I was amused in a bad way by The Matrix: Resurrections. It made me laugh, and then wince at the idea of laughing at it. It abuses the ideas of the previous movies. Sometimes it does classy visual work. But it's purposefully derivative. At one point in the movie, no joke, a bunch of Warner Bros. business execs are discussing how to differentiate The Matrix 4: The Videogame from The Matrix 1. None of them really get it. This is the funny part. It's almost charming. But then the sad thing. At first you think they're joking, but ha ha, the movie really does know itself, so don't worry, nudge nudge, wink wink. But sometime later, I realized they really didn't get what makes The Matrix a cool idea. Because all it does is copy. Innovation was my favorite thing about the original matrix movie(s?), particularly the first one, but this one is all about monetizing innovation by creating high fidelity copies. Granted, the fidelity is high, but you can just FEEL the toner running lower every time they do a "Matrix" thing, seemingly for the lack of a real idea about how to advance the story. At some point, you realize you're sitting in front of a coin-op photocopy machine.
One particular moment in the movie made me shake my head more than others. It's nearly at the end. There's a downpour of bullet casings from a minigun-mounted helicopter falling by the camera, like rain. It's a beautiful moving image, and we've seen it before. From the first movie. It's. The. Exact. Same. Shot. And it's used as one of the final, climactic elements of Resurrections. When this shot is done, what we get is a shot of Neo and Trinity hanging awkwardly in mid-air. It's not interesting, it's just weird. That's what this movie really is. A bunch of matrix ideas hanging awkwardly in mid-air, for no greater reason than to look cool. This movie has the kung-fu, the clothes, the guns, the cars, the bullet time, the apocalyptic robo-future, and the star-crossed lovers. But it doesn't have the soul. It doesn't have what we all loved the first one(s?) for. It's just a corpse with electricity running through it. A heartless machine!
