The Matrix: Resurrections – Logic and Proportion Fallen Dead

Between The Matrix Resurrections and Spider-Man: No Way Home and even some off-hand references in Hawkeye pop culture seems to falling into this meta-textual vacuum of self-referential awareness, like an ouroboros consuming it’s own legend until all that’s left is a smile, a wink, and a nod. It’s unclear if this is a bad thing or not, theater goers don’t seem to mind with Spidey raking in the cash but it does seem to be an impediment to the latest Matrix entry, which is convoluted, uninspiring, and a little self-important.

This is justified in many ways, The Matrix was a game changer, like a stone dropped in a pond it’s arrival was immediately felt, affecting the way action films were made to this day and is a near perfect cyber-punk hero’s journey. And the decision to revisit the source material isn’t a bad one, if it had only supplemented it in some way rather than simply pointing and shouting “…member?!” If this seems overly critical I only need reference The Animatrix, which demonstrated how diverse and imaginative this world has the capability to be.

There isn’t a lot that is particularly memorable about Resurrections, but one of the things that made the original trilogy notable, even the ones everyone hates, is that it had a kind of elegant violence, there was a balletic quality to the goings on even when it was a little absurd. Here, in this fourth entry, the action feels cluttered and unfocused with the Machines now able to dispatch “drones” occasionally turning the experience into a zombie movie to the benefit of nothing. As much as it may or may not have affected gun culture there was a definite fetishism of firearms and I’m not making a political statement; the guns were fucking cool when depicted in slow motion and fired while flipping through the air and out of speeding cars and POW POW POW BANG VROOM!

Ahem. This aesthetic is also completely missing, with antagonists that make stormtroopers seem like sharpshooters and relentless post-production muzzle flash that entirely takes away any sense of danger or consequences. It’s kind of like when the wands in the Harry Potter movies stopped being complex weapons that were as dangerous as the imaginations of the people wielding them and just turned into laser blasters color-coded to whatever side they were fighting for. To wit, it’s a disappointing omission and, to be frank, a lazy choice for a franchise that has new life because of it’s enthusiasm for the original material.

This all might seem like Resurrections is a bad movie, it’s not. It’s a decent one but is absent the clarity and focus of even the least liked films of the trilogy. Although there was an excess of philosophical rambling and existential gobbledygook, the plots had a clear direction and climax. Good versus evil. Freedom versus oppression. Love conquers all, etc. That’s not present here in what is kind of a reboot of the series. There’s less an impassioned desire to save the human race than a need to critique and disparage it. Gone is the optimism of a savior come to free mankind from their shackles and in its place is a kind of epic battle between two forms of middle-management, the micro-aggressor in Neil Patrick Harris and a defeatist Jada Pinkett Smith.

Also gone is the distinct green palette and anonymous cityscape that made the Matrix so distinctive from “reality”, and the result is somewhat jarring. Resurrections clearly takes place in San Francisco and is actually very lovely rather than depressing and banal, which begs the question, how bad really is this simulacrum compared to the artificial sky in Io where a strawberry is, like, a huge fucking deal. Again, this is an odd decision from the filmmakers who took multiple takes depicting Keanu and Carrie jumping off a skyscraper in order to catch the perfect sunset shot. Lovely, yes. Antithetical to the concept that the Matrix is some Stygian prison? Also, yes.

I do hope there is a future for this franchise, it’s a compelling world that is still full of untapped potential, potential that is under-utilized here in service of a relentless need to, again, wink and nod at the original film. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to expand that world, the title itself is enough of a draw, I just wish Lana Wachowski and company didn’t feel the need to go back to the well, looking backward rather than out at the vivid, horrifying, and terrifically fascinating universe they created.

The Wheel of Time: Eps 4-6, Time Keeps on Slippin’

This might be a little spicier than it needs to be, I’m still cranky over the cancellation of Cowboy Bebop after a single season, only three weeks after it was released. I’ll grant that the live action adaptation has serious flaws to the degree that I trashed my review attempt because I’d been relentlessly pointing out things I thought were bad or dumb, but I ultimately really liked it for the effort the cast and crew put into it. I even understood some of the pushback to the introduction of Ed, which, mine was something like, “…well, that’s going to take some getting used to.” When it worked it was a joy, however rarely that was and it at least deserved some more time to find its footing. Whatever, man.

The first three episodes of The Wheel of Time were not a great experience, mostly serving to introduce the world and it’s characters and seemed to get a mixed response. Newcomers to Robert Jordan’s world seemed cautiously optimistic while veterans of the book series gnashed their teeth and wailed like angry banshees on a chilly Scottish loch. I landed somewhere in between the two, having affection for the series as well as a naïve, childlike, and decidedly uncharacteristic hope that everything will work out in the end, if given time. Three episodes later and I’m convinced that this series will not last longer than three seasons, max.

I’m not a stickler for adhering to source material, I get that a novel and a television show are totally different mediums, for example the changes made to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books, which are good on their own, substantially improve the Outlander television series with minor but effective adjustments. And if, while watching Dune, I had to listen to Timothée Chalamet droll through his each and every thought as Paul Atreides I’d have been rooting for the Sandworms inside an hour. But the key words there were ‘minor’ and ‘adjustments’, not a complete disregard for the original story. I had to check with other reviews to be sure, because I am an old fogy with a bad memory for stuff that happened in the 90s, and a whole lot of things have happened already that are either out of sync with the book or didn’t happen at all, it’s like a completely different story with the same characters. The only explanation I can come up with is that these changes were made for pacing reasons and if the pacing were good this explanation would make sense. It isn’t and it does not.

I don’t do episode recaps but the last three deserve at least some snapshots, because they took me on a roller coaster ride and, if that sounds like a compliment, I fucking hate roller coasters. “The Dragon Reborn” takes the series aggressively into it’s multi-narrative approach, hopping between characters, sometimes to advance the plot other times to bore me to tears. The Romani Tinkers and their pacifist philosophy do nothing to advance the story and when they start getting slapped around, literally slapped instead of what is portrayed as brutally attacked, I had to laugh at what was supposed to be a dramatic scene and then ask myself what was wrong with me. However, in the same episode, Rand and Mat have an encounter with one of the Nazgul Eyeless on a small family’s farm and it was like I was suddenly watching a different, better, far more entertaining show.

This is when and why it occurred to me that there will not be more than three seasons of Amazon’s The Wheel of Time, this lack of consistency in both tone and storytelling. More than that, I went on about Cowboy Bebop and how much it varied in quality but the thing was at least fun, or trying to be. There is no joy in The Wheel of Time, particularly when the crew finally reaches the Amyrlin Seat where everything and everyone takes things super seriously. For example, I get that they are mourning a Sister and that her Warder can’t process the grief but the only comparison I can think of is spending half a Game of Thrones watching characters weep and moan over the death of Jon Arryn. We don’t know these people and watching strangers grieve is weird.

Further, a note on the Whitecloaks. What I do remember from the books is that the Children of the Light were an autonomous legion of magic-phobic religious nut-jobs who could be both dangerous as well as incompetent shit-heels. They had roles within the world but not important ones and certainly weren’t as center stage as the show’s version, and I get the reason for this. The role of fundamentalism and the subject of women’s rights in our current geopolitical doodly-whatnot makes this group the perfect stand-in for real world subjects, however they are also tangential to what is trying to be the main plot of the show, they aren’t trying to stop anyone from stopping the Dark One, so why bother establishing them before any actual antagonists?

Speaking of sensitive subject matter, I appreciate the diversity in casting and overt inclusion of LGBT interactions and relationships, however in The Flame of Tar Valon an interaction takes place that demonstrates another of the show’s glaring problems: sex. As in, it’s not sexy. I had real issues with some decisions in Game of Thrones but even through my distaste and high-handedness…I still watched the thing and felt shame later. Two characters with absolutely zero sexual chemistry have a surprise triste in this episode and I had to jump on Google to find out if I’d missed something in my original reading. I hadn’t, Moiraine and Siuan apparently had an implied thing in the prequel novel, but the experience was like watching an old lamp and a credenza come to life and re-enact the climax of a John Hughes teen film in the most agonizing way possible.

The writing in these scenarios is about as erotically charged and inventive as the label on a bottle of shampoo, and speaking of the writing, ugh. As young Siuan has to say goodbye to her father he says, ‘I could no more visit you than the fish could touch the moon’, and she, in her apparent precocious wisdom, ‘But the fish touch the moon’s reflection every night’, and he’s all, ‘Oh you are so wise.‘ The moon’s reflection is not the moon, it’s a reflection. You’re a terrible father. There’s a lot of this going on in the show, these dimly conceived truisms that sound like they’ve been dredged up from the depths of Tumblr and Jordan’s writing was better than this. I’m starting to feel like wailing on a loch somewhere.

I hadn’t realized until now that the Wheel of Time television series will only have eight episodes in it’s first season and that’s shocking considering both the budget and breadth of the source material. With only two episodes left Moiraine is suddenly taking the gang to confront the Dark One via a Waygate and I, even having read The Eye of the World, couldn’t understand or remember why. Mat Cauthon hesitates and bails on the group and I could not, after reflecting on what amounts to his character arc, understand why. And Moiraine has been banished from Tar Valon for not divulging her mission, because apparently even the Amyrlin Seat doesn’t know what’s going on in this thing. Amazon had the confidence in this series to greenlight a second season before the first was released, though I’m not sure at all where that faith comes from and with two episodes left and no Big Bad seen, no Quest structure, and no antagonists to the plot, there’s a lot to tell and very little time to do it.