Enter the Matrix

i could have done without the kung fu scene and the groff agent smith. i liked everything else.

I really didnt care for this film. Groff was really miscast as Smith (I do realise they wanted Weaving back in the role but he couldnt commit).

I do get the whole trans subtext and think the overall premise of the Matrix story is great and the first film remains a standout but this? This just felt like a clip show! A good 20 minutes or more was just bits of the other films!

And I'm gonna say it. We all love Keanu but that man cannot act.

20 minutes feels like a real exaggeration

instead of projecting actual clips from the first movie in that room they should've committed to the bit and remade them in half-life 2 era source engine

i'm an idiot... they could've just used footage from enter the matrix!

i am not mad at u trayce to be clear
but this is a rant i need to get off my chest bc i see it alot

the Keanu cannot act thing drives me fucking ~crazy~

yes i am a stan but

but

as written, what would a “well acted” Neo look like. like, please tell me. he inhabits the role incredibly well & by not trying to do too much ppl just go oh he is doing nothing
which is not the same thing at all
like no one says carrie ann moss can’t act bc she stands around delivering lines stonefaced.
thats what is required of the role. but ppl understand that bc she has the benefit of no one saw her in anything else ever & she didnt spend decades laboring under the conventional wisdom of critics that you are sooo terrible at your job, which you arent and never were

anyway this is not the keanu thread i’ll shut up

otm tho

I can't find the *really* good article about Keanu's acting that I was reading a while ago, but this one's definitely pretty good:

https://lithub.com/the-hero-we-need-keanu-reeves-is-demolishing-all-our-dumb-stereotypes/

Here it is! https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2016/04/21/the-grace-of-keanu-reeves/

yes! doing less ≠ doing nothing
that is almost my thoughts exactly, excellent piece -thx for linking

Griffin & David go about as long on this flick as you’d expect https://audioboom.com/posts/8006197-the-matrix-resurrections

the "Keanu can't act" accusations better fit a film like Devil's Advocate, where he actually tries for some gravitas and fails. he's a pretty convincing Neo and those are the roles he does well.

xpost listening now, in total hog heaven podcastwise

Carrie Ann Moss is even worse! Anyway I will stop now :)

saw resurrections and it was pretty good! not everything worked but most of it did. much better than revolutions for sure, though it doesn't reach the same heights as the first two. i do wish hugo weaving had been available though, that would have made this version of smith even better.

not really surprising that a lot of people hated this though, it really requires being at least familiar and sympathetic towards the sequels + having tolerance for its self-indulgent meta stuff which i guess most people don't. personally i loved mgs2 and could have done with even more of it though

i want speed racer resurrections

I haven't seen any of this yet and may yet watch some of it, but I know the very general gist and saw someone else suggest that it should have been called "The Matrix: Rebooted," and I think that's very clever.

keanu is the uncarved block

xp: It would have been more clever if this movie was a reboot and did not involve multiple resurrections

Can I watch this if I haven't seen the third one?

Yeah. Skim a plot summary though.

this is one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time, it felt so small, stupid, cheap

Didn’t post this here the other night but this impenetrable line read is absolutely incredible & I keep watching it every few hours. When she takes the big breath and it’s STILL indecipherable? That’s the prestige pic.twitter.com/rQhHlIvRVY

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) January 3, 2022

This movie is more enjoyable to talk about afterward than it is to watch imo

lmao at that video

I thought I got most of that line when watching it.

Here's the subs:

You call this a choice?

Oh, honestly, when somebody offered me these things, I went off on binary conceptions of the world and said there was no way I was swallowing some symbolic reduction of my life. And the woman with the pills laughed ’cause I was missing the point.

What point?

The choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do.

it was clear, if fast, for me. definitely don’t judge it based off that phone recording of a tv

I will say that this movie is Exhibit 842 in my argument that Hollywood needs to get over its recent aversion to ADR. It feels like there have been at least a few incomprehensible mumblefests in most every movie or tv show I've seen from the past several years.

I liked the new Smith, if only for the fact that it’d have been a dead giveaway from the beginning who Neo’s boss was. That facial expression as he sees the office shootout take place, his eyes settle on the gun that’s on the floor, and then remembers was pretty fun

I remember the "binary conceptions of the world" and "I was missing the point" parts. That was enough.

I think the main sound thing that recent movies have a problem with is that they do a decent surround sound mix for theatres but just use an automated program to convert it to stereo.

otm, and increasingly noticeable due to the thing with modern sci fi/fantasy/superhero movies where actors are given big mouthfuls of knotty expository dialogue that would read fine on the page of a comic book, but sound bizarre when a live human is told to bark it out as fast as possible in order to keep up the pace of an exciting scene.

I liked the new Smith, if only for the fact that it’d have been a dead giveaway from the beginning who Neo’s boss was

Yes that did occur to me. So if Weaving had been available I wonder how they'dve got around that.

new smith was good, just having weaving play this version would have been funnier. it wasn't really a twist, it was made pretty clear as soon as he was introduced

He has a bust of Weaving in his office and calls Neo by the wrong name consistently- I don’t think it was meant to be a mystery!

i would've loved to see weaving play a douchey tech boss for the first part

big mouthfuls of knotty expository dialogue that would read fine on the page of a comic book

tell me you didn’t buy Shaolin Cowboy without telling me you didn’t buy Shaolin Cowboy

one of the issues with this is it has so many ideas that it doesn't really get the chance to explore them all. smith & morpheus are the biggest victims of that, though smith is still great here

I read a review that said they should have cast Samara Weaving as nu-Smith, and that would have been amazing.

Could have gone with Tony Abbott

He wouldn’t have been able to pull off the “pretending unconvincingly to be human” part at the start

Could perform his own system glitches though

one of the issues with this is it has so many ideas that it doesn't really get the chance to explore them all

Definitely felt this, but it's a much better problem to have than the opposite

He has a bust of Weaving in his office and calls Neo by the wrong name consistently

He has a bust of the villain from the game they published, and calls Tom by the name he is known by in their world? sus

just going out for coffee, game guy is much worse before the reveal

total milf!

i just think of the horrors that were avoided by zak penn NOT picking up the matrix ball and running with it

am grateful that we got this instead

like, i have been thinking about this a lot. there is so much cynical glib shit out in the world and manufactured emotion and especially in Big Event movies humanity doesnt always survive the moviemaking process from script to screen & i am personally so glad that this movie exists and that there’s so much soul in it and that it ends in a beautiful way

He has a bust of the villain from the game they published,

Being punched so hard (for being a turbocunt) that his entire face changes shape!!! c’mon

+ also in contrast to the already-established Thomas-desk statue of Trinity looking cool* as fuck

and calls Tom by the name he is known by in their world? sus

Does anyone else call him “Tom” familiarly? It verrrry much felt like a “cool boss” tactic equivalent of the more aggressive deadnaming that Weaving does in the orig(inals)

* I found the gun stuff mostly gross in the first one so adoooorrrred how neither of them touch one in this

yeah i loved that

stuff i didn't really like:

the action is fairly perfunctory - it's not bad but it totally lacks the cartoonish flair and ambition of the originals. it's not the focus and gets away with this but it's still kind of a shame?

morpheus mostly didn't work here & not having fishburne back was a real shame. he's also by far the biggest victim of too many ideas, there's just so much going on with what they do with him but none of it really goes anywhere at all & there wasn't really space for it to begin with. smith also suffers from more ideas than there were room for, but what they did with him works much better.

i totally get how people who hadn't watched the originals very recently could have found the plot hard to follow in places. i only had pretty minor complaints there though (smith's motivations here took a little bit to figure out & could have been clearer).

re: the action, no matter how you cut it a film without Yuen Woo-ping is not gonna live up to one with him onboard.

If you want more to chew over

https://gizmodo.com/the-matrixs-queer-subtext-is-plain-text-in-resurrection-1848323936