8 ms·

I saw it twice. I honestly cannot tell if Lana Wachowski hates the Matrix or not. There was this meta montage of "oh we have to make a sequel to the Matrix beca

by titzer 5y ago

I saw it twice. I honestly cannot tell if Lana Wachowski hates the Matrix or not. There was this meta montage of "oh we have to make a sequel to the Matrix because the suits wanted it, everybody pile on stupid crap", which was obviously a middle finger to...someone. I laughed out loud at how over the top that blatant F-U was...but given that the movie proceeded to then actually crap on every single thing that was awesome about the first Matrix (hey, Trinity is a literally a soccer Mom now? Morpheus is the most newly freed mind and completely unimportant? Smith is completely unintimidating? It's inexplicably set in 2020, not 1999 that was supposed to be the peak of human civilization?) Did she honestly ruin it on purpose?

oliyoung 5y ago
> I honestly cannot tell if Lana Wachowski hates the Matrix or not. The movies and the production of them? Yes. The concept and story? No. > Did she honestly ruin it on purpose? Yes. I think she did.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  What kind of person would take something of their own and ruin it like that? Tons of people loved the matrix, just let it be.
  - oliyoung 5y ago
    Plenty of people. Part of the act of creation can be it's destruction https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/banksy-auction-record-shredded-painting-love-is-in-the-bin https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/banksy-...
  - abathur 5y ago
    Assuming the dialog can be believed: they either had to participate in the reboot, or let WB reboot it without them.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      Ok, makes sense. Instead of WB making a horrible movie, Wachowski did it for them? I’m not sure the Wachowski brand has improved after this.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    I really don't like this new movie, but it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the ones that came before. If I really cared to, I can just pretend that this movie doesn't exist, as people are fond of doing to the original two sequels. Even from a "cinematic universe" or "canon" perspective I don't recognize its ability to affect the previous story; we're living in a rapidly accelerating era of media where escapism commands huge money and nostalgia is king; who's to say five or ten years down the line someone else might not make a new Matrix property and retcon the story as told in this one? Would be funny if Lilly Wachowski was the one to do that.
    - brightball 5y ago
      Exactly. There are only 3 Indiana Jones movies.
      - philistine 5y ago
        THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!
  - minimaxir 5y ago
    It was rumored that WB would have made another Matrix without Wachowski involvement if she had not agreed to it. Who knows how that would have turned out.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      Sure ok, but so what? What kind of person (allegedly) sinks a movie franchise out of spite? How about… Not do that and put effort into everything you do? IDK. Not sure I buy this and think it’s possible the Wachowskis that made the first movies are gone, and this was a good effort. ♬don’t let money change ya♬.
      - oliyoung 5y ago
        > sinks a movie franchise out of spite? it's not spite. She didn't "sink" it because she was spiteful, she wanted to say something about the films and her work and chose to deconstruct the act of making a sequel to a trilogy after 20 years. It's their art, they can do what they want with it. Their work since Matrix has always been avant-guard (Cloud Atlas is barely a film in any normal sense, a Speed Racer film by anyone else isn't _that_) they were never coming back to make another stock science-fiction action film. The real question is, how did Warner green-light the script and release knowing that it was going say all those things.
        titzer 5y ago
        It was really petty and I lost a lot of respect for her over this. She could have let WB fail on their own (proving what a masterstroke their first movie was), she could have outdone it (proving she's still a master), or she could have given a middling effort. All of which, IMHO, would have been better than intentionally sullying--frankly, ruining--the original piece. Frankly I hope I can just forget the fourth movie, because I don't want to watch the first movie knowing that Neo ends up a doddering old pilled-up nutter and Trinity's a cookie cutter soccer mom with barely a bike shop. (and of course, that's silly, because they didn't really end up that way, they were put into that way--at great expense--for why again? stupid plot. Stupid, stupid plot.)
- wyldfire 5y ago
  I loved "Alien." Just an awesome film. Over the years there have been several sequels and spinoffs. Probably more bad than good. But there's definitely been some good ones. I just spend less time thinking about the bad ones.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Apart from the first Matrix movie, which is amazing, have the Wachowskis actually made any other good movies? Was it just the case that they were surrounded by talented people in the first movie and listened to them? Then after it was successful they were like "we got this".
  - dereg 5y ago
    Bound? Cloud Atlas? Speed Racer? Reloaded, as a pure action flick? One thing I admire about the Wachowskis is their insane ambition. You either hate it or love it but let's not pretend like they were just lucky.
    - superiorflush 5y ago
      Cloud Atlas was a mess.
  - dasKrokodil 5y ago
    They wrote the screenplay for 'V for Vendetta', which I thought was a pretty good movie.
Barrin92 5y ago
I think so, or at least the film was very self-aware of the fact the Matrix as a movie franchise has exactly become what the Matrix in the original movie was, a repetitive, stagnant world that exists solely to suck the lifeforce out of its subjects. This is a critique that Baudrillard (whose work is featured in the original) actually had already of the original trilogy itself when he stated that "the matrix is the kind of movie that the matrix would come up with" Not sure if she was trying to burn cash on purpose as performance art but I wouldn't put it past her either
- titzer 5y ago
  The first time I saw Resurrections, I was lol'ing at the brainstorming montage, as I saw it as her explicitly sticking her finger in the eye of all the haters and crackheads out there. But the second time it was cringe. I mean, the first Matrix was this unabashedly bad-ass movie that was so fresh, and then by the time number 4 rolled around, it hates itself and everyone else so much that most of the screen time is spent just trying to get even...with whom? Screw those stupid critics; make a kick-ass movie that completely leaves those morons in the dust. Instead, the more I think about it, the more it just drags everything into the muck.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    I think there's a way to make Matrix 4 that looks upon its own legacy and destroys that baggage, "kill your darlings" and all that, and even maybe many of the scenes filmed in this one could be present in that movie. But the film we saw in theaters is not the quality version of that meta-textual film, it is often very confusing with poor writing, execrable action scenes, and plot that is far less clever than its ambitions. Some of the dialogue sounded like the crummy lines from modern Hollywood superhero and other blockbuster movies, a far cry from the at least tonally-consistent writing of the original films.
    - freewilly1040 5y ago
      I rewatched the original recently and that dialogue is not exactly a strong point either. Really devoid of subtly or even the barest hint of humor. A pretty unbelievable amount of exposition, telling rather than showing. I think I looked past it when it came out because I was a kid, and the world building was interesting to me.
meerperson 5y ago
It felt like a sort of kabuki of the original Matrix, as written by Redditors who were tasked with making it as self-referential as possible.
trissylegs 5y ago
I think the F-U might have been to the Redpill movement. For taking an allegory for Estrogen and turning into some misogynist hate movement. Or it could just be these tweets: https://twitter.com/lilly_wachowski/status/1262104754496339968?lang=en https://twitter.com/lilly_wachowski/status/12621047544963399...
- jevoten 5y ago
  I've heard that the Wachowskis claimed that, but in what way is the Matrix's red pill similar to estrogen pills, or transexuality in general?
  - ruined 5y ago
    when it was originally written, the most common estrogen pill on the market was red. short answer: the matrix is gender. but it also represents any social construct pretty generically, and that's why there's so much confusion. long answer: duck duck go matrix transgender. also, like, when a creator tells you their work means a thing, just take them at their word. they would know. you can criticize how well or how poorly it conveys the meaning, or explore what subterfuge is concealed within, but questioning explicit intent is a bit silly.
    - yucky 5y ago
      >when it was originally written, the most common estrogen pill on the market was red. As Don Quixote once said "El Oh El"
      - ruined 5y ago
        i know, right. reactionaries will misread anything. literally bootstraps and bad apples.
        yucky 5y ago
        Are there some sources from the era that the movie was released that make that connection? Or is this just people trying to take back the meaning of the red pill from those scary republicans?
notjustanymike 5y ago
It was like watching fan fiction of the original.
brightball 5y ago
Yea…I mean, I got through it because I loved the originals but it was very much a fan-service movie. Not unlike the latest Spiderman with how much it tried to reference from the others in the collection, but the constant flashovers to the originals were a bit exhausting. Was tough to watch. I mean, I got it…but it was tough to watch.
zucker42 5y ago
I haven't seen the new movie, but RedLetterMedia's review had interesting commentary along these lines.
crispyambulance 5y ago
Yeah at one point during one of tiresome chase scenes that was packed with gun play and slow-motion action, I recall one of the actors said “I hate bullets!” Totally believable to me that the filmmakers just “dialed-it-in” for a pile of money without caring for the story. After all they were already “done” after the first movie. Too bad. Tragically, that same pile of money could have funded a dozen innovative new filmmakers and actors with fresh stories to tell.
- shmoopi 5y ago
  Fresh and innovative stories don't sell as well as a known brand. That's why a sequel to an established franchise is always preferable to big studios.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    You can tell a completely new story under the brand name of The Matrix, she's chosen the lazy way.
wonderwonder 5y ago
I was so disappointed in this movie and I thought the trailer looked amazing. It was just so bad. When they brought back the Merovingian looking like he had not brushed his teeth is 45 years I almost turned it off. Then amazingly it got worse.
- nsonha 5y ago
  the trailer is exactly the same style of the film you get. Scenes included in it like stopping the bullets and dojo explosion look incredibly lame. Then the colors are all over the place. It's fine if you don't do the green tint, that doesn't mean you have to pop everything to 11. So I don't know why you thought it was amazing.
yucky 5y ago
Is it possible that the movie just sucked? Everyone on here dancing around that possibility due to...reasons.
- nominated1 5y ago
  The reasons people seem to be dancing around is censorship. Woke ideology on one side and the CCP on the other. That’s an extremely narrow area to work in. I don’t see this movie as an outlier. TV and Film have been in trouble since BLM and now with China buying AMC, the prospects don’t look good. As as a (former) movie goer I’ve seen nothing but shit for the last 2 years. I now suspect shit is the new normal. I’m not paying for shit… it’s that simple. In other words, I agree with you.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    What does this have to do with the movie? Even if I could imagine a scenario in which the argument would be relevant, I don't understand what you're specifically attacking here.
    - nominated1 5y ago
      Financial struggles… isn’t that what we’re talking about? It’s simply one in a long line of offerings from Hollywood that is not meeting viewer expectations. I see it as a cumulative effect. ... And my reasons are clear.
      - brailsafe 5y ago
        That's a pretty tenous connection imo. You might as well pick any arbitrary thing you think is declining, financially I guess, and point to wokeness or the CCP as the cause. Is there something specific you saw in the older movies that you think is missing because of that stuff, therefore the movie is bad and wokeness is responsible?
        nominated1 5y ago
poisonborz 5y ago
This is my take. And when thinking about it, it's rather brilliant if so. It's still painful to watch, and a bad film in every sense, but the way this was financed and got greenlit seems somehow to be a masterful rug pull. It has metal robot pokemons, freeing Neo is completely unnecessary, the new human settlement doesn't need a thing and won't fight, the soap opera low-fi slow mo fight scenes, everything seems to point to a sort of purposeful sabotage.

by titzer 5y ago

oliyoung 5y ago

> I honestly cannot tell if Lana Wachowski hates the Matrix or not. The movies and the production of them? Yes. The concept and story? No. > Did she honestly ruin it on purpose? Yes. I think she did.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
What kind of person would take something of their own and ruin it like that? Tons of people loved the matrix, just let it be.
- oliyoung 5y ago
  Plenty of people. Part of the act of creation can be it's destruction https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/banksy-auction-record-shredded-painting-love-is-in-the-bin https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/banksy-...
- abathur 5y ago
  Assuming the dialog can be believed: they either had to participate in the reboot, or let WB reboot it without them.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Ok, makes sense. Instead of WB making a horrible movie, Wachowski did it for them? I’m not sure the Wachowski brand has improved after this.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  I really don't like this new movie, but it doesn't impact my enjoyment of the ones that came before. If I really cared to, I can just pretend that this movie doesn't exist, as people are fond of doing to the original two sequels. Even from a "cinematic universe" or "canon" perspective I don't recognize its ability to affect the previous story; we're living in a rapidly accelerating era of media where escapism commands huge money and nostalgia is king; who's to say five or ten years down the line someone else might not make a new Matrix property and retcon the story as told in this one? Would be funny if Lilly Wachowski was the one to do that.
  - brightball 5y ago
    Exactly. There are only 3 Indiana Jones movies.
    - philistine 5y ago
      THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!
- minimaxir 5y ago
  It was rumored that WB would have made another Matrix without Wachowski involvement if she had not agreed to it. Who knows how that would have turned out.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Sure ok, but so what? What kind of person (allegedly) sinks a movie franchise out of spite? How about… Not do that and put effort into everything you do? IDK. Not sure I buy this and think it’s possible the Wachowskis that made the first movies are gone, and this was a good effort. ♬don’t let money change ya♬.
    - oliyoung 5y ago
      > sinks a movie franchise out of spite? it's not spite. She didn't "sink" it because she was spiteful, she wanted to say something about the films and her work and chose to deconstruct the act of making a sequel to a trilogy after 20 years. It's their art, they can do what they want with it. Their work since Matrix has always been avant-guard (Cloud Atlas is barely a film in any normal sense, a Speed Racer film by anyone else isn't _that_) they were never coming back to make another stock science-fiction action film. The real question is, how did Warner green-light the script and release knowing that it was going say all those things.
      - titzer 5y ago
        It was really petty and I lost a lot of respect for her over this. She could have let WB fail on their own (proving what a masterstroke their first movie was), she could have outdone it (proving she's still a master), or she could have given a middling effort. All of which, IMHO, would have been better than intentionally sullying--frankly, ruining--the original piece. Frankly I hope I can just forget the fourth movie, because I don't want to watch the first movie knowing that Neo ends up a doddering old pilled-up nutter and Trinity's a cookie cutter soccer mom with barely a bike shop. (and of course, that's silly, because they didn't really end up that way, they were put into that way--at great expense--for why again? stupid plot. Stupid, stupid plot.)
wyldfire 5y ago
I loved "Alien." Just an awesome film. Over the years there have been several sequels and spinoffs. Probably more bad than good. But there's definitely been some good ones. I just spend less time thinking about the bad ones.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
Apart from the first Matrix movie, which is amazing, have the Wachowskis actually made any other good movies? Was it just the case that they were surrounded by talented people in the first movie and listened to them? Then after it was successful they were like "we got this".
- dereg 5y ago
  Bound? Cloud Atlas? Speed Racer? Reloaded, as a pure action flick? One thing I admire about the Wachowskis is their insane ambition. You either hate it or love it but let's not pretend like they were just lucky.
  - superiorflush 5y ago
    Cloud Atlas was a mess.
- dasKrokodil 5y ago
  They wrote the screenplay for 'V for Vendetta', which I thought was a pretty good movie.

Barrin92 5y ago

I think so, or at least the film was very self-aware of the fact the Matrix as a movie franchise has exactly become what the Matrix in the original movie was, a repetitive, stagnant world that exists solely to suck the lifeforce out of its subjects. This is a critique that Baudrillard (whose work is featured in the original) actually had already of the original trilogy itself when he stated that "the matrix is the kind of movie that the matrix would come up with" Not sure if she was trying to burn cash on purpose as performance art but I wouldn't put it past her either

titzer 5y ago
The first time I saw Resurrections, I was lol'ing at the brainstorming montage, as I saw it as her explicitly sticking her finger in the eye of all the haters and crackheads out there. But the second time it was cringe. I mean, the first Matrix was this unabashedly bad-ass movie that was so fresh, and then by the time number 4 rolled around, it hates itself and everyone else so much that most of the screen time is spent just trying to get even...with whom? Screw those stupid critics; make a kick-ass movie that completely leaves those morons in the dust. Instead, the more I think about it, the more it just drags everything into the muck.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  I think there's a way to make Matrix 4 that looks upon its own legacy and destroys that baggage, "kill your darlings" and all that, and even maybe many of the scenes filmed in this one could be present in that movie. But the film we saw in theaters is not the quality version of that meta-textual film, it is often very confusing with poor writing, execrable action scenes, and plot that is far less clever than its ambitions. Some of the dialogue sounded like the crummy lines from modern Hollywood superhero and other blockbuster movies, a far cry from the at least tonally-consistent writing of the original films.
  - freewilly1040 5y ago
    I rewatched the original recently and that dialogue is not exactly a strong point either. Really devoid of subtly or even the barest hint of humor. A pretty unbelievable amount of exposition, telling rather than showing. I think I looked past it when it came out because I was a kid, and the world building was interesting to me.

meerperson 5y ago

It felt like a sort of kabuki of the original Matrix, as written by Redditors who were tasked with making it as self-referential as possible.

trissylegs 5y ago

I think the F-U might have been to the Redpill movement. For taking an allegory for Estrogen and turning into some misogynist hate movement. Or it could just be these tweets: https://twitter.com/lilly_wachowski/status/1262104754496339968?lang=en https://twitter.com/lilly_wachowski/status/12621047544963399...

jevoten 5y ago
I've heard that the Wachowskis claimed that, but in what way is the Matrix's red pill similar to estrogen pills, or transexuality in general?
- ruined 5y ago
  when it was originally written, the most common estrogen pill on the market was red. short answer: the matrix is gender. but it also represents any social construct pretty generically, and that's why there's so much confusion. long answer: duck duck go matrix transgender. also, like, when a creator tells you their work means a thing, just take them at their word. they would know. you can criticize how well or how poorly it conveys the meaning, or explore what subterfuge is concealed within, but questioning explicit intent is a bit silly.
  - yucky 5y ago
    >when it was originally written, the most common estrogen pill on the market was red. As Don Quixote once said "El Oh El"
    - ruined 5y ago
      i know, right. reactionaries will misread anything. literally bootstraps and bad apples.
      - yucky 5y ago
        Are there some sources from the era that the movie was released that make that connection? Or is this just people trying to take back the meaning of the red pill from those scary republicans?

notjustanymike 5y ago

It was like watching fan fiction of the original.

brightball 5y ago

Yea…I mean, I got through it because I loved the originals but it was very much a fan-service movie. Not unlike the latest Spiderman with how much it tried to reference from the others in the collection, but the constant flashovers to the originals were a bit exhausting. Was tough to watch. I mean, I got it…but it was tough to watch.

zucker42 5y ago

I haven't seen the new movie, but RedLetterMedia's review had interesting commentary along these lines.

crispyambulance 5y ago

Yeah at one point during one of tiresome chase scenes that was packed with gun play and slow-motion action, I recall one of the actors said “I hate bullets!” Totally believable to me that the filmmakers just “dialed-it-in” for a pile of money without caring for the story. After all they were already “done” after the first movie. Too bad. Tragically, that same pile of money could have funded a dozen innovative new filmmakers and actors with fresh stories to tell.

shmoopi 5y ago
Fresh and innovative stories don't sell as well as a known brand. That's why a sequel to an established franchise is always preferable to big studios.
- nsonha 5y ago
  You can tell a completely new story under the brand name of The Matrix, she's chosen the lazy way.

wonderwonder 5y ago

I was so disappointed in this movie and I thought the trailer looked amazing. It was just so bad. When they brought back the Merovingian looking like he had not brushed his teeth is 45 years I almost turned it off. Then amazingly it got worse.

nsonha 5y ago
the trailer is exactly the same style of the film you get. Scenes included in it like stopping the bullets and dojo explosion look incredibly lame. Then the colors are all over the place. It's fine if you don't do the green tint, that doesn't mean you have to pop everything to 11. So I don't know why you thought it was amazing.

yucky 5y ago

Is it possible that the movie just sucked? Everyone on here dancing around that possibility due to...reasons.

nominated1 5y ago
The reasons people seem to be dancing around is censorship. Woke ideology on one side and the CCP on the other. That’s an extremely narrow area to work in. I don’t see this movie as an outlier. TV and Film have been in trouble since BLM and now with China buying AMC, the prospects don’t look good. As as a (former) movie goer I’ve seen nothing but shit for the last 2 years. I now suspect shit is the new normal. I’m not paying for shit… it’s that simple. In other words, I agree with you.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  What does this have to do with the movie? Even if I could imagine a scenario in which the argument would be relevant, I don't understand what you're specifically attacking here.
  - nominated1 5y ago
    Financial struggles… isn’t that what we’re talking about? It’s simply one in a long line of offerings from Hollywood that is not meeting viewer expectations. I see it as a cumulative effect. ... And my reasons are clear.
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      That's a pretty tenous connection imo. You might as well pick any arbitrary thing you think is declining, financially I guess, and point to wokeness or the CCP as the cause. Is there something specific you saw in the older movies that you think is missing because of that stuff, therefore the movie is bad and wokeness is responsible?
      - nominated1 5y ago

poisonborz 5y ago

This is my take. And when thinking about it, it's rather brilliant if so. It's still painful to watch, and a bad film in every sense, but the way this was financed and got greenlit seems somehow to be a masterful rug pull. It has metal robot pokemons, freeing Neo is completely unnecessary, the new human settlement doesn't need a thing and won't fight, the soap opera low-fi slow mo fight scenes, everything seems to point to a sort of purposeful sabotage.