The Matrix: Resurrections

[Pulstar]

The Matrix is about as deep as Keanu's acting.

[Neon Ignition]

For me, the first film is nicely paced and is obviously the best, still holds up well. It was very much about the representation of Neo's discovery of his destiny/situation but it was never the amazing concept the hype had it at the time. Fortunately the film holds up regardless. The second was fine enough if convoluted but I'm also in the small camp that finds the third a better watch than the second. Quite a bit fell flat for me with Reloaded whereas ropey cg aside I can cope better with Revolutions momentum and action.

[EvilBoris]

The Matrix is about as deep as Keanu's acting.

It might not be deep, but it is certainly rich in detail.

[QualityChimp]

The Matrix is about as deep as Keanu's acting.

I think that's doing the film a great disservice.

There's lots going on in there, but a lot of it is just referenced or hinted at.

[buster_broon]

Im With kit

I used to watch the staircase scene a lot, amazing choreography and the weapons they had were similar to early Jackie chan movies

[Dogg Thang]

For me the context gave them little meaning. CG fights in a fictional CG world is as impressive to me as an animated card trick. The back-pedalling from the end of the first movie (upgrades...) really hurt the sequels for me too. And the convoluted nonsense which led to long speeches rather than people doing stuff.

But I also think the depth was comparable to text logs found in many games - a lot of info and, yes, it is genuine depth but rarely does it actually serve the story at hand.

[Paddy]

Are people open to another Matrix film being good though? I'm aware the goodwill has been crushed somewhat after the debatable CG in Reloaded and the Dragonball-like fighting in Revolutions, but fingers crossed the Wachowskis could pull something good here (tempting to say they are one-trick ponies but they have done serviceable projects since the original Matrix).

[QualityChimp]

Everyone ****s on the sequels but I thought the second one was solid. The highway scene, the brawl, that epic fight on the staircase, those ghost twins, it was ****ing ace! yeah all that stuff in zion was ****e (the dancing bah) but the action was top!

It's the third that ****ed everything up for me. Felt like barely any fighting while we watched some character I didn't even care about shoot a choke point on a cs map for 2 hours. Utter ****e.

I'm with you too, Kit.

The first film is amazing, but it's Reloaded I've watched the most. Well, I usually skipped the Zion scenes (especially the rave and awkward saucy scene), but as Kit says, there are some of the best action sequences ever filmed. All the scenes Kit said, plus the tea shop fight, "upgrades" and Trinity in the power station.

People moan about it being too talky at the end, but I'd rather have something to talk about afterwards rather than just a series of action scenes.

Revolutions was painful, though. I think it's that film that sapped some people's good will for the series and sometimes, unfairly, rope the second film in with their memories.
The end was a real anticlimax and undid a lot of the good work of the first two films (like killing Hicks and Newt did at the start of Alien3). Morpheus was reduced from a badass to Will Smith's wife's beatch, deciding to rescue Trinity was ultimately futile, the action scenes were repetitive (the club scene was a rehash of the original's lobby fight) and two films worth of fighting the robots was tied up by sending a blind Neo to beat Smith, which he ultimately failed to do.

The Super Burly Brawl looked amazing, but soon descended into some kind of Super Smash Bros.

I might rewatch the first two as it's been a while, but I don't relish the idea of further films in the series.

[Dogg Thang]

The burly brawl as a fight looked awesome but it missed a trick for me, one I mentioned that the Animatrix got right. Where does it take place? Nowhere. It's like a random noplace Sesame Street with nobody in it. The background is dead. The same feels true even for that highway scene with all the cars. Nobody really exists except for the main characters. It's like the Wachowskis forgot that all the other people plugged into the Matrix are actually real people and are living what they think are real lives. That was a huge part of the draw of the first movie - what if the world you live in isn't truly real and you can break all the rules? When the Wachowskis forgot the part about the world, they lost the magic for me. Nobody they encounter in the sequels has any attachment to the reality of the Matrix and so there is no sense of wonder when the rules are broken.

This is why I adore the haunted house Animatrix story. That more than anything in the two sequels sums up the heart of the attraction of the Matrix concept for me.

Now in that sense, there could be potential in a prequel in that you get to go back to people who start by believing their world is real. But the sequels tell me they themselves missed that part of what made the first film awesome.

[H-Man]

They lost so much goodwill with me with the two sequels. Not only did I not think they were good but, for me, they lost the entire hook of the concept. It was like they didn't actually know what was good about the idea to begin with. Because of that, I would be approaching any new movie with a massive amount of skepticism. On top of the Matrix movies, the Wachowskis have had more misses than hits for me.

Well put. The first is one of my favourite movies and at the time I couldn't believe how much they missed the mark with the sequels. Since then and after another forced viewing I now blank them out as their existence only makes the original a worse movie (much like with The Crystal Skull and Prometheus!). There are so many things to point the finger at, but the big hippy rave/commune city really was truly awful. It should have been a steampunky, desperate, kids warming themselves from a fire in the tv set a la Terminator, last strand of humanity tomb. That's the impression the first movie gave - it was great.

[EvilBoris]

How could they sign in and out of the matrix when everything is powered by steam?

I'm writing this as I watch Reloaded, just reaching the only bit I remember really disliking...the sexy rave.

[H-Man]

I've no problem with tech, just not a massive hippy city.

[EvilBoris]

Well it is essentially a post apocalyptic city, shampoo isn't easy to come by

[sj33]

The biggest problem with the sequels for me was that they were simply cool sci-fi flicks, and lacked any of the social commentary of the original.

Of course, we all take away something different from films. The original Matrix film was one of the few films to have left a lasting effect on my world view. It challenges the natural tendency to take the world we see around us as an assumed unchanging reality. We assume that the world we live in was an inevitable consequence of history, that the reality of waking up in the morning, going to work to earn our means of living, and doing this continuously in order to be able to continue to do this. We assume the capitalist world we live in is simply a natural reality, when in fact it is a man made creation - not in the sense that somebody sat down and planned it, but in the sense that it is a system that has been created and is maintained. It only takes a significant amount of people to realise this, and to propose that they no longer intend to maintain this system, and the whole thing will fall apart like a pack of cards. Paradoxically, the vast majority of people would fight to maintain the system because, for them, it IS reality and nothing could possibly be any different. The Matrix wasn't suggesting that we are literally living in a dream world, or might have been literally enslaved by robots. It's suggesting that the world we live in has been created by mankind, and can be recreated by mankind.

The sequels don't have any of this at all, they're just rather cool sci-fi movies. So they really had nothing for me. I'd recommend the first film to everybody, but only the first one.

[CMcK]

The sequels labored a load of pseudo religious clap trap over 4 hours. This is in no way cool. Or sci-if.