The Matrix

To quote Screen Rant Pitch Meetings, "Sure, that might as well happen."

The sky seeding is shown in The Animatrix in "The Second Renaissance".

Yeah, the Second Renaissance shows that the darkening of the skies was the opening salvo of the UN's last offensive against 01. Nanomachines were spread across the atmosphere with the intent of depriving the Machines of power while the humans attacked across all fronts. It's initially successful and pretty much all the earliest built Machines are wiped out. But by this point they've already begun building themselves into the more cephalopod-like bodies of the movies and those Machines halt the human advance and then launch their own counter-offensive. It's around this time they start experimenting on PO Ws and figure out how to use them for energy.

Humanity desperately launches one last nuclear salvo but it doesn't have any lasting effect. The United Nations finally surrenders only for the Machine ambassador to kill the remaining human leaders during the signing of the accords. After this point the remaining humans are rounded up and plugged into the Matrix.

The Second Rennaisance was great. Better than the real movies, in many ways. It had some outright nightmareish images in it, though that was kinda the point.

It's very visceral, no doubt. I wouldn't call it better since it is just essentially a documentary of pre-Matrix history highlights. It did give me nightmares right after I watched it though. The entire thing is uncomfortable, beginning with how humans treat the Machines, and everything after Operation Darkstorm is just one long horror show in the reverse with how the Machines treat conquered humanity.

Second Renaissance is fantastic but the one I found most underrated is he Detective Story one. The ultimate bluepill tragedy.

Detective Story was one of my favourites as well.

I like how Trinity admitted that dude probably would have been able to handle the truth if he'd had a chance.

I agree. "Detective Story" is a good one.

My ranking would be:

1. Second Renaissance - Reasons already mentioned

2. Detective's Story - Completely agree with you

3. World Record - Another pretty great bluepill story. And that ending :O

4. Kid's Story - Odd man out here, but I loved it, no matter how many rules it violated :D

5. Last Flight of the Osiris - Cool tie-in

6. Beyond - This is were the "Meh" part of the list starts. I just found it pretty dull.

7. Matriculated - I get what they were going for, but it just didn't work for me

8. Program - Yeaaah......I mean honestly, that plot was a joke and just an excuse for (admittedly well-animated) Samurai action.

I recently saw Resurrections and I was struck by...

Well, first, I was struck by how brazenly angry this movie is at Warner Bros. for making it. Like. There is no subtext here. The Wachowski Sisters made it literal text. I don't think I've ever seen a Writer Revolt as bold as the first like twenty minutes of this movie. Slow clap.

But the other thing that struck me was how much Lighter and Softer the film is. The original trilogy was really edgy with its whole "With us or against us" thing. It had a whole Hard People Make Hard Choices thing where the Bluepilled folks basically need to be sacrificed to fight the Machines. Ordinary men and women were as much the enemy as the Machines were, and the characters spent a lot of time fighting cops and S.W.A.T. teams and such.

Even the Agents would basically just superimpose themselves over a real person. On the off chance you managed to kill one, it's not the Agent that dies. The person whose body they're wearing dies.

So Bluepills were getting caught in the crossfire between Redpills and Machines constantly. There was no other way to save mankind other than to cut huge bloody swathes through scores of individual people. Sucks to be them, but greater good and all.

Now, decades later, the Wachowskis return to the Matrix and immediately write all of that out. No more shooting Bluepills. Now, instead of Agents superimposing over Bluepills, we just have bots. Fake people programs that can be killed en masse with no moral qualms whatsoever, because they're basically digital orcs. No muss, no fuss.

That's interesting. It speaks to how the Wachowskis have changed as creatives in the decades since the first trilogy. I wonder if the way certain elements of society have, uh, taken the movies to heart let's say, had any effect on their decision to go this route?

Edited by TobiasDrake on May 15th 2022 at 1:40:36 AM

My favorite (sub)text was the Merovingian. I laughed so freaking hard during his scene.

And I wonder when he will get his spin-off

There’s also far less Gun Porn than in the prior films. Compare the rescue of Morpheus in the first film and how it lavishes on the guns and guns and bullets that the heroes pull out and unload upon their enemies, to this film where Neo doesn’t even touch a gun and his main application of his telekinetic powers is to use them defensively. Wouldn’t be surprised if that were also trying to tone down the “solipsistic shooter” undertones of the previous films.

Though I mentioned before that on the whole the Wachowskis’s filmography has gotten Lighter and Softer over the years. Lana makes the point very directly here that The Matrix’s ‘cool edgy cyberpunk’ aesthetic was always just the surface of a sincerely intended love story, and she and her sister have moved their hearts to progressively more prominent on their sleeves with each new film of theirs.

I laughed at the Merovingian's dialogue while utterly cringing at the scene as a whole. It doesn't serve any purpose in the plot, except to wave at people who watched the original trilogy (can we call it that now?). The fighting is anemic, Keanu Reeves is clearly not in the same physical condition he was before, and there are no emotional stakes.

I get that Lana Wachowski is a different person and trying to tell a different story. I really do. But there is so much extraneous stuff piled onto this film for the sake of appeasing fans and/or executives that it cannot focus on anything. You don't get a pass on being uncreative just because you call yourself out for being uncreative, and you don't get a pass on being an enforced sequel because you make fun of enforced sequels.

The first twenty minutes and the last ten minutes of this thing are okay. The rest is bleeeegghghghghg.

If the message we're supposed to take away is that Neo and Trinity (and Lana) are just so tired of this bullshit so please leave them alone, I got it, thanks. Loud and clear.

Edited by Fighteer on May 15th 2022 at 5:00:46 AM

The Action being pretty underwhelming in comparison to the OT is probably the one thing we all can agree on in regards to Matrix 4.

This is technically only one Wachowski sister (Lana), the other one (Lily) wasn't involved.

Also, I don't know if you can say anything about Reeves being out of shape for action when the John Wick franchise exists. The reason is much more obviously that Yuen-Woo Ping (action choreographer for the first three) didn't come back for this.

Edited by Gaon on May 15th 2022 at 2:04:01 AM

What I heard was that Reeves didn't have time to go through all the fight training and choreography, so they settled on having him throw a few punches and then fall back on his force push.

I enjoyed seeing how the world had changed since the end of the war, both in the real world and in the Matrix. It really emphasizes that, despite much of the world still sucking, Neo and Co made a difference and things really are a little bit better.

Granted, it is entirely for practical rather than moral reasons that the Machines have replaced the old Agent system with the swarm. As Niobe explained the Machines were facing an energy crisis as too many people unplugged from the Matrix. And energy crisis for beings that run on electricity really means mass starvation. We see the predictable result of that energy famine in the flashback where desperate, starving Machines do what desperate, starving people have done since the beginning of time; they started killing each other for control of the remaining food.

Things have stabilized by the time Resurrection starts, but the Machines have internalized something through bitter experience; Don't take your food for granted. Whereas before a handful of people being lost from the Matrix was a minor nuisance, I can easily see the Machines now having a collective heart attack at the idea of losing a single person to some Agent shootout.

I was genuinely surprised that they recast Agent Smith. I didn't. Really. Expect Smith. To be here? Recast or otherwise.

Like, they went to so much trouble to justify why Neo and Trinity are somehow alive again. And by "so much trouble" I mean Lana definitely played Mass Effect 2 at some point. But it was an explanation. Smith's supposed to be dead too but he's just. Sorta. Here. Because reasons, I guess?

I have no idea what they were doing with Smith. I don't think they knew what they were doing with Smith. He somehow winds up being an ally in this film? Because he wants revenge against the new Architect, and apparently that desire is stronger than his hate-boner for Mr. Anderson. A hate-boner which, I remind you, is so great and so strong that it once motivated him to break free into the human world, despite how little sense it makes that he can do that.

But. Okay, sure, he hates the Architect more. But what really got me is that he winds up being a loose end. They kill the Architect and then Smith's like, "And done. It's betraying time. Sorry, Mr. Anderson, but our alliance ends here. MUWAHAHAHA!" And then he immediately fucks off and never comes back.

What the hell is going on here? Is this supposed to be a sequel hook? Because I can't imagine Lana's chomping at the bit to make Matrix 5 after how much time this film spent shittalking the fact that she had to make Matrix 4.

Edited by TobiasDrake on May 15th 2022 at 5:36:59 AM

Yeah, at times the movie look like setting a new trilogy...only to end by pretty much carpet bombing any idea of it and finally setting the whole thing up.

I also liked the Lighter and Softer direction they took in regards to the people still plugged in the Matrix. Honestly, since I was a child I always disliked how Neo and other free people from Zion just killed lots of innocent people with absolute no remorse or hesitation whatsoever; while it is understandable for the people possessed by Agents, as there wouldn't be many other choices, it is much less so for people tricked by the Agents, like all the people protecting the building in which Morpheus was being interrogated. The solution of the protagonists to rescue Morpheus was just shooting everyone, and a fight scene, even if with good coreography, just isn't as cool when you stop to think about how our heroes are shooting en mass what are innocent people just as oblivious to the Matrix as Neo, Trinity and everyone else was once. Don't get me wrong, it was a war, it's just the lack of moral conflict presented by the narrative that bothered me a bit.

The new movie, on the other hand, solves a lot of these moral issues by using the bots, who not only are a good update to the current internet era (fake programs acting like real humans to make people behave in the way the person who created them wants to is pretty relevant), but also don't put any bluepills in danger. Even the decision of getting out of the Matrix is treated in a less provocative way than in the first movie. In this way, it helps to avoid extremists and conspiracionists from using the new movie to say how "everyone is sheep being brainwashed by the government to serve their interests and only we took the red pills and see things how they really are!" like what they did to the first movie.

Edited by good-morning on May 15th 2022 at 1:18:00 PM

I'm about 30 minutes in and the meta commentary is... noticeable.

I still want to know if Laurence Fishburne was unavailable or if they decided to recast him.

Edited by FOFD on May 16th 2022 at 3:24:57 PM

All this is very true, but counterpoint, Jonathan Groff playing deranged is always fun to watch.

Granted, I dont like much bots because it feel a excuse to have fun murder time without much of a issue and I kinda like the heavy tone against the protagonist on the first movie.

...and we see AIs who themselves 'woke up' and are helping the humans, thus defeating the purpose of the whole "they're bots so it's okay" thing.

Edited by Chortleous on May 17th 2022 at 2:45:10 PM

1 hour and 40 minutes in.

Yeah this movie starts falling apart once Neo gets back to the real world. Highlights were having Reeves and Moss and even Pinkett-Smith back. The early mystique and even the relentless Leaning on the Fourth Wall. The callback to Neo and Smith's fight. Sati.