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From visionary filmmaker Lana Wachowski comes The Matrix Resurrections, the long-awaited fourth film in the ground-breaking franchise that redefined a genre. The new film reunites original stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in the iconic roles they made famous, Neo and Trinity. (Warner Bros. UK)
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An entertaining and surprisingly current coronavirus continuation. Reaction to the third Matrix will depend heavily on how much the viewers took the original trilogy, because the Wachowski sister keeps on making unhidden fun out of it from beginning to end. It mocks human sheep who want just to get on an enjoy life: why won’t the powers that be just leave them alone? It also ridicules the fact that this sequel was even being made, admitting that it was only for the money. Oh, and for love, love too. The special effects and action sequences are only mediocre, but the fights are at least quite easy to follow. All the revolutionary things that were so jaw-dropping in the first movie are now simply ordinary, expected, or else made fun of. The second half of this picture is rather headless chicken and a lot of things from it need explaining. I thought this movie lacked an overall message, but on the other hand I quite enjoyed watching this self-reflective or even cynical period to the series.
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The fourth film has a relatively interesting ratio in the cast of old familiar faces with newcomers to the franchise (Christina Ricci or Priyanka Chopra, for example). And this ratio decently represents the development of the entire Matrix film series. In an age of elevated cinematic sagas, Resurrections is a nostalgic genre blend with which it’s nice to experience a little of that viewer comfort. For now, the last film rehabilitated the whole tetralogy in my eyes and the lingering bad aftertaste of the second and third films slowly faded away.
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The new Matrix first promises a lot of interesting and new ideas, and potentially an original development of the main character and the whole world, only to turn into a slightly sad film in the middle by a director who is not capable of executing any of these ideas to the end, and only manages to create a not very imaginative variation of what we have already seen. What makes it worse is the whole film vehemently tries to present itself as something innovative, ironic, and daring. But that desire to mock Hollywood blockbusters and the obsession with sequels, while also wanting to be a part of it all and grab a piece of the box office cake, ultimately appears somewhat awkward.
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In my opinion, this movie is actually like last year's Mortal Kombat as it is such a "guilty pleasure", at least so far this year. As a standalone movie, the fourth Matrix movie does not stand up well, in my opinion, and few people will enjoy it without knowing certain realities and a sense of irony. Still, I was gloating in the cinema and marveled at how the studio could have greenlighted this screenplay. The way the whole thing went reminded me a bit of the third season of Twin Peaks, where David Lynch broke free from the chain and was meta in his own peculiar way. He left popular characters in hibernation for most of the time and managed to piss off half the audience to boot. It could quite possibly be summed up as follows: If you are one of those who wanted and looked forward to the fourth Matrix movie, you are probably going to be as disappointed as ever. If you are one of those who considered the original a borderline masterpiece and did not care for the sequel, you are going to get an entertaining and interesting experiment. I guess that is about all.
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The fourth Matrix comes with the ambition to show what has happened in all of the worlds since Neo’s seemingly last breath, i.e. not just the cinematic worlds inside The Matrix and the Matrix, but also the filmmaking and audience worlds outside of it. However, what the new film presents inadvertently proves to be much more thought-provoking than what it literally presents in particular instances of dialogue and scenes. Much has been made of how Lana, with her presumed absolute creative control, took the liberty of making a cheeky joke at the expense of Hollywood and its contemporary trends and pursuit of viewer comfort. Despite all of that, however, The Matrix Resurrections is not the rumoured anomaly, but in the end it largely remains merely another manifestation of the system. The greatest expression of creative freedom within the Matrix franchise remains the third instalment, which, in spite of everything, follows its own lighted path of techno-new age ethos and aesthetics in the style of The Watchtower. Conversely, the new Matrix notably ignores all of these levels. Instead of spirituality and philosophy, it dawdles over purely secular issues, and virtual ones at that. Whereas for some viewers this will be a confirmation of the fall of today’s world from the heights of thought into a self-indulgent presentation of its own would-be sophistication, from a step farther way, the effort to awaken that world may appear. Religionist interpreters of the original trilogy, according to whom its individual episodes correspond to the stages of awakening, contradiction and enlightenment, may see this as a step backward, whereby the franchise returns from nirvana to earthly matters, back to the marketing-heralded beginning. That may just be exactly what the world needs today. Not to accept an old messiah from a long-ago age, but to understand that the current stage of society is still not perfect, that true progress – technical and intellectual – never ends or, in the better case, we are still only at the beginning, only with a starting position that has shifted. It’s a similar case with everything that viewers expect from the new Matrix, at least in the sense of our expectations and, conversely, what Lana Wachowski is aiming for. Those who associate the three preceding instalments with innovation or progress in the area of action scenes will be disappointed or utterly pissed off by the confrontational ridicule that the fourth film offers. However, those who expect the Wachowskis’ work to go in new directions (through assimilation of the progress made by others before them) will not be disappointed. The Wachowskis have long been interested not in action scenes, but in the possibilities of narrative and the depiction of movement, and ideally the combination of both. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that The Matrix Resurrections makes very little use of Reeves’s impressive physical skills from years of working on the John Wick franchise. Some of the action scenes even feel completely haphazard. From the overall perspective, however, it can rather be said that they correspond to Neo’s gradual recollection of his abilities and it’s no longer about making the action an attraction, but they have already done that. The film is even more fascinating in the key dialogue scene and the variations thereof spread out over time and space, where the revolution in means of expression takes place. In many respects, the fourth Matrix is an even more inconsistent and, in its individual aspects, problematic work than the Wachowskis’ projects that immediately preceded it. But, again, it’s true that it offers something new, unseen before, fascinating and thought-provoking.
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