“Matrix Resurrections”: an explosive demake in the blockbuster industry | Slate.fr – Slate.fr

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It all started when Thomas Anderson traded in his boring life as a computer scientist in a software company to discover that the world he lived in was a vast lie and that in reality human beings were born plugged into machines that pump their energy by keeping them in a kind of virtual reality. The matrix, what.

An ambitious blockbuster

Twenty-two years later, our hero is still working in IT, but as a developer of video games to success. He still thinks it’s a boring life and he always feels like it’s all a hoax. He is overtaken by Bugs (Jessica henwick, amazing), who remakes him the blow of the blue pill and the red pill – red to understand that the world is false and to wake up in the real world. It’s so identical that it might not seem interesting to mention it. In fact, what changes are precisely the decades that separate us from the end of the trilogy.. Keanu Reeves Has Changed, The World Has Changed, And This Is Precisely What It’s About Matrix Resurrections.

Lana Wachowski returns solo to directing with a film enraged against the very system that brought her to life. It is both a blockbuster expensive and ambitious, but also a film that draws a lot in Cloud Atlas and Sense8, where the director talks about herself, her own life and also lots of love.

If you’re looking to feel the same way you did during the first game, it’s a waste of time. Physically, Keanu Reeves, 57 years old, is there, but we feel that he reserves all his good punches for John Wick 4. On the contrary, as he becomes Neo again, the film keeps confronting him with his own helplessness. All this is also and above all a response to the impossibility of making a completely satisfactory sequel to one of the greatest myths of action cinema of the last twenty-five years.

Liv, die, repeat

Faced with Keanu Reeves in the middle of a déjà vu meta-trip, the actors parade, but do not quite resemble the icons of the past. The neo-Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is completely stunning, cloning Lawrence Fishburne just enough to confuse us, while Agent Smith rejuvenates as Jonathan Groff, often referred to as “Macron” since his performance as an FBI officer on the series Mindhunter. Thomas Anderson struggles, tries to understand what is happening to him, this time by being psychoanalyzed (for Neil patrick harris).

As a genius of the video game, he is cornered by his parent company Warner Bros, just that! (she funded the film) to produce a sequel to her hit trilogy. So, to drown his sorrow, he goes to the simulated Starbucks where he crosses paths with Trinity, who has become Tiffany, the MILF of his dreams.

What tries Matrix Resurrections today has never really been done, on this scale, by a Hollywood blockbuster. What perhaps comes closest to it is the project Rebuild of Evangelion, a series of animated feature films, demake more than a remake of one of the most popular anime ever.

Rather than making a sequel that risks disappointing fans of the saga, the writers have taken the same toys to take them in another direction, even if it means breaking them in the process. Symbolically, Matrix Resurrections also reverses the myth of the saving hero, the Chosen One, in many ways. Neo doesn’t fly anymore, and, above all, he doesn’t really want to believe anymore. The powerlessness of the character who has stood out so far for his extraordinary gifts, offers Trinity the role of true pivot of the story. It is she who becomes the center of interest of the whole film, and also, in a way, the character on which now rests the hope of humanity.

Of course, this falls under the fan service, but that has nothing to do with the genre of that of blockbusters such as Spider-Man: No Way Home, to take an example released so recently that it may be projected in the adjacent room of the same multiplex.

Side Matrix, no one applauds when a little-known character comes onto the screen. The fake Starbucks sign is ready to smile, but while the barista’s name will ring a bell to the biggest fans, none of them will flinch when they hear it. Even more meta: the one who replaces Neo in Trinity’s heart is none other than the stuntman who voiced Keanu Reeves in the very first Matrix. It’s all layer upon layer of information in this fairly straightforward story spread across different layers. The trio of Lana Wachowski and writers David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon don’t really try to explain their script. “What you know, you cannot explain, but you feel it”, said in the 1999 version the character of Morpheus, still just as appropriate in this sequel which clearly denotes what the studio wanted.

An angry utopian hot-tempered

If you would like to see a Matrix and not a film “about” Matrix, you will be disappointed. We can also blame the film for being visually poorer and less inventive than its predecessors. Yuen Woo-ping is no longer in command and Neo mostly spends his time making shields with his hands to stop bullets. It’s a chaos not so far removed from what we saw in Sense8, with more money on the screen. Matrix Resurrections lingers to come back to what we already know and the second third of this new chapter is a little too long. Viewers will find plenty of other reasons not to like it.

Some of the audience may not be responsive to the meta-commentary that often comes to poke fun at the film itself when the video game start-up nation explains that Matrix, it’s just crypto-leftism and bullet time. The choice was made between that or transform Matrix in Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens. We can also not appreciate the anti-nostalgic message which we do not know if it is great or too smart for its own good. But all these considerations are only a prelude to what will follow. Matrix Resurrections is at the origin of hundreds of hours of videos posted on YouTube by enthusiasts who share their analysis of biblical metaphor and to multiple proto-messianic exegesis disseminated on blogs and in fanzines. The saga also exposes us to far too many people dressed as leather and latex priests in SF conventions. It’s part of the fun.

Matrix Resurrections is therefore a mutant film, experimental, simple and complex at the same time. It is a sequel which in essence demonstrates the impossibility of making it and which denounces the cynical will of the studios to continue to make money on it. Technically, it’s still an escape and adventure film full of chases. It is, by the admission of its director, a trans allegory pretty obvious.

It’s a wonderful universe SF that her own designer tries to bend, as if it were for her to have fun one last time with the toy in order to break it better. We can also see in it a fiery Utopian angry, almost a “whistleblower” on the turn taken by the media and their hold.

We can’t miss the “film on depression” aspect either, that of a man who realizes that the world is not turning right. It’s also an uncompromising love movie, because that feeling is the “Genesis of everything”, Lana Wachowski concludes in a dedication addressed to her parents which scrolls in the end credits. Matrix Resurrections is above all a punch film thrown at the mouth of the blockbusters which resemble each other like so many Agents Smith. It’s a demake that offers the public to revisit something very famous in a very different way. Anyway, this Matrix 2021 is without a doubt the best film that talks about the original work. The message remains the same: “Wake up!”