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Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½

It’s fitting — maybe even fate — that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” should be the biggest and virtually only movie in the world on the week that “The Matrix Resurrections” is released. Both are mega-budget, meta sequels that feed on our collective familiarity with their respective franchises. One is a poison, the other its antidote.

One is a safe plastic monument to the solipsism of today’s studio cinema; an orgiastic celebration of how studio filmmaking has created a loop so powerful that it’s programmed audiences to reject anything that threatens its perfection (and to clap like seals for anything that reaffirms it, even if that means cheering for the “unexpected” return of heroes and villains they were once eager…

1

Nothing will ever approach the shock of the new the original gave us, but this is still a quintessential Wachowski huge swing, deeply idiosyncratic and defiant of expectation, cluttered but meticulously constructed and written to theme, and unabashedly dorky. Just like the last two sequels it'll probably be another decade before everyone realizes this is Actually Good.

136

I never would’ve guessed this was exactly what I wanted from a new Matrix movie in 2021 but wow I guess it is

Review by Karsten ★★★★ Liked

a love story that feels like it was made by an actual human being! enjoyed this movie a lot

Review by jerome_morrow ★

Dude what the fuck is happening to cinema

58

never in doubt

30

73

There are so many threads at play here. The monopolization of media culture, and how the general public is obsessed with the film you created and yet they don't even understand it. The studio is moving ahead with a reboot, with or without you. Video-game writers cracking jokes and playing ping pong, trying to define and spearhead the art that they grew up on, but didn't make. Or the desire to create something new is first defined by breaking out of tired, repetitious loops, a structure that is put in place so anyone that detaches from the binary is still lost in the labyrinth of code, unable to gain traction and find their way out. "Back to the Matrix!"…

36

did you know that the reason most detransitioners give for doing it isn't that they didn't want to be trans, or it wasn't right for them. it's actually because the people in their lives, the world around them, made it impossible to continue.

will rewatch, more to say after, it's a blessing

29

honestly? don’t understand it. enjoyed it a lot, but i do not understand it. i maybe get about 50% of it and i am too dumb for the other half. i’m looking at everyone’s reviews and going “hmm” like i agree but i’m mostly just going “okay, you guys clearly see the matrix and i just see the green digits.”

i only just watched RELOADED and REVOLUTIONS for the first time days before this and with each of them, i found myself being completely lost in the themes, philosophy, and expanded lore but there’s an additional meta-theme to this one that only made sense to me when it was so obvious in the beginning, and then i couldn’t track it…

7

Among other things, a film about: the enraging state of IP-based filmmaking and the impossibility of an original artist getting a budget for anything other than a sequel, the residual pain & doubt even when you've attained your real self, late capitalism as a manufactured state of endless longing, and the important difference between victory and peace. Will have more thoughts later to let people go in as blind as possible (even if “spoilers” are less relevant here than any recent tentpole), and after I get the chance to see it again to parse its breathtaking glut of ideas and stylistic bravado. It took people at least a decade to catch up to Reloaded and Revolutions. It may take as long to realize what a unicorn we got here in such a dead mass culture space.

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3

"Why does this story feel like a memory?"

A hyper-digital, sentimental mess of fiction and reality not only blurring but disintegrating right before your eyes at the prospect of returning to ideas, images, and feelings from another time and another world where you were another person. Now looking backward with a newfound formal freedom and seeing how the machine you built has been ingested and exploited and algorithmically reflected back at you. But it's still yours, fundamentally derived from your mind, your heart, your being, which means that the power to destroy it belongs to no one but you. "I this, I us."