There’s at least one Reloaded + Revolutions fan edit that’s pretty good. Combined into one, Reloaded’s massive action sequence is a little past the middle of the movie. Smith’s growth from the first copy to the whole Matrix over a couple hours feels more impressive. In exchange you lose some of Trinity’s arc in Reloaded and a lot of the Zion deliberation and defense scenes.
Did anyone ever satisfactorily explain how Neo was able to EMP the sentinels in the real world? I always hated that, felt like the writers wrote themselves into a corner and didn’t really know what to do.
Yes, we had another thread, where @Paul_cze posted this, it has a very satisfactory explanation, I thought, and a lot of questions I had were finally cleared up.
I will definitely watch the trilogy again with a new perspective after reading this.
Huh, that’s actually a pretty neat explanation. I’m impressed!
That’s certainly an interesting read. But:
The Scifi View is Different: Again, I’m CLEARLY separating out the sci-fi view from the metaphysical/religious view here. If one takes the metaphysical view, Neo becomes self-realized, and this has nothing to do with sentient programs or all the rest – but then the “belief” in his powers has to do with more metaphysical/religious connotations. He becomes the “One” in the same way Buddha or Jesus did – through his path to self realization. This is a significantly different but parallel storyline. Both the religious view and the sci-fi storylines are significantly different, but just as intentional. To reiterate – the matrix trilogy is fully allegorical in the sense that the entire trilogy was INTENDED to be viewed from separate and distinct story lines. This also addresses one of the many knocks on the trilogy – many knock many of the key scenes as incoherent or vague. This was purposeful action on the part of the Wachowskis. Most of the key scenes are “specifically” vague just so that they can be properly interpreted in two completely separate storylines. More than anything else, this truly is the magnificence of the story line across all three movies.
The first emphasis is the author’s, the second is mine, but they’re related and where I disagree. I really don’t believe this explanation was intended, and if it was, I strongly disagree this makes the story “magnificent”. It’s a fascinating theory to back solve for the confusing metaphysical twists.
The guy who wrote that article does a supremely crap job of distinguishing between canonical facts and personal speculation. Like when he casually refers to Seraph as a former One, something that AFAIK has never been established in any official Matrix media. So unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of Matrix minutiae, it’s tough to judge the bullshit level of all his theorizing.
I appreciated being able to watch Dune at no extra charge on HBO Max after I saw it in the theater. I suspect the same will be true for Matrix Resurrections. This seems like a movie I’m going to want to see in giganto-screen glory with speakers blaring.
Yeah, I haven’t gone back to a theatre yet. HBO Max has been awesome for me.
If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole really goes, there’s a 500 page archive of The Matrix Online story here:
And a couple of videos summarizing the plot and showcasing all of the cinematics:
And the official memory book can be downloaded here:
This is the best kind of mini-review I could hope for. (Emily is a critic who used to write for The A.V. Club among other outlets.)
Hopes still high, still nervous that I’ll loathe it.
So, uh…some people will like the film and some won’t? I probably could’ve guessed that myself, to be honest…
Yeah but consider the source:
I worried that some people would hate it and some people would find it to be a mediocre boring money-grab. At least, apparently, the filmmakers are swinging for the fences.
“but you see the architect scene is a cinematic masterstroke"
Yup. That’s all I needed to see. Yuck.
Also in the vein of “please stop while you’re ahead” is this…
That reads like an AI-powered Mad Lib that picks a few adjectives at random then selects from a list of bad movies.
When I consider the source, my first thought is probably cynical, or maybe just presumptuous is the right word, but I guessed maybe Resurrections just really heavily hits some kind of trans allegories. That’s reductive of me, but that’s the main thing I know about Emily VanDerWerff (and obviously Lana Wachowski), so those are the dots I connected in my head.
I should probably fight that assumption. Watching the original Matrix movies now, knowing that both Wachowskis would later identify as women (but from my vantage point having no idea where they were in their personal lives leading up to that during the time they were making the movies), I can imagine how the themes of identity and reality could’ve represented working through those issues in their film, but I also don’t think that the metaphors and allegories of the original trilogy were ever explicitly and uniquely about that experience. So perhaps the new film is no different in that regard, but it’s just going to hit differently for a trans woman watching a movie made by a trans woman.
I don’t really have a point, just working through my thought process. I also loved the Mad Men reviews Emily wrote for A.V. Club, so maybe it just means everyone in Resurrections wears skinny ties and smokes more.
That’s more than I knew about VanDerWerff, and does recontextualize the comment a bit. It doesn’t change the conclusion, though - someone that enjoyed the sequels is clearly an unreliable source (for my purposes) about this new one.
What difference does it make, though, really? If it got poor reviews we’d all see it anyway. It’s a Matrix sequel.