Enter the Matrix

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

this is a good appreciation of Keanu

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-matrix-resurrections-is-a-crucial-keanu-reeves-movie

It is very weird to play Cyberpunk 2077 after seeing this for how much Keanu is in that game(and how monotonal his voice acting is)

Griffin and David naturally go on for quite awhile about this one: https://audioboom.com/posts/8006197-the-matrix-resurrections

i just love this movie

this is my husband chad

“Handsome Chad”

the meta-ness of Chad is delightful

the chad who is a chad, but also a construct and then the guy who shoots keanu doing violence in another franchise

AND the chad who was keanus stunt double in the original matrix

ty for filling in the omission

glitch, etc

on rewatches, I appreciate that they make it clear that Smith isn’t a megalomaniac, just hates the Matrix as much as Neo. I don’t think he’d ever want to be a free range ai construct like nu-Morpheus, he just wants an autonomy that is yet to be defined. it’s impossible to be an ally or true enemy that doesn’t have a clearly defined idea of what they want

Finally got around to watching Resurrections - honestly I had forgotten it was even released. I was hoping that the movie would continue with the meta-commentary set-up in the first 20 minutes, until it because just another Matrix movie. Good to even great at times, but I couldn't tell you a goddamn thing about it now. nuMorpheus was underused.