It seems appropriate to be starting with a movie review, given my recent realization that the old blog, which was intended to be a place for writing about books, ended up having lots of posts about movies.
I didn’t really intend to watch the new Matrix movie, though I was slightly intrigued when I learned that Aleksandar Hemon had co-written the script — there’s an essay of his, “The Aquarium”, that lives permanently in my brain (you can find it in his Book of My Lives, which is overall very good. The Lazarus Project is also phenomenal) — though slightly less about it being a joint effort with David Mitchell, whom I can’t seem to get into. And let me say up front that I have zero memory of the second and third Matrix movies, just a vague sense that they sucked. But Matrix: Resurrection seemed like an appropriate New Year’s movie to watch when spending the holidays with your family, and once I started, I was locked in, even though everyone else went to sleep. And I’ve been kind of half thinking about the movie ever since.
There’s a moment, fairly early, when the film stops to consider what exactly it is supposed to be — what audiences appreciated in the old movie, and what they want from its new incarnation. Mind-bending philosophy? Cool scenes like the famous moment of Neo dodging the bullet? Badass fight montages? The conversation happens under the pretext of a discussion about what the new version of the Matrix game will be — the central conceit of this new movie is that Neo is back to the normal daily grind of life in the Matrix, duped into believing that his vague intimations of the true nature of reality are symptoms of madness. He is the creator of a game called The Matrix, and now he is suffering from the delusion that it’s real. Meanwhile, of course, people in the real world are trying to save him from the Matrix and remind him who he really is. In other words, the new movie basically returns to the philosophical problem of the original, but with a meta twist. This is very appropriate to our cultural moment, which is so so meta, and it also has the delightful (to me) effect of making many of the conversations in the movie double as conversations about the movie, and of course as reflections on our own socio-political milieu. So, for instance, in addition to the stuff already mentioned about what people liked in the original Matrix, we get stuff about how people don’t care about truth or the nature of reality, they only want stories that make them feel something, etc. In terms of the ways the film speaks to the present, there are lots of visuals of militarized police that I think are meant to be significant, but there’s no really meaningful political commentary, just platitudes that will satisfy people on both sides of the political divide.
So that’s the mind-bend-y(ish) philosophical part, covered. Another key component, action scenes, is also fairly well covered, with plenty of fight sequences that are admittedly not all that different from the ones in the earlier movies, but are entertaining enough.
Unmentioned in that board room conversation is the spiritual element of the original movie — the question of whether Neo is truly The One, which is another layer of metaphysical reflection, one that might not sit so neatly with the rest, but let’s not think too deeply about that, eh? (Yes I know plenty of academics have, and I don’t intend to read what they’ve come up with, sorry/not sorry) But which I think is actually an essential component to the original movie. And the new movie does that too, sort of, through its love plot. And it has the same kind of problems in terms of coherence, and also the same problem as far as tone — it’s where the movie really has to decide whether it was to be a cyber-opera or something more coolly ironic, and it clearly can’t make up its mind. This emotional current also makes demands on the skills of the actors that they are not always able to meet, but that is probably forgivable if we read it as camp.
Do you see, now, why I can’t fully make up my mind about the movie? The fact is, I thought it was pretty stupid. I groaned out loud more than once (the ending, especially, is just atrocious) — but I also chuckled appreciatively a time or two (Neil Patrick Harris is great, obvs). I found it boring, but I did watch the entire thing. It was more intellectually stimulating than Dune (which was just turgid, sorry), and (marginally) less annoying. I didn’t love it the way that I loved the original Matrix, but I don’t know if it would have been possible for me to love it as much, being, as I am, someone who had already seen and loved the original when it came out 20 years ago —that’s just the nature of sequels (with the exception of Live Free or Die Hard, and some of the Fast and Furious movies, which are masterpieces). I think the point is, I was entertained, in spite of myself, and when I wasn’t, I kind of also was. Not every movie has to be good. This is not a good movie, but it is kind of an appropriate re-tooling of the original for the present. It’s less philosophically profound, but then, the original really isn’t either, once you get past the initial Cartesian premise.
I just keep coming back to that meta-question — what do we want this movie to be? and finding it genuinely interesting, which really has less to do with the movie than it does with me. I don’t watch all that many movies these days, because I have a 4 year old and there’s a pandemic and I don’t live down the street from Doc Films any more (though I do live not too far from both Cornell Cinema and Cinemapolis, which I don’t take advantage of enough because of aforementioned 4 year old and pandemic). And when I do, I’m often exhausted and a little gloomy, and so what I want from movies (or more frequently, tv shows) varies. I would definitely prefer something better than Matrix: Resurrection, but I guess the point is, I’m not sorry to have watched it, and I kind of want you to watch it too, so we can talk about it. Which is more than I can say for a lot of contemporary cinema…
Kasia Reads 