The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

[Brian G Turner]

Watched it now - mostly enjoyable. The main issues for me is that the fight scenes were a little boring - came on in a predictable way but were too fast to really see what was going on; and was surprised to see a few tired old skool stunts. Also the story didn't really make sense to me -

Spoiler

I didn't understand Smith's role (or why he referred to Neo as "Thomas" instead of Neo or Mr Anderson), or the Analyst, or how putting Buggs in Trinity's place for a few seconds somehow beat everything.

However, overall it was a fun enough tribute to the original trilogy, but it's main power seemed to come from simply referencing the older film rather than establishing a good new one.

 

[Swank]

Watched it now - mostly enjoyable. The main issues for me is that the fight scenes were a little boring - came on in a predictable way but were too fast to really see what was going on; and was surprised to see a few tired old skool stunts. Also the story didn't really make sense to me -

Spoiler

I didn't understand Smith's role (or why he referred to Neo as "Thomas" instead of Neo or Mr Anderson), or the Analyst, or how putting Buggs in Trinity's place for a few seconds somehow beat everything.

However, overall it was a fun enough tribute to the original trilogy, but it's main power seemed to come from simply referencing the older film rather than establishing a good new one.

My understanding of what we are watching:

Spoiler

Smith is there to act as Neo's torturer, producing the tension that increases his output in this upgraded Matrix. "Thomas" is just an informal "Mr. Anderson" slight. Smith is tolerated in this role by the AI, despite his past actions. When the deal is off, his loyalty reverts to his true motivation - killing Neo.

The Analyst is the new Architect, keeping the upgraded Matrix going on the foundation of Neo and Trinity. The original Matrix had no center.

Buggs keeps Trinity's Matrix self viable so she can be unhooked from the AI's input and swapped to the human input. That was necessary because they didn't have an extraction method (telephone) in the Starbucks and she would have died like Apoc and Switch did in the first film when unhooked without extraction.

 

[Brian G Turner]

One thing especially disappointing about this film is that the original Matrix film broke new ground in visuals - it gave us something we'd never seen before. But there wasn't any of that in this film - aside from a metallic pin-cushion Morpheus, but that was hardly amazing: we saw a metallic CGI character in Terminator 2 30 years ago. Additionally the fight scenes were quite "meh", and there was a long sequence with the warehouse fight where we didn't see Keanu Reeves' face at all, which just screamed "stunt double". Along with a few cliched film shots - falling through the floor into a bed of empty boxes - it was really uninspiring, unoriginal, and frankly quite boring. Really surprised the Wachovski's didn't try and push boundaries a little more - certainly we've seen that happen in other films recently.