#i cant believe i finally got fucking fed in the GAMES and not a film or a comic or whtever

[othermart]

just finished sonic frontiers !

[legionofpotatoes]

the matrix resurrections

(spoilers and big thonks in my usual fart-sniffing yet oddly charming way)

sweet lordy this film is completely uninterested in coherent pacing or dramatic intent but I selfishly still love it so so much because of what it is about and because of everything it just.. *is* with its entire chest.

cant properly search a fucking thing on this website but I distinctly remember watching the first trailer and immediately posting my hopes that this would be the movie to unabashedly stick it to the redpill shitheads infesting all message boards with their left-brain wank and I genuinely cannot believe that that's exactly what I got, no holds barred.

the matrix trilogy left the class, got silly drunk, and crashed back in to REALLY tell us, like as a final note my dudes, and with some more feeling this time, just what the fuck it was on about. It also wants to give us an awkward hug and hiccup sweet nothings into our ear about how much it really loves us. that's resurrections.

But for real though. it really just goes and says that the trilogy's ways of recognizing and fighting the flaws of the system are so archaic and outdated in today's hellscape that the system itself has assimilated and weaponized them against us, completely drowning out the intent behind shallow masturbation to nostalgia. and in distilling this idea into a plot point they fucking. nailed it so hilariously by turning it into a video game. they literally turned the og matrix into a videogame loaded with all modern trappings of decentralized narrative ownership and crushing corporate oversight. it is literally nothing more than an indulgent product the big man demands a Fresh New sequel for, and is therefore framed as a stark, stupidly ideal meta-phor (boo) that the film's engine roars out of, engaging and ripping the notion to shreds in the name of the one thing that can righteously pierce through the endlessly enfolding ebb and flow of this maliciously adaptive culture, a culture that will hijack and weaponize any argument against its systems of control. The one single thing that can truly cut through the noise of the matrix: love.

This movie is a *ridiculous* ode to romance, blasted loud from the rooftops of big media's most popular movie franchise, cementing its final point with such cartoonishly overt vigor that it becomes impossible to deflect - short of dismissing it outright. It is about neo and trinity re-finding and fighting for one another inside a matrix that has transcended all limitations and devoted itself to feverishly gaslighting and manipulating them for some convoluted plot reasons that don't really matter. What matters is that it essentially boils their lives down to a hapless toil in a hypercapitalist system interested in keeping them on their respective treadmills, surgically dosed on both validation and misery to maximize productivity. Myths, memories and all aspirational stories are corporate-fed propaganda designed to dilute their own spiritual value, and the people that are plugged in willingly accept this veneer of utopia as they essentially become their own rabid wardens. It is a jarring mixture of deft satire and cartoonish depiction of today's uberconnected, truthless, cynical world where finding sincerity is often an almost sisyphean labor of emotional wall-tearing.

yet the film ultimately breathes out and firmly reassures us that this difficulty is not absolute, and that it is worth trudging through. it is, in fact, the only fucking thing worth doing at all. the matrix resurrections is a single-minded, optimistic oorah at a world sneering and laughing in response, an almost childish invocation of something as simple as love in the face of a hyper-complex digital globe drained of empathy. it has shed all notions of nuanced discussion winning the day in the age of misinformation, it has abandoned all rules of cool as shorthand for marginalized empowerment, it's spat on the very idea of a mechanized interiority to its crystalline message. it is absurdly naive. and it is impossible to hate.

the matrix did not need a sequel. nor did this movie, whether framed as a franchise boat or even as something wholly unmoored, needed to really exist. it truly reiterates the most base, compact, irrefutable truth of humanity. cue "the power of love" guitar riff. and yet, as evidenced when the plot winks it at us in the beginning, the existence of a matrix 4 was perhaps an inevitability of the ever profit-seeking market. So let it be this, then; for if it has to exist, then only like this. A cobbled-together, earnest post scriptum to a seminal trilogy, reminding us that yes.

Love IS the genesis of everything. and the noise is just noise.

Assorted thoughts and musings that don't fit in the Big Part:

just the Plot of it is a Lot. again, not a movie as concerned with harmonizing form and function as the OG films were, sure, but it's still a shame that it shows. it's convoluted just a bit too much, paced just a bit too poorly, spotty in effective exposition and definitely lacking in dramatic intent. has its big oomph in the setup and payoff of neo and trinity, which is delicious and which totally works but eeerghh I wish we got to find catharsis in all the other characters too. but maybe not really the point here? I'm not smart enough to crack this one boys

yahya is such a charming presence on-screen, man. love his funky lando morpheus to bits. I have no idea why the story needed him but I never once wanted him gone

something about the matrix gaslighting neo's past by remixing iconic elements into silly gags feels so... right, lmao. like it's designed to be a playful wink but will absolutely infuriate the right kinds of people. hell yeah deja vu is the cat's name like for real now checkmate nerds

I bet geoff keighley wanks it silly thinking about how cool it is that his game award is in this movie. in quite a specific framing. and by 'I bet' I mean yeah I've seen his tweet and it is, like, the single most hilarious fucking thing I've read in months

so the agents are ineffective and replaced by zombie NPCs but they are still in the system? or were they only part of that uh modal loop-de-loop thingy? that neo wrote? is the analyst's bullet time god mode defunct by the end? because of neo/trin no longer powering the place or? clarityyyy. sheesh. again just the Plot of it all. Keep it simple!! like how you accepted a cookie from the oracle to agree to an exchange of data. simple in-jokes and worldbuilding. why do all the AI civil war stuff and Zion But Cooler With Clouds and all that noise if it's just a ramp for romance? really no simpler choices to get us there? idk

did the merovingian really mention mark zuckerberg or did I hallucinate that part

man jonathan groff is so chewy with his lines. what a great addition to the film. his arc is sort-of nonsense but boy did he fluff it all up with his unique combo of understated and unhinged. you go dude. so happy for him, truly!!! he should do theater or something

that was a joke about jonathan groff doing theater. I know

and whaddup sensate family we got a whole-ass reunion here!! no notes or comments. *chef's kiss* all around. alix had the 8 on their hair and everything. truly a niche gift for us VIPs. my partner had a bit of a hard time reconciling just how odd they all looked together as a team in a completely different setting and story, but I mean I just kinda though it was neat to see them again! but it's very much a director's faves kinda thing so your mileage will uh, vary

niobe's makeup looked so strange?? not bad, or ineffective, but it did not manage to slink into the background for me. it was distractingly uncanny. her good eye was 40 years old, and the rest of her was 90

all the dramatic emphasis on handholding is so. good. it is so so good. i love hold hamds as plot device

genuine action storytelling has turned into storytelling during action in the beats in-between the punching and kicking. I know it sounds pretentiously nitpicky but the difference matters in cinematic language terms I promise. the punching and kicking itself is just wide-angle noise now, no more intimate push-and-pull of micro close calls and setups/payoffs. this is a general trend towards cinema that is especially evident in the quippy MCU bouts, but it's worth noting its absence here specifically because the matrix was such a masterclass of action storytelling. the first movie especially. so much character growth and catharsis would just happen during and in the middle of that wonderful, kinetic choreo. we don't have that here and honestly it's okay and also keanu and carrie anne are in their 50s so I'm just kinda lamenting it selfishly. the only time I really felt it bum me out was during that oddly padded sewage fight with the exiles.

another extremely personal opinion but the constant wide outer establishing shot > immediate interior cuts pull me out a bit? I like a nice punch-in, maybe intermediary transitions, but it all felt like. small sets with CG extensions all the time. except for the outside stuff! really loved the golden hour set pieces visually

ah, sad gamedev keanu in pajamas drinking vodka on a rooftop, what an aesthetic

I did lie about the coolness factor a little bit because seeing trinity doing the superhero shit in the end was hooo boy. thrilling stuff! and she got to beat that guy up real good. neil patrick harris, staunch as ever. what an endlessly dependable dude. feel like he could perform as literally anyone and just consistently kill it

and look I'm not here to gloss over lana's weird racism but idk how to address it in the context of this film outside of just kinda. addressing by mentioning it. it's a shit outlook that's bled into some of her work and I obviously lack the personal experience to discern its degrees here - and far be it for me to play whataboutism on this whole ordeal writ large - but if it matters at all to your read of my read then yes, I definitely factor in the shaky optics at the helm. whether despite of them or in spite of them, the core ethos of this story appears to work fine, perhaps in lieu of it being an ethos fundamentally built to sidestep nuance and paint in broad strokes and universal concepts. I mean lana did make my favorite movie of all time that stars an abuser and is rife with orientalist messiness so this could all be a damning admission on my part, but I privately stay as aware and critical of it all as I possibly can while dunno, trying to receive the value her unique cinematic language and voice can sometimes offer? I suppose I could boil it down to a guilty pleasure thing as well. we are, after all, talking about movies

no no no but. the Gamers being the real agents of apathy here. galaxy brain take. gotta praise it again. can almost see the waves of angry youtube dudes clutching pearls over this. mmm. i can have a little schadenfreude. as a treat

and finally, my hottest take of all: the matrix... was just a PG-13 free guy all along

but seriously though. I couldn't help but love it in the end, with almost the same fiery love that I have for speed racer. I mean okay not really those levels but. it has such an earnest and sloppy center, this movie. it feels like a cinematic version of the human heart. ultimately I'm just glad it exists and that it.. exists in this form, I guess!

haha he's called the analyst