film she's making about the time she had a fling. It's a wild turn that doesn't totally work for me but it's definitely more interesting than anything Hong Seong Soo has ever made. Yes all of that was a setup to remind everyone that this is actually a Hong Seong Soo hate channel. Like Heart, Resurrections uses self-awareness as a narrative device rather than just a crutch. But it also does so for comedic effect and so a better point of comparison would actually be Wes Craven's Scream 2. Heck, the movie even has an equivalent to that film's amazing stab opener as we see the beginning of the first Matrix we created in Resurrections while a pair of new characters who have injected themselves into this old code comment on what they and we are seeing. It is strange and silly but it's appropriate because the Matrix as we know it exists in the Matrix as the characters of the Matrix Resurrections know it. In the wake of Agent Smith's assimilation and then destruction of the sixth Matrix the architect has been replaced by someone who decided for funsies to include his predecessor's work as a foundational text. In this new Matrix the Matrix trilogy of films is a trilogy of video games still called The Matrix designed by one Thomas Anderson. They were milestones in their genre and we hear about the influence they've had on people over and over again. At one point we are even shown footage of the games which is literally just a scene from the original film. All of this allows Wachowski and Ko to vent about the state of the industry and fan bases and all of that good stuff. There are multiple points where characters literally stop what they're doing to discuss series theories and like if you're not the direct target of all of this it's pretty funny. That said there's also a lot of old footage that isn't being projected in universe and is instead meant for us the audience and I didn't enjoy that so much. Periodically Neo's past intrudes on his present and we'll get like a quick cutaway that conveniently reminds folks who haven't seen the originals in a while how this moment or that character calls back but that blade cuts both ways. I've never understood the love that other critics have for David Zellner's 2014 film Kumiko the Treasure Hunter. A film about a young Japanese woman who sees the Coen Brothers 1996 classic Fargo believes the opening text claiming that it's a true story and then travels halfway around the world to find the treasure that she believes is still hanging out by the side of the road. It is a fun premise and is apparently based on a kind of depressing urban legend but none of that really matters because the movie's not as good as Fargo and constantly throws that in your face by having the title character watch scenes from Fargo and every time she did so I just kept wanting Fargo to keep playing and for the rest of the movie I was actually watching to stop. Obviously you're going to think about The Matrix when you watch a sequel to The Matrix but it's kind of abstract until you are literally shown these images from your childhood or wherever and you're like huh I wish I was watching that one you know because it's a better movie and it's not like I want resurrections to be The Matrix again but it doesn't need to highlight its own relative inadequacies so blatantly. Bring it back to that comparison from before the moment where a man named Morpheus is holding up two pills and telling a man named Thomas Anderson to choose. You see Morpheus is back but it's not the Morpheus we know and love in fact he is a program formed from the code of both that Morpheus and Agent Smith as created by Thomas Anderson for the game The Matrix who has been hidden away in a modal before being pulled out of The Matrix entirely by a human into some like machinist nanobot form or something. I don't know y'all there's a lot more bullshit techno babble in this one where they attempt to explain how things work in ways that help nothing and hurt everything. Also I'm not a programmer but modal is definitely not the right word to describe interactive recreation of the beginning of The Matrix. Anyways back in The Matrix, new Morpheus, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, ambushes Thomas Anderson in his office bathroom while wearing a fly-as-fuck yellow suit. He says who he is but doesn't bother explaining much beyond that because he feels there's no need to. He doesn't even offer a choice, only holding up a red pill that not yet Neo wants nothing to do with and so runs away. The lesson is that being Morpheus isn't enough he must evoke Morpheus. And so Thomas Anderson is introduced to Bugs, a woman with blue hair, cool sunglasses, and a white rabbit tattoo that he must follow to a place he doesn't exactly know but comes close enough where he has walked through a ripped projection screen showing the footage that I mentioned before, Neo's first meeting with the old Morpheus. Our new Morpheus is here again now dressed in a familiar style and sitting in a familiar armchair as that classic scene plays out silently behind him. Bugs explains, after our first contact went so badly we thought elements from your past might help ease you into the present. Morpheus adds, nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia. Callbacks to things that we all like are not inherently cynical, but they so rarely feel genuine these days. Our rose-tinted glasses hide the fact that the industry has been blood-soaked by nostalgia weaponized by media conglomerates. Obviously these big budget trips down memory lane like the latest Ghostbusters and the live-action adaptation of Into the Spiderverse. Joking aside, there is a lot of good stuff in Spider-Man No Way Home and almost none of it has to do with Disney, which is pretty terrible considering Disney owns fucking everything now. Don't want you to think about how they are tugging at your heartstrings, they just want you to cheer and laugh and maybe even say the lines that you've heard so many times along with the people on screen. They'll never confront you with any of this though. They have nothing to say about nostalgia, they just want you to bathe in it, not resurrections. This movie shoves the cynicism of its own existence into your face, that's why the Matrix trilogy is a part of it, and why there is a conversation about how Warner Bros wants to make another entry into the Matrix franchise and if its creators want any say they've got to be actively involved. Let's be real, there is no way that Warner Bros executives weren't champing at the bit to smash open that green tinted piggy bank and see what was inside. And it makes you wonder what sort of pressure there had been to make a new Matrix film before Lana Wachowski actually came up with one. A scene where designers tried to suss out what made the series so groundbreaking by listing its most superficial aspects feels a little too real. And sure, this film includes plenty of callbacks, but many of them are kneecapped by a script that is indebted to but doesn't really seem all that interested in its own past. I am genuinely curious how many people started quoting Old Morpheus alongside the new one only to be shut down when he doesn't bother finishing the thoughts. Time is always against us, etc, etc. No one can be told what the Matrix is, blah blah blah. It's very 2021. But why shouldn't it be? When it all comes down to it, this movie feels like a modern blockbuster. Unfortunately, it fights like one too, which is probably the most frustrating aspect of the entire thing for me. The Matrix trilogy is held up as a pinnacle of action filmmaking for a reason. The decision to bring Yuan Wu Ping from Hong Kong and teach these American actors kung fu and all of that resulted in fight scenes that are still amazing to watch. And ones that you might just pull up on YouTube randomly because they're that cool. I will never just pull up a fight scene from the Matrix resurrections. And that's bizarre because the martial arts stunt coordinator Jonathan Husebio is a part of 8711, which is the stunt house co-owned by OG Neo stunt double Chad Stahelski. Like, is it the John Wick guys? Inventive actioning featuring Keanu Reeves put them on the fucking map. So how did the Matrix resurrections end up being so bland? Is the problem that other guys were involved like the lead fight choreographer is not actually part of 8711, but rather someone who worked with Wachowski on Sense 8? Was he the one who decided to let Jonathan Groff throw his own punches? Because in a movie full of weird choices, that is honestly one of the weirdest. I have loved Groff as a performer ever since I saw him star in Hair at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park back in 2008, but let's be real, dude can't throw a punch to save his life. There are so many weird choices though. Thinking about Jonathan Groff, he and Ya Ya Abdul Mateen II are asked to follow in the footsteps of truly iconic performances. And that just kind of sucks for them, especially because their characters in this movie are fundamentally confusing. As I alluded to, Morpheus first appeared as an agent called Smith, but with another presence inside of him. Which is a potentially fascinating choice, but one that goes literally fucking nowhere. Why introduce the idea of Morpheus Smith when Smith is actually just going to show up as his own agent of chaos with motivations I never once could even pretend I understood? Is all of that just another fuck you to the fans? Or is it an embodiment of the way that all of these modern sequels and reboots shoehorn in crowd-pleasing characters who serve no actual narrative purpose and are just there to tickle audience pleasure centers? I don't know. So much of this movie feels deeply unmotivated, like its characters are going through the motions required of them by the existence of the movie that they're in and not much else. Is that intentional? I thought that the annoying glitch effects that made me literally google are the glitches in the Matrix 4 part of the movie would go away when Neo exited the Matrix, but they didn't. So what do they mean? Clearly it has to do with Trinity, but Wachowski is playing 4D chess here, and I don't know why. Cause like, she's here for this central relationship, right? That's what brought her back to the series, and it is what clearly has the most feeling behind it. And Neo, once he realizes that Trinity is alive but captive again, becomes singularly focused on freeing her to the detriment of all of the other stuff that's been set up. And it makes perfect character sense. This is the guy who had to choose between humanity and love, and he chose love. And then when he thought he lost her forever after helping humanity and then himself forever, he finds out he has a chance to be with her again, why would he care about anything else? But when your protagonist isn't interested in all of these other mysteries that the film is presenting, it just adds to the confusion. We as audience members take cues from the characters. If their focus is elsewhere, it really seems like our focus should be too, right? Everything else that's going on feels like a distraction because as far as Neo is concerned, it is. Is that true for Wachowski too? She wanted to tell the story of Neo in Trinity, but to do that she had to wade through nearly 20 years of bullshit. And she did, begrudgingly and cynically, all of the things she had to do to make an action blockbuster in 2021. And maybe she used Neo to let us know what was really important to her and made everything else so weird and confusing that audiences wouldn't even bother trying to understand it so they could just focus on what matters. Maybe all of that stuff I didn't like was part of some masterful subversion. Or maybe, just maybe, I'm overthinking all of that and the truth is that the Matrix Resurrection is simply not very good. I will let you decide which is which. Thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I Am the Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great. If you want to see more, subscribe. There's a ton of stuff happening next month. I'm posting about that shortly. So yeah, that'll be fun. I don't know. Hope to see you then.